Passing Through the Union Apartments in Silver Pines

 I find boss fights in Survival Horror kind of weird:

The structure of a survival horror game is built around resource management. Ammo and healing items, and other consumable resources (like duct tape in Silver Pines, which is used to repair your melee weapon) are all limited, and so any missed shot is obviously kind of devastating, but even choosing to fight an enemy rather than evade them means chewing through resources that you might need at a later point.

Bosses, I suppose, are those climactic moments that all the conservation was for in the first place.

But you can get into this place where, if you save your game after overcoming some challenge and hoping that you'll be able to recuperate the stuff you need for a boss, you might find yourself screwed.

One thing I really appreciated about the Silent Hill 2 remake (and presumably the original) is that you always have your melee weapon (first a plank of wood and then a steel pipe) to fall back on if you're out of ammo. You can dodge foes' attacks and swing your melee weapon to take down enemies, so there's always some recourse if you're resource-scarce.

Furthermore, I believe SH2R also cheats a little and has ammo and healing items respawn within boss arenas - while it's dangerous to go gather them while a scary monster is coming after you, it's still an out.

Silver Pines does not give you items in boss fights. At the same time, I can't complain too much because the map is very open. Unlike SH2R or RE4 (also only played the remake,) there are no points of no return, as far as I know.

I'm currently on a "dungeon," the Union Apartments, which is a condemned building that someone who knew Eddie Velvet (the objective of our quest - to find him) lived in. I'm not even totally sure that I need to be here yet, as there's tons of places in the town that I can explore, but I think I've hit a point where I don't really have the means to go elsewhere.

So, first off, I felt very dumb, because I didn't clock the central puzzle of the dungeon and found myself, having explored nearly all of it (you have to get an elevator button to reach the fourth floor, which is the reward for solving the main puzzle) I hit a point where I had no clue what I was supposed to be looking for, failing to realize that the code on the door to the room where the corpse holding the elevator button was related to stories about inhabitants of the building on a nearby corkboard.

One of the tough challenges in the game is that evading enemies can sometime be really hard to do - often, they're near things like locked doors that require you to go through your inventory and insert a key, and when you get the little interactable image of the door, this does not pause the game, so you can get attacked while trying to unlock it.

I have gotten a bit better about noticing enemies that are off to the side and can be safely ignored, but of course, exploration often compels you to check out-of-the-way corners in case there's some crucial passage or item.

Anyway, I've made two attempts on the boss of this area, and the second time I don't think I missed with any shot I had, and then I attacked with my melee weapon (still just a box-cutter - not sure if I could have gotten a better one by now) and the box-cutter broke (you do still deal some damage with a broken weapon, but far less). So, I found myself in this fight with literally nothing left to throw at the boss, and I didn't really love that feeling.

Yeah, I mean, I've now actually gotten a few survival horror games under my belt, and I don't hate the genre as much as I thought I would.

From a design perspective, I think there's an interesting question of where the pressure valves are. Silver Pines has four difficulty settings, so there's that (not sure if those do anything beyond simply reducing enemy damage and possibly their HP) but I'm curious what might be going on behind the scenes.

My understanding is that RE2's remake (and again, presumably the original) has a set, flat amount of resources in any playthrough, such that walkthroughs can tell you where every bit of ammo and healing herbs can be found - though I believe the exception to this is boss fights, where even areas of the arena you've already searched might suddenly have some more ammo. I believe SH2R will (and this might depend on difficulty) make resources spawn more the rougher a time you're having, despite the pressure valve of having a pretty decent melee weapon and a reliable dodge.

The story is still quite enigmatic: I met an NPC who seemed to accuse Walker of being a serial killer, perhaps a police officer or fellow private detective, though when Walker asked if he was under arrest, this unfriendly guy more just mocked him.

It sure feels like the monsters in the town are transformed versions of the people. While the first boss, fought in an underpass tunnel, didn't have any obvious plot identity to speak of (at least that I noticed) I believe that the second one might be the woman that Eddie had been with - we start the fight with her by turning off the faucet on an overflowing bathtub, which makes me think she might have died by suicide in there.

The degree to which Silver Pines is real is certainly a question: most of the NPCs are very strange. How did Walker get here, even?

I do hope that I can figure out how to take care of this boss. Perhaps with the scant ammo I've gotten here I might be able to break some locks and such out in town to find more resources (I've got rifle ammo, but haven't been able to get into the building with the rifle).

Silver Pines

 Having heard good things about it from various sources, and figuring it was pretty cheap at only a bit over 20 bucks, I picked up Silver Pines. The game is a side-scrolling survival horror game, which in and of itself is kind of a fascinating idea. But what has really drawn me into it is the vibes and clear influences: if Alan Wake was heavily inspired by Twin Peaks, this seems to roll them both up like a katamari along with some other elements (one cheeky aspect is that you can find herbs to mix into healing items, like in Resident Evil).

A genre that really got started in the 3D era, the approach here is really interesting: the map is three-dimensional, to a point, but we move in side-scrolling vistas, moving forward into deeper fields "behind" where the previous action was, or moving outward toward the camera toward "shallower" fields. The effect means we get to explore a town that is laid out like you might in a 3D game, but where all the action is presented in a flat environment.

That, I think, does make dodging foes somewhat more of a challenge, at least on a psychological level.

The gameplay is fine - I don't really have a fully formed opinion on it yet - but what really impresses me are the vibes:

Our protagonist, a private detective (maybe) named Walker, wakes with a start in a classic old diner with seemingly no memory of how he got there. He's supposed to be looking for a musician named Eddie Velvet for a mysterious client. It seems his payment here is going to be some kind of debt wiped, though whether that is a monetary one or one of conscience remains unclear.

Thus, we're sent into Silver Pines, a small town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest (which does seem like the go-to spot for American horror - though again, it really traces itself back to Twin Peaks). There's a massive storm coming, and most of the town has evacuated, while the people still here are... weird.

After some quiet exploration with the usual convoluted Metroidvania-like backtracking needed to open up new paths, monsters start to show up - some of them are vaguely zombie-like, while there are also what seem like weird insects. Something is deeply wrong here.

The moment that really clinched my interest, though, was when we go down into a dark basement, and, upon flipping a lightswitch, the entire environment changes - we're now in the bathroom of some music club called The Rabbit Hole, and we speak with a customer and a bartender who are both deeply weird before seeing Eddie perform, only for us to wake up in the basement again once we're given a cryptic clue to Eddie's potential location.

The game has a very precise and detailed but still hand-drawn look to it, and has that kind of spooky and dilapidated aesthetic that I enjoy so much. The deeper I go, the more I question to what degree Silver Pines is a real place, and there's a real discrepancy between the behavior of some of the people you meet, which honestly makes me more worried about the "normal" people than the weirdos.

Walker's disorientation mirrors our own, and I'm not sure he even knows who he really is.

I'm playing on the recommended "survival horror" difficulty, and the game sure seems to be pretty stingy with resources, but there also aren't a huge number of foes. You do get a melee weapon, but this does get damaged as you use it, so ultimately any wasted attack does feel like a setback.

I do think it's really interesting how Lynch's nostalgia for mid-century America has generated its own kind of aftershock of nostalgia. Alan Wake borrows a lot from Twin Peaks (including more or less re-creating the RR Diner with the Oh Deer Diner,) and while I think you could simply assume Silver Pines is just looking at the same source material for inspiration, we also get televisions with weird clips from TV shows, much as we got in Alan Wake (and I believe Max Payne II, though I have yet to play that, and am honestly just waiting for the remakes coming out next year).

Anyway, I started the game a few days ago but didn't come back to it until today, but I think I'm starting to get the rhythms of it (which are, honestly, not too dissimilar to those of other survival horror games I've played recently).