Thing is, there's always hope for Silent Hill

At least, there is in my opinion. It's why I'm hopeful every time a new one is announced, it's why I let myself feel hope when everyone is telling me that there's no point. Certainly, that hope is often dashed by what is the undeniable existence of the actual game, but initially there is always hope in me that maybe the new game won't suck.

Anyway, I also decided to just make an entire post about Silent Hill to get this over with. I was watching a Let's Play of Origin recently, and it made me remember why it was such a disappointment, how that disappointment led into subsequent games, and the upsetting fact that they didn't have to be disappointments, it's just that people who are making the new SH games have little understanding of what made the originals so good (and it's not little set pieces of Pyramid Head and Pyramid Head knockoffs walking around and doing a little dance let me tell you that much right now).

Goddamn there are a lot of spoilers under the cut for all manner of Silent Hill games. This is a warning and a divestment of my responsibility.


Wasted Opportunities #1:
One of the major complaints about Silent Hill as a whole, from one game to the next, is that the games in general are pretty routine. We're at least going to see the hospital, we're at least going to see the amusement park. There are locations that we've visited so many times in Silent Hill every time a new game comes out, they're all little minigames of "how long until the hospital." Granted, Downpour tried to prevent this by removing the hospital completely, but that also didn't stop Downpour from being a pretty mediocre game (but more on that later). So, the wasted opportunity.

Pictured: A broken door. Not Pictured: A player about the kick the Playstation because this is like the tenth fucking broken door in as many minutes.

Everyone who has played at least one Silent Hill (except Arcade, I suppose, for obvious reasons) knows that the entire town (or towns, as Silent Hill has expanded its influence) is riddled with broken locks. Personally, I did not mind this, except for when I was sobbing and trying to get to a safe haven. The developers also cut down a lot of the frustration through the use of the map, which makes it very clear what doors can be opened, and if it's impossible to enter a door, meaning that my repeated trying of a door I had already tried before was severely reduced. Maps are vital to Silent Hill, and removing it is always going to be a stupid idea, even if it's just because you're too lazy to code one, coughAlchemillacough. Besides, Silent Hill can be a pretty linear game, and the isolated scares that they do have should you explore does make exploration worth it. Plus, would it be more interesting to have these doors unlocked and have a ton of absolutely boring rooms? I'll take the locked doors any day.

The thing is that in Silent Hill, the locked doors could work in a game's favor, especially a game like Silent Hill. In Silent Hill 2, the alternate worlds of Eddie and Angela are explored and glimpsed, and are usually the settings for boss battles throughout. We find Eddie's world to be a butcher's freezer, depicting how he sees people, and we discover Angela's constantly burning world, a perpetual hell she exists in. And James', in turn, is damp and wet and flooded. And this could mean all sorts of things. They can mean whatever you interpret them to be; maybe the fire is Angela's punishment, maybe the meat locker represents Eddie's isolation. Whatever! Silent Hill is supposed to be a game about interpretation, but the point I am trying to make is that Silent Hill is, by the characters themselves, interpreted differently by different people.

Angela's Otherworld

Eddie's Otherworld

James' Otherworld

So the conclusion to this, at least to me, is that these broken doors can actually be opened... just not by the character you're playing at that moment. Perhaps Angela and Eddie entered the same buildings that James did. Angela probably went through the apartments - other than the rooms that she and James shared, it's entirely possible that she is able to open the doors that James cannot and also cannot open doors that James can. What would she find in her doors? We saw the monster that represented Angela's sexually abusive father, but she also had a sexually abusive brother. Maybe she would find a warped monster form of him within her doors of Silent Hill. Maybe a doll representing her mother, or an empty space where that doll would be. Who knows!

But it means that levels and familiar locations can be retread - in an entirely different way. Doors that were locked the previous game now open easily, doors that James opened with holes to stick his entire arm in are locked. New content, new interpreted atmosphere. Same layout, different scares. Or same rooms! Different spin!

Scares. Oh, that reminds me....

Wasted Opportunity #2:
Where are the individual scares? Those were my favorite things about Silent Hill 3 and they were lingering aspects of Silent Hill 2. Admittedly the first game didn't have much of these (though it did have that damn cat), and if it made up for it in atmosphere and just being plain disturbing is debatable. My love of the first Silent Hill mostly stems from my affection for Harry Mason, and his inability to go five minutes without repeating himself.

As I said, Silent Hill 3 is the star of this aspect of the Silent Hill series. For games known for their thick atmosphere and constant level of creepiness, the fact that they did have anything similar to jumpscares at all is often overlooked in my opinion. For good reasons, as jumpscares can be cheap and fade with time, except Silent Hill 3 really worked that.

This can only go well.

The mannequin room really sticks out to me - as does the mirror room. Both mannequin room and mirror room are totally optional areas of the game - it's easy to find them because Silent Hill always engenders a need to search every goddamn room in the area and jamming the open door button, but it is also entirely possible to finish the game without finding these. I love this scare because, like most important set pieces of the Silent Hill series it is isolated, but as a jumpscare, it also lingers with you during and after the room itself, which is not common with most jumpscares.

Mannequins, by this point, are part and parcel of horror games, as is anything that mimics the human form but remains slightly off (see: Five Nights at Freddy's), but there was something so unnerving about this room. Heather is unnerved with us as she enters it, mentioning that she feels as though she's being watched, but we're never subject to what actually happened, only leaving us with our thoughts and theories to creep us out and have us running out of the room before whatever got it gets us. The mirror room gives us a manifestation of Heather's actual phobia, the world of Silent Hill allowing us to literally watch that phobia seep from Heather's imagination into her reality.

Though Silent Hill 2 was not filled to abundance of these, it still had plenty of isolated little scenes, such as when James sticks his hand into the hole in the wall and then puts it back in after he was bitten by something the first time. Or the bizarre notes written around the place - not with any purpose or meaning or continuation of the game and storyline, but just there. To unnerve and be unnerving. Often they are silent, waiting for you to notice them. They don't do a little dance or poke you with sound effects until you know where to look. They're sure you will notice, sometime or another. They'll wait.

I mention isolated because these little scares are always done when we are completely alone, just us and our character. Though we meet people throughout the games and even have them accompany us, the spooks mainly happen when we're by ourselves. It's an effective touch to things that happen.

The more recent Silent Hills have lost this sense. Any set pieces they have are preceded with fanfare and the sensation of "look at us!! look at the thing that we did!!!!!!" This is exemplified mainly in scenes with Pyramid Head (or Pyramid Head knock-offs) and it is significant that in Silent Hill 2, we are more often confronted with Pyramid Head outside of cutscenes more often than not. The first time we are face to face with him is not a cutscene with James slowly walking up to the bars, gasping and muttering "What the hell is that?" in his best Troy Baker impression. Pyramid Head just stands there, observing. Not doing anything. James is similarly unperturbed in kind of a peculiar way. Our radio is going crazy and then with a growing, gripping terror as gamers, we know we have to go where he is. THIS is why we felt the impact of Pyramid Head as a terrifying creature, not because the game was focusing the camera on it and telling us to LOOK LOOK! while he did a little jig for us.

Not pictured: Pyramid Head giving us a show. Pictured: The player realizing that we're so fucked.

The problem with cutscenes is that you know that you have little to do with it. Cutscenes are movies! They're small little movies, and it is a drastic change in gameplay because for a few seconds we are no longer playing a game. Cutscenes more or less alert the player that whatever happens, the player doesn't have to worry about dying (most of the time - this is probably why Quick Time Events became a thing), which is why Pyramid Head is so scary. Every time we are confronted with him, we know that there is no escape. There's just running and crying and frantically pelting away at his helmet with our tiny pistol as he lumbers closer and closer.

Wasted Opportunities #3:
Closer and closer to James, yes, but closer and closer to us the player as well, because the one thing video games have over all other mediums is the literal placement of ourselves in the character we play and that is by allowing us choices. Spec Ops: The Line made a big deal about this choice, not necessarily an in-game choice to let something live or die, but our choice to play the game at all. That itself is also a choice. Walking Heather to her doom is our choice. Sure, the game will not progress without it, but we push Heather on, we put the disc in the console in the first place. We could conclude the game by turning it off and never continuing. So it's only with our input that the game continues, only with our input that our character does anything, and that interactivity ties us to our characters intrinsically.

Other than Spec Ops: The Line, I would say that the best use of player choices comes from Silent Hill. There are a lot of games that really fail on this front - by this point in gaming, I feel like developers have cottoned onto the impression that choices in video games increase the feeling of immersion and user input. It's the whole motivation behind sandbox games, more or less. However, it's as though this is just a recent discovery, so we have to watch them figure out how to use it. Overall, it's used as a way of getting the good ending or the bad ending and for giving us a rather pointless evil/good meter in the corner of the screen. And the method of input is also somewhat infuriating.

I don't know if you've noticed this, but when you're given a morality choice in real life, you aren't given a button-prompt to save puppy or kill puppy. You just do it, and aren't subject to a little cutscene afterwards of your choice. You watch the resulting chaos play out, perhaps a little helplessly, but not as a video calling you a dick and then you moving on with your life. I mean, in Downpour it doesn't even change the next cutscene! It only changes what ending you get, and is there anything that makes obtaining a certain ending feel cheaper than a simple button prompt to do so?

IMMERSIVE GAMEPLAY! You definitely feel like you're the character, staring gormlessly at a dangling body until he makes up his damn mind.

I had a lot of issues with Downpour, but a lot of it stemmed from it being so close to what we loved about the original trilogy. And in the ways that Downpour fails, we find a lot of the problems with the more recent interpretations of Silent Hill, such as Murphy's backstory and the entire choice system of the more recent games. I mean for heaven's sake in the above picture, the choices are literally A and B. Good or bad? Right or wrong? Morality works this way, right? asked the Homecoming and Downpour developers inside of their local nursery, smashing bricks together.

Within Silent Hill, for some bizarre reason, the simple angel vs. prick choices also brings up a wholly irrational problem that no game should have, let alone Silent Hill.

I remember Zero Punctuation mentioning this, and it really stuck with me, which I don't need to tell you, obviously, because I'm bringing it up now.

A CHARACTER'S BACKSTORY SHOULD NOT BE OPTIONAL.

Did you get that? Was it capslock-y enough? How about this?

A CHARACTER'S BACKSTORY SHOULD NOT BE OPTIONAL GODDAMNIT WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU.

They did this in Shattered Memories, and then they thought that they could sneak it past us in Downpour. It is straight up bizarre, confusing, and goddamn stupid for a character's backstory to be dependent on choices you make in the game. In Silent Hill 2, James is guilty for a good reason! The dude murdered his wife. Granted, there was a lot of emotional stuff that happened before then, as we are aware that Mary was having mood swings and going through a lot of understandable distress and trauma in her illness, but James did it! James murdered his wife. Whether you catch spiders and release them outside for the entire duration of the game or you are slapping around kittens with your pipe, it never changes the fact that JAMES MURDERED HIS WIFE. This fact is irrefutable, unavoidable, and the whole reason James is a compelling character in the first place, not to mention the uneasiness that creeps up on the player as this information becomes increasingly clear, driving a slow wedge between you and James as the innate trust you feel to the character you play begins to crack.

This fact allows the ending of the game to have more impact, because yes, James did the thing, but what now? What does he do after that? Will he suffer in his own personal hell for the rest of his life, watching Mary die again as Maria, or will he attempt fruitlessly to restore his wife, or will he be consumed with his guilt and drown, or move on and create a better future for himself and the young girl who was there for Mary when he couldn't be? What will James do after? Can he forgive himself now?

Which makes sense! Why would your choices now affect who you were in the past? James can change who is now and will be, but there are certain focuses of James' personality that can't be changed.

LIKE THE FACT HE MURDERED HIS WIFE.

 James talking to the wife he murdered. Murdered super dead.

Not to mention none of the choices are necessarily clear cut. A lot of the alternate endings can only be specifically sought, but the three main ones rest on whether James can forgive himself and whether he ever felt much affection for Mary in the first place. Which the game doesn't do by asking "Do you want to forgive yourself y/n?", but by noticing how many times you linger on the knife, and how much James can't seem to get over Mary, how much he's focused on Maria. It's subtle things. You could, I suppose, argue that Shattered Memories was somewhat subtle in its morality shifts, but A) the game immediately gives you a choice by giving you an actual button to decide what to focus on, and B) what did I say about a character's optional backstory? Did you forget what I said about that? I'll give you a second to scroll up if you need it.

Not to even get to the fact that games should allow exploration and often is just another feed to the addiction of a gamer's curiosity. Shattered Memories outright stunts by making you feel paranoid about anything you might focus on ever at any point ever. It feels limiting and is limiting, which goes against what I feel as though they were trying to achieve with Shattered Memories by opening up the camera/flashlight control and trying to encourage exploration by the absolutely pointless collectables throughout the game. Everything that Silent Hill 2 notices are stuff you might be doing naturally anyway. As a gamer you're trained to protect escorts, heal up when necessary (or DECIDE that you can hack it for a few more hits, just in case I'm not driving home this point yet), check the inventory if you're lost.

Wasted Opportunities #4:
Toning down for a bit, what exactly do recent Silent Hill developers think that monsters are in Silent Hill?


In the first three, any Silent Hill gamer could list off the paranoias and personal failings that the monsters represented. Silent Hill 1 was a manifestation of Alessa's fears as opposed to Harry's, yes, but it's still immediately apparent as to what they represent, which is then heavily elaborated upon in the following two games. Nurses who are inhuman and warped except for their sexy parts? James' libido. A hideous blob of flesh like an unrestrained cancer growth? Heather's bad smoking habit. Giant penis vagina monster? ...Giant penis vagina monster.

This could mean anything. If by "anything" you mean "Giant Penis-Vagina Monster".

They were all creative manifestations of the characters' inner workings - creative being the operative word (giant penis vagina monster aside). In Homecoming, we mostly only have copy-cats of Silent Hill 2, though that's fair, considering how much Homecoming wanted to be Silent Hill 2 to the point of basically ripping out all the major themes and monsters and pretending that they're new. I get that Alex was institutionalized and wanted some sexy times, but I don't know, they could have been more creative with it. Also, Alex's past wasn't even focused on sexiness and those characteristics makes it stand out like a sore, plagiarizing thumb, as James' sexual repression is present in almost every area of the game with the mannequins and even the patients because of Mary. All of them have some shapely legs; the mannequins themselves are all leg. They don't even have a head or arms to make them more humanoid. They're almost literally sex objects. He even has a flirtier version of Mary following him around town - everything is tied to Mary.

It's all interpretive. Not exactly like the Silent Hill Wiki, though I adore it for providing 90% of the pictures in the post, has things like: "Richard's monster has a strangling attack, possibly having something to do with his suicide or something!" Possibly. Could you conclude that? I just don't know. Silent Hill is so seeped in symbolism that anything could mean anything - and that's really awesome. It's even more awesome when those things are left ambiguous, because sometimes something being so absolutely apparent without actually depicting what it's representing can be so much more chilling because it is your brain filling the gaps. See: Abstract Daddy boss room (dear god, if the pistons don't say it all, what does), the infamous first cutscene with Pyramid Head. Nothing about those scenes explicitly told us what was happening, and what anything meant. We just understood. Absolutely. Horrifically. The problem with the Sad Daddy's attacking being a strangling attack that lifts Travis up by his neck is that it's so absolutely on point that it actually is not particularly special. It'd be like if Pyramid Head stabbed Maria while screaming "THIS IS A METAPHOR FOR MY PENIS."

So, as far as interpretation goes, what exactly is Homecoming's deal with the sexiness? For a game that focuses on Alex's repressed memories of murdering his brother, the monsters don't really seem to represent that. There aren't really any monsters emphasizing sibling rivalry or the death or a younger sibling or really anything, which is hella bizarre considering the main focus of the game. Sure, the bosses are representation of the children who died, but Homecoming is about Alex murdering his bro, SH2 is about James murdering Mary, SH3 is about Heather's unwilling pregnancy of actual hatred. At the very least there should be several normal monsters wandering around representing Joshua, but no, all we get is Siam, a weird BDSM monster that looks a lot like Silent Hill 3's Closers. There's not a lot of creativity or focus entered into this and the little that it has is worked to death or stated outright that it loses all admiration.

This monster looks like this because she was CHOKED TO DEATH and she liked the CATERPILLAR IN ALICE IN WONDERLAND. ...Do you think they got that? Should we be more clear? Eh, let's just make her sexy too and call it day. Horror is hard.

Downpour doesn't even try! It just has some people-like looking people in the game who look a bit weird. They just look like a self-mutilation party that got way out of hand. And like Homecoming, there's little that represents Murphy's main emotions, such as guilt over his son and what happened to the guard, though maybe that's to be expected, considering the game changes what happened to his son and the guard depending on how you're feeling that day and what button you felt like choosing at the time. When Downpour was first announced, saying that it would have a rain theme as opposed to a fog one, and that Murphy was on death row, I was all geared up. I was expecting monsters like this:

You know, stuff that represented Murphy's fear of execution or whatever terrible thing that he did. (I certainly didn't expect for you to be able to GO BACK IN TIME AND CHANGE WHAT HE DID.)

Those are screencaps from one of the buggiest games of all time, the Suffering, which executed (hurr) the prison theme three thousand times better than Downpour. The Suffering, though it had its faults, had cool monsters, all focused on the theme of execution and different methods of execution. If Downpour had just been a triple A developed reboot of Suffering I would have liked it more than the crappy boring monsters that it did end up giving us (and the Suffering also suffers from magically change your past decisions syndrome as well). And the Bogeyman? Who did you think you were fooling, Downpour? That's Pyramid Head. Just because you gave him a mask and a raincoat doesn't mean you're fooling anyone. And you're certainly not fooling the raincoat killer from Deadly Premonition. Of all the things that Downpour fails at, the enemies really stand out to me. They're just so boring. When you're doing something worse than Homecoming, be worried. 

I don't think I'm asking much. It takes a lot of creativity to make a game in the first place. All I'm asking for is original stand-out monsters for each game that have an overarching theme tied to the main character and whatever regrets they have at the particular moment. That's why the original games were so terrifying in the first place! I could go to Deviantart and find better monster concepts than Silent Hill: Downpour. This is supposed to be a horror game series, damnit. Be horrifying!

Conclusion. For now.

God, I LOVE Silent Hill. For the most part I have accepted that SH's booming era is gone and past, but as a fan of it, I guess what I have is hope for other fans. And I want those fans to take up the mantle of Silent Hill, and I keep thinking that the people who continue the series are fans, and people who understand why the original games were so scary, but no one really seems to get that yet, it's absolutely bizarre. Even Homecoming's copy-cating is confusing, because the scenes that it ripped off all reflect certain ones in SH2, and at the same time take away the very thing that made them scary in the first place - why? How is that hard to miss? Did you play the original game in the first place, what is happening? Did you miss something? Did you blink and skip the scary part? Or did you blink and think that a scary part happened during it and was not a slow build of atmosphere and anxiety that lasts for several hours? I assure you, there were no jumpscares for the most part. It's just you.

I don't think that the town is bereft of opportunity - There's still so much to do, explore, and I am waiting for a game that does it. I want it to happen so badly. Ughhhhhh.

I'm excited for Silent Hills - WHICH MAY SEEM STUPID, I'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE time and time again. But at least Guillermo Del Toro has proved over and over that he understands subtlety and atmosphere. But one can only hope. 

And there's always hope for Silent Hill.