Silent Hill 2 - one out of one - Henry Arrambide

Silent Hill 2 – 1/1 – Henry Arrambide

The fact that a SH3 review preceded this is merely coincidence.

              When you set out to make something ‘mature’, you must be careful. Trying to prove that games are ‘mature’ may lead to something like Manhunt, where ‘maturity’ is just a coverall term for violence, cartoonish gore, or sexual deviancy. I find that striving to make something ‘mature’ in those oh so useful selling points comes off as insulting; it’s as if the creator is saying that the gaming populace is immature, unable to appreciate games properly, and so tits and violence must be added (not that cartoonish excess is a bad thing when handled correctly). You get so caught up in trying to make something ‘mature’ that you forget the other goals entirely.

              Silent Hill 2 understands this. The game is tasteful with its violence; blood and gore don’t spew forth with every gunshot and whack, but are effectively used when needed. It tells a simple yet twisted story, and expects you to pick up the pieces and determine the truth. There is no barrage of cutscenes and extended hours of dialogue. What exists are quick snippets, short lines dropped by characters as lost in the world as you are. No one knows what the hell is going on, not even the game in some cases. Why should there be an NPC telling you up to date plot points? (Answer: because the developers don’t think the gamer is paying attention; or the game is mechanically weak and hard to understand) You remember things, you take notes, and you draw conclusions. Some things you forget accidentally. Sometimes you want to forget the terrifying crap you just went through – the atmosphere works at creating this ever-looming fear that either motivates you or scares you into never wanting to play. You make implications based on your surroundings to figure out what happened where. In short, the game asks you to participate, not just listen, to the story; the game is aware that you are playing it, and so it wants to utilize that dimension. There is only as much meaning behind your actions as you interpret there to be, sure – but the game was made with the idea in mind that your actions in some way affect things on a deeper level. The game asks for you to be mature – not to play, because anyone can play, but to solve the deeper problems in James Sunderland’s life and get a full experience from the game. Interactive entertainment – you aren’t just moving the avatar from plot point A to plot point B and being info-dumped. That kind of audience respect is why Silent Hill 2 is mature.

              The story is a nice one, a simple one. Because there isn’t a fifty character cast spanning two discs, and two hours of pre-rendered pieces, some would say the story is lacking. The game works fine with what it has. The game pushes you through apartments, hospitals, parks, prisons, and a hotel giving strong Kubrick vibes. You are pushed through holes into deeper and darker hells, dragging James along with you. Yes, you the player, are dragging the man you control – not just thematically either. Unlike other survival horror games, or even other Silent Hill titles, Silent Hill 2 doesn’t ask you to scour the locations twenty times over until you find the small jewel hidden behind the bookshelf. The character, sensibly, marks off the map as he explores – you aren’t searching for a needle in a haystack (or a chess piece in the police station); you’re whittling away the wrong routes via process of elimination – and when you find that right route, you’re whisked away into a darker, different, deranged little place, pushed farther down the rabbit hole. There’s a forward momentum that keeps the player vested in the game (ever load up a save for a game and be totally confused as to what the hell you were doing? This is an impossible scenario with this game); on some deeper level it might tie into the idea that the town of Silent Hill is alive, haunting James, forcing him to face what truth lies at the end. That’s a player’s interpretation though; you may come up with your own little idea.

               You don’t know what happened, you want to find out. James knows exactly what happened, and he wants to forget, locking it all up behind literal and metaphorical puzzles and self-deception. You’re playing Vertigo meets Eraserhead here; attention to detail will be needed, but the game is only 4-5 hours in length once you’ve beaten it – single-session runs of the game are manageable, the mechanics aren’t tediously unbearable – quite the opposite: there’s a nice weight put into the simple action of beating the shit out of monsters with a 2x4 with a nail through the end (some of you might want twenty different weapons and a magic system because the ‘gameplay’ is ‘lacking’); multiple runs of the game aren’t chores. You can come back anytime and comfortably play, notice new things, think about old details. Those phrases scrawled in blood on the walls throughout seem abstract or esoteric the first playthrough, maybe just creepy little pieces of nonsense to get you scared – but on a second or third play you know what lies ahead, you can interpret what they’re alluding to. Silent Hill may not be the happy little garden he envisioned when Miyamoto said games should welcome you at any time, but the principal remains; the town wants you, and it's all too easy to fall back in.

              You control just a man, slow, sluggish, inaccurate in his pistol aim, easily tired with extended running. Unable to save everyone he wants, unable to face the truth alone. You can control him, but he isn’t able to do everything you want. Sure if you want to hurry up and run because you’re bored or scared or impatient he can do it, but by god man, look at that character model! You’re killing him! He runs out of breath, begins to trip or shake - this little psychological stab at the player makes you doubt what can be done with him. Can he survive? You know he isn’t fast or agile, you don’t want to fight the big monster making noise around the corner. But that big monster is only static. The monsters in the game are easy, simple pushovers blocking the path to the answers you seek. Much like self deception, the game’s rule is only as powerful as we allow it to be. You may get too scared by the game, turn it off, play it another day. But remember, it’s just a game. It has done a damn fine job getting its point across if it has scared you. You allowed it to do that.

There was a caption here once. It's gone now.

              So, much like James Sunderland himself, you must go back to Silent Hill of your own choice. Run parallel to him. Are you ignoring everything around you because you just want to get to the end? Without understanding why a puzzle works, you don’t understand why it was there in the first place. Puzzles in this game at first appear to be the typical survival horror fare, but unlike Crests and MO Disks, there is some deeper thematic link. If you blast through the game only listening to the dialogue drops, then you only get the bare bones plot. The cardboard acting and awkward animations of characters you encounter might just be there to add character, to point out in the overall scheme of the games narrative that people are an awkward bunch who do stupid and fucked up stuff. You won’t entirely understand the end by running past all the notes, but did you really want to understand the game if you were just playing for completion? The game is setup to where you’ll be beating it no matter what – hell all games are, in a way (except Tetris and her ilk, that cruel beautiful beast!). Why not slow down and see what the game has to say? That’s a rarity considering that slowing down in a lot of games would shatter their illusion. Sephiroth summoned Meteor but you still had plenty of time to breed all those chocobos and go grab Knights of the Round. Personally, these are the kinds of games I want more of – I’m no longer that teenager who can invest fifty hours a week into Morrowind because “It’s something to do” - I don’t read books because they’re simply there, I don’t sit through mediocre movies because they’re simply there – I want something that pays off somehow, with some message or meaning, something to get me thinking, something I can come back to – not a game that provides fifty escapist hours of medieval chores or abstract game mechanics that are needlessly excessive. Saving the world/princess is sooooo played out. If I want to play with myself, there's quicker, easier methods.

              Unlike a game such as Bioshock which strived so hard to be artistic in presentation yet ended up just being a game where you ran around from cinematic chokepoint to chokepoint with a shotgun and lightning-hands (because Rapture’s scientific and artistic community thought it was such a good idea for some reason), Silent Hill 2 understands that the player is playing the game. Cutscenes aren’t just there to point you in the next direction or give you coins to collect, hell some of them make you more confused about where you are going. You travel through an apartment building solving puzzles involving typical items and themes such as money, time, groceries, and garbage – the game responds by showing you scenes of frustration, confusion, and having you fight somewhat sexually deviant creatures. From here we can use what we’ve played and seen to draw conclusions and our own interpretations about James’ story. Each section of the game is like this. You can take time and have fun. Or you can speed through the coin puzzles and the stupid garbage trick and see stupid monsters having sex, then complain that the game only lasted six hours and talk about how weird that Orange Soda item was (SODA?! IN AN APARTMENT COMPLEX WHERE PEOPLE LIVED?!!? WHAT?!). Choice is yours.

               A hospital gives us snippets of information as we solve a multipart puzzle involving schizophrenic patients and the nature of how one perceives reality. There is a long chain of password based puzzles that play into the recurring theme of disappointing expectations; the hospital puzzles yield you nothing but a strand of hair at the end of the day. Anyone playing the game expecting some grand overindulgent horror plot will be absolutely pissed at the game by this point. “That’s it?!” they would say. What else do you expect? A strand of hair fits in with the personal and with the creepy, which means thematically there is nothing wrong. If you are keeping track, it works really well with the bent needle in your inventory to make a sort of fishing hook, thus working mechanically - the hair is sound. Did you want it to be something like a Gold Medallion or a Red Card Key? Where would you even use or place that? It made no sense years ago when Resident Evil had chess piece keys and statue puzzles to fetch red jewels (even when a conveniently placed note or two pulled long stretches to tell us “OH, the security guard at this place really loved chess”), yet they have become what is expected, what gamers believe should be in puzzles of this sort. I remember seeing a friend play the game; at one point during a cutscene taking place in a room featuring a wall spanning mirror, he turned to me and said “Something is going to pop through that glass.” He spent the whole scene anticipating that - he didn't even care about what the people were saying or doing because goddammit there should be a huge monster busting through that glass any moment now.

Makes perfect sense.

              If, at the end of the day, “That’s it?” is all you can muster, you may want to reconsider why you play games. Why were you so annoyed that speeding through the game didn’t deliver the tropes you wished? Watching the Making Of Silent Hill 2 (and then comparing it to the Making Of Silent Hill 3), the game was a product created with some sense of love behind it (not just blind love either; constant Nietzsche, Hitchcock, Lynch, Bacon, and King references, among others mentioned in the interviews and paid tribute to in game, show that the depth to the game isn’t accidental) – the creators were free to reign, the series was yet to establish itself; the story need not be related to the first game because the fanbase was yet to develop - after the divide 2 created, business dictated that 3 had to cut back and be related to 1 – a ‘true sequel’ was needed to establish a franchise. The love put into 2 shines through in an attention to detail which merits multiple plays and creates a psychological experience that can be visited at any time, be interpreted multiple ways, and stick with the player long past the games initial release. Definitely more engaging than the Junction system could ever hope to be.