The Game That Changed My Life

Everyone out there has a spark of inspiration, even if it is in the most menial ways. Maybe a book you’ve read made you a better person, or maybe it has influenced you to some extent. My biggest inspirations as a kid have always been the role models around me, perhaps none more-so than my grandmother who had bared a massive amount of weight from our family, as she really was the glue and mortar that kept us all in line. Sure she had her issues, and some more than others, she managed a cemetery for a good chunk of her life, and it is a tough business to keep like that working all-the-time. Most times it didn’t. Growing up surrounded by gravestones leaves me less frightened of graveyards, and more a peace with them. One of the most beautiful cemeteries I’ve ever been able to walk through was Moravian cemetery. It is famous for its beauty, and also made popular in many of Paul Zindel’s novels, such as the Pigman series. So when people learn more about me, they think of me as less macabre, more dorky, nerdy, comic-book reading, etc. When I really do partake in occasion the comic book medium, I much rather leisurely read a book (one I am reading now is On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I’ve had it for a few years, but finally decided to sit down and start reading it, and I can say so far it isn’t as trashy as I expected it to be. That of course can all change after the first fifty pages.) I never really had a problem with the dead, I always respected their honesty, and admired their determination, because it seems no matter how long they remain dead, they never attempt to return, that takes a lot of dedication. I of course joke, and in good humor, not with malice, but that is my point, the dead are at peace, they don’t have the worries the living are burdened with, they always have to get somewhere on time, which they rarely ever manage, and they are always rushing through to the next best thing, rather than admiring the things in front of them that could very well be the best experiences of their lives. This is my point, we really don’t stop at times to admire the smaller, perhaps, older and more interesting moments in life, and I don’t believe we should wait until we’re dead to start thinking, so I am going to tell you how one game changed my perception on philosophy, thought and tastes, especially in the aspect of how incredible a medium such as video games can go. I will admit that today there are far greater examples, and done in a much timelier fashion, but few have touched me as an individual as deeply, especially the plot. Silent Hill 2, perhaps the pinnacle of the series, and I will admit the best Silent Hill to date, including the third game and Silent Hill: The Room. Although Silent Hill 3 is the closest to the original game, that is, when it comes to storyline, that doesn’t necessarily make it a great game. Now, unlike past game reviews, I am not going to actually be reviewing Silent Hill 2. If you haven’t played the game yet, the HD collection is out, but I heard the people over at Konami screwed it up, so pick up the original if you want a great game experience. It would be nice to give your PS2s and Xboxes some love too, so go try Silent Hill 2, it is most definitely worth your time, even if the game’s as dated as Donkey Kong. First off, the story is just so Japanese, and I mean that in the highest regard. The story about James Sutherland and his wife Mary, who has been dead for years, but writes him a letter to meet him in a town called Silent Hill is absolutely incredible. It shows that from the beginning this game is not your typical horror, and up until this point, movies like the Grudge, or Ju-on the original version were scarcely seen in American households. Truth-be-told at the beginning of the 21st century, the Japanese culture and entertainment industry was probably limited to most Americans, except maybe for knowing that the movie the Magnificent Seven was based after Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece: Seven Samurai. Japanese horror is ridiculously based on the senses, rather than gore. Don’t get me wrong, there is plenty of gore in this game, but it is more suggested than brutishly shown in odd camera angles. What is eerie about this game more is the humanity behind it, and the fact that it is dealing with such unique issues that tend to hit the emotions of the player just as hard as the fears. Sure we can talk about the clunky controls, but this is an appreciation editorial post, not a semi-objective review article. Let’s continue with the story: The idea that James Sunderland is simply out to find his dead wife waiting for him on Toluca Lake in the middle of Silent Hill is one of passion, and the idea that the sexual suggestiveness of the characters/monsters involved delves more into the routes of serious philosophical and psychological discussion. The emotional dread the main characters feels is from such a traumatizing event, that we get the sense of the sinful acts with mere silhouettes of the man’s past. It is brutal, and yet intelligently written. The game is artwork in motion, and nearly captures all the makings of a pure horror classic. For years I have tried to truly unmask the deep-rooted details of this game, as so many online and in video game articles have picked and picked at this game, trying to truly understand it, and the truth is, you don’t have to fully grasp the game to get the meaning, the true meaning that it is our own psyche that decides how Silent Hill progresses. Yes, we play through the eyes of James Sunderland, but really, we are all still metaphysically trying to grasp the meaning of Silent Hill for ourselves. We get two stories when playing a Silent Hill game, especially in the second title: and that is the story of the individual character who must trek through the game, trying to deal with their own twisted demons mapped out by the designers and writers, but really it is also a sort of psychological test, one that plays on all the human emotions, and the heightening senses of the gamer, which makes them all have a unique experience that no one else can have, simply by testing their own psyche. Even the music is eerily intelligent by Akira Yamaoka, who has done such astounding work on all the titles, I bought Homecoming just to hear the soundtrack. I truly wish he would compose for more games, then again, I kind of wish he would compose for all games. Yet the music is a psychological power trip of the mind, it doesn’t just play to the setting of Silent Hill 2, it is an auditory representation of the entire game, and without it, the game is merely a linear experience. With the sound and music promptly blaring through the speakers, this game could’ve been a two dimensional tabletop Atari game, and you would still wet yourself from sheer terror. I love the music so much for all the games, that I truly believe you are not a real gamer if you don’t love Melissa Williamson’s “You’re Not Here” opening for the third game, which plays to that eerie little preview of the horrors waiting those who await taming the third game. The music, the sights, and the controls are a bit juxtaposed, but they all manage to work in a way that seems right. If the controls were better, I don’t think the immense fear of being nearly helpless in the game would shine through. Sure frustration is another way of describing the said controls, but it is the lack of mobility that makes the game even that much more realistic. Silent Hill is about a lose/lose situation, because you know that there can be no winners in a psycho-fiction such as this game, which truly very few can understand. Unless you’re s psych major, or you just happen to dabble in Jungian theory, the game is a mere misunderstanding for most, but it catches the mainstream by being about a husband who will do anything for his wife…anything. The truth is, the game can have millions of theories, most of which can come from scholars, and most of them will never even think to take into account that this was just a mesh of all the right things happening at once, without a hinder to story, and more importantly to the side puzzle that give you no break from the action or the fear, because the side puzzles and riddles to advance you are so well thought-out and well written, some are poems, some are songs, and some are removing very suggestive disgusting things in order to get to say a key, or to find a latch. Truly Silent Hill 2 is frightening all the way through, and that’s why it had changed my life in so many ways. In-truth, I don’t think any series, not even my beloved Dead Space series has come even remotely close to being of the pinnacle of “survival” ( or in this case “no survival”) horror. The problem with all this, and most of you will understand is that it is not a game that is easily a mainstream game, not for the Mom and Pop horror fans that think the best way to spook people is to have a CGI monster come popping out of the cellar door, or closet, morgue, etc. This game was far too intelligent for such cheap scares, and the fact that there are bosses just sitting there, not some great cinematic sequence to have them pop out at you, it is stunningly more frightening to just be walking and bam! Here comes Pyramid head to get you. If I were to ever take over the Silent Hill franchise, which is on its last leg, and has too much Western influence (I am not painting a great argument am I?) but I would not try to make a Japanese game, nor would I try to make a Western, Eastern or even some fantastic game based into some historic culture. I would simply make a game. The story would be the background, the controls would be a bit clunky, but I wouldn’t allow for anything that wasn’t feasibly impossible to connect with, they would be mediocre at best, at least to the degree needed to make the game more menacing than frustrating. Remember, Amnesia, an amazing game that didn’t even have a button to attack with was one of the best horror games to come out in ages. Basically, the game had to play to the senses, and it doesn’t have to look pretty, but it also doesn’t have to look gritty, an ad hoc cookie cutter “noire” game. If you have to call something noire, it isn’t noire, just so you developers out there understand it’s not a new idea. I’d want some psychological issues thrown in, but not necessarily ones that take away from slight humor, or even double entendres that will be crucial to the game, and I’m not talking about Nathan Drake asinine clichéd humor, but intelligent, but not something that sounds like stuck-up elitist humor, or intellectual monopolizing. The game just has to be a game, something that scare the holy shit out of the gamer, and also makes them feel empathy for the characters. These are the type of ideas that are not revolutionary, they are instilled in Silent Hill 2, even add in some dark comedy and malcontent from characters like Angie(?) (Might be Angela) and Eddie, who truly are more representations of individual pieces of James’s personality, but really they are manifestations made by Silent Hill itself. Let’s not even get into all the sexual connotation’s behind Pyramid Head, in what he represents to James, because that could be an entire blog post on its own. Yet, Pyramid Head is also proof positive that Silent Hill 2 is much, much deeper than the average psychological thriller, and that people and pick away for years over the actual meanings behind the game. A good example is to call it the “Eraserhead” of video games, but I would say it is much more than that, because the Silent Hill 2 does have a deep-rooted meaning, not just wishy-washy symbolism with no intent or purpose. Now, I did promise to explain a bit on how exactly this game changed my life to some extent, and I will tell you how: it proved to me that horror writing is so difficult to do, because most horror doesn’t actually involve horror being at the forefront. If I haven’t had played this game when I was young, about fifteen or sixteen, I would still be thinking of writing ultra violent, ultra bloody, over-the-top nonsense found in most horror stories that suck. Silent Hill 2 has made me a better writer in many ways, and it has made me know that fear itself is the encroaching death, not the act itself. This is so true too, because it isn’t the end-process of death that we fear, we do not fear corpses, well, not normally, but the idea of being a corpse, or the inevitable fact that the situation we are placed in, will lead to us then being a corpse. That’s why we fear more the monsters outside our windows, or under our beds, or creeping up from behind us more than we fear them once they are already chewing on our carcasses. I believe deep down that the fact this game made you not want to explore the town, especially since most of the game is masked in a dead fog, which to me is far more frightening a weather pattern than any other (except maybe tornadoes and hurricanes) but the fact that it played on those primitive fears, where a white out forces you to walk blindly into the unknown, and hope that a dog or a demon, or some estranged monster wasn’t lurking within the blanketed white. I would also like to add that the radio was a genius trick to add in, and warned you of a nearby presence throughout the game. This idea was very original, and it inspired me to think that cliché nonsense wasn’t all you needed to perpetuate an idea to the mainstream. This game was perhaps one of the biggest selling games of the year, I would say it outdid many of its competitors, especially Resident Evil’s Code: Veronica X. Having a belief that most Resident Evil titles after the first two were more action games than survival horrors, I believe that Silent Hill even today is still the boss of all other survival horror titles, and will go down as a legitimate game to play for decades. Silent Hill 2 proved to me that fear can be done in a mature, intelligent way that makes horror almost noteworthy, especially in a world full of such nonsensical fodder that we call “horror” and “science fiction”. Despite all the flaws with the game, and the outdated graphics, which really are still a lot nicer, and at times more effective than some of the graphics of the previous console generation. Moreover, the game is still quite a massive achievement for its time. Luckily, the Silent Hill saga has been re-released as a DLC HD edition, and though the game has been tweaked to include new voice-acting, the games are still relevantly left alone. Konami should not ever allow Americans to create another Silent Hill game, and I believe the end of the series was after Silent Hill 3. This may sound prejudice, racist, or at the very least insensitive, but the cultural differences, despite our current love with Japanese society and their food, entertainment, etc. does not make us experts in the field of their style of horror and psychological thrillers. Despite all temptation to go-ahead and re-purchase the HD versions of the PS2 Silent Hill games, I decided to not pay these fools money, and play them still on my Playstation 2. If I could say anything else about this game, and why it means so much to me, you may ask why is this such an important matter? I mean, it’s just a game, right? Something to entertain you, but I will admit it can be a lot more than just that. I agree with the consensus that a game\ game is a game, especially during the Playstation 2 era, but games have become in-a-way more like films, and written to be more thrilling, more action-packed, and far-more dramatic than television or film. Unlike any other medium, I believe when you become invested in a character, but more-often invested in a storyline, you are entranced in that storyline for all your years, in some ways as an immediate embellishment in that world, and later on as a musing that comes up in nostalgia, and you recall the fun times of those years, and everything with them. In-truth, I try my best to always look at the future, especially with so many people rooted in the past, but with this game, I stop and think back to a time when I could play a game, and it helped me get through the an time when our country was just about to change indefinitely. You see, Silent Hill was the last game I bought around the time the Twin Towers were attacked on 9/11, which I believe the imagery is still instilled in the last generation’s minds. Perhaps the horrors became a bit more real with me because of such a trauma, or maybe it was eerily reminiscence of the psyche that was to come for months after the attack, that we truly are all trapped in this sickening hell that only we can release ourselves from. Even now, the game brings back a loss of hopelessness that was rarely seen in games past. The idea that you are in a lose/lose situation all the time, the idea that the power normally instilled in players to finish a game and get a happy ending is taken away, and even though this game has about four endings, which includes a comic relief ending that I will not ruin, but can be found in its entirety on any video-sharing website of your choice, so you can go see it yourself if you’d like. 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