Self-made Demons
Lately I’ve been writing thousand words spiels that I keep forgetting to snip, resulting in an unusually long front page.
Don’t seem to have posted much about games despite my desire to, and thus we begin a ramble on a game I finished yesterday: Silent Hill 2.
It’s my first Silent Hill game; I’m unfamiliar with the series, the series’ history, the developers—basically everything. And I had a slight inkling of what the story would be, due to an implied spoiler I read on a forum related to a different game. Not that the SH2 doesn’t end up implying it in every corner while you traverse the town of Silent Hill.
My hands-on experience with ‘survival horror’ games is limited to one lovely less than 4 hour play of Resident Evil 4 (which I will finish someday). More recently, though, I watched the Giantbomb Endurance Run of Deadly Premonition—although whether or not DP actually qualifies as a ‘survival horror’ game, I’m not entirely sure.
What exactly is a survival horror game? No idea. SH2, RE4, and DP are all oddly different games from each other. To my knowledge, other games that I’ve heard of as ‘survival horror’ are Haunting Ground, Clock Tower, and maybe Fatal Frame? The first set I know for sure feature shooting zombies. The second set, I think, actually don’t involve shooting zombies, but they would all slot under attempted ‘horror’ somewhere.
But shooting zombies varies (no really, it does). SH2, for instance, has an ‘aim’ button where the main character faces the direction of the zombie and shoots, even if the zombie is off screen. There’s no targeting screen, or a heads-up display telling you ammo left, or life left; SH2 has the most uncluttered gameplay screen I have played since Grim Fandango, and that is because there literally is nothing on the gameplay screen. I’m a dude walking around in a horrible town trying to find someone who is supposedly dead.
This is where the spoilers will begin, now that I’ve finished talking about irrelevant things.
James Sunderland is a man who once vacationed in the quaint town Silent Hill, with his wife Mary who apparently died three years ago from disease. Except for the part where he receives a letter from Mary in the present saying she is waiting at Silent Hill.
To say the least, I normally don’t watch horror movies either, because they don’t really feel scary—I jump and all, but when I walk out on it, there’s nothing that frightens me about the whole ordeal, or anything I feel is particularly revolting or whatever is forgotten in a tizzy. At the conclusion of SH2, I’d say that I jumped at spots, but overall the feeling isn’t one of terror, but one of faint curiosity about the human mind. The game is entirely depressing: no ‘fun’ gameplay, no ‘fun’ story bits or characters, no ‘fun’ locations. It is bitter, creepy, morbid and gloomy through the end.
You know it is a bit more than depressing when someone dies, and then you walk a short hallway, turn the corner, and find yourself in a graveyard. With an object representing the save method attached to a gravestone. And one of the gravestones has your name on it, with a conveniently dug hole in front for you to jump in.
For one, I don’t know what town James and Mary were vacationing in but it sure as hell isn’t the town I was in for the game. James starts off with his car parked up on the rest stop way outside of Silent Hill, and I had to walk a massively long path to get to my destination. Along the way, I passed a graveyard (HA), and I also had to, in real life, turn on the lights and unplug my earphones because I thought a bush was an attacking dog and I also couldn’t stand all the whacko sounds. It was driving me nuts.
You know what I hate about SH2? The sound design. The sound design is so fabulously terrible that I am more scared of the music than anything else—that is, the sound design is AMAZING. Since it’s PS2 graphics and all that I might actually say that sound created half the experience for me, but I don’t mind the graphics that much. They are appropriately muddy for the current day; in that sense, I feel as though the murkiness of Silent Hill is only more evident and not harmed by dated visuals.
Long story short, for the first couple of hours when I played, I always stopped dead when my radio started putting out the slightest inkling of static. It starts crackling when monsters are nearby, and they could be yards away (hence no visibility of them to begin with) and I’d stop in my tracks if the radio so much as hiccuped. The monsters also sound appropriately grotesque—there’s variations on how they sound, and sometimes I try to determine what they are before I see them, but I can never tell (because I suck). Sometimes they make tapping noises that sound like footsteps, and I would hang around with my gun in aiming position waiting, waiting for them to come to me because I would rather not run to them, obviously.
And this is how you make atmosphere.
I think what made the game more jarring for me is that I actually don’t like dying in video games. I can accept failure, but being as weaned on JRPGs as I am, I would say that death generally doesn’t mean much when I normally play. In JRPGs I save all the time, and tend to be extremely conservative in my approach to heavy-duty areas without save points that require hours to go through. Whereas for SH2, dying meant I would I have to go through all those dark and creepy hallways again shooting stuff that might bleed all over me and I honestly don’t like listening to roaring static. It’s depressing! Don’t want to have to go through that more than I have to.
I clocked in about 12 hours to finish, by the way. Long and painful hours, for sure, considering I started this game back in April.
I actually don’t know why I continued playing this game after the initial run. Habit? Perhaps. But for games that I complete for the hell of completing, I usually start cracking jokes to myself during the cutscenes a short way in, like Dirge of Cerberus, or in the case of Final Fantasy XIII I sighed numerous times and pushed forward on the stick hoping it would end soon. DoC is ultimately entertaining because it is magnificent comedy. But SH2?
What got me was the town. Normally I revel in towns; I love towns that feel alive and like a world, like many of the cities in Final Fantasy XII. I like them colorful. I like cool furniture and nice architecture.
But Silent Hill has none of the above. What it does have is endless fog and monsters strolling about the streets. Yet there are places where you see and wonder—like a human corpse lying in a pool of blood with a note next to his hand. You wonder why he didn’t survive, or what he was here for in the first place. Is there anyone out there like you? Is this really a vacation spot? Scribbles on walls, scribbles on pages scattered, a corpse holding an item, even a giant bloodstain at the intersection—everything has a story of its own, but there’s no way to know what the story is. The town is too whacked out, and staying in one place won’t get you answers anyway.
The ‘other people’ in the game consist of Angela, Eddie, Maria, and Laura. These are flesh people that don’t die for some strange reason, even though they lack your impressive arsenal of guns and melee weapons. Don’t the monsters attack them? Perhaps even to James, these people act in a world of their own, just like James’s world filled with bloody monsters and mannequin monsters and Pyramid Head is a world of James’s own.
This dude is supposedly infamous, but I wasn't sure of who he was until I played this game.
Pyramid Head actually wasn’t so much scary as creepy, because the first time I met him he was doing the nasty to a monster in the kitchen of the dilapidated apartment I walked into. ‘Nasty’ does not mean murder. Pyramid Head did murder to the monster after he did the nasty. Life was much more depressing when I got stuck with him in a room that was only three times the length of his weapon; I wasted tens of bullets on this guy and they probably all bounced off his head.
I digress. Outside of gameplay prowess, Pyramid Head is pretty much the only monster than James refers to and remembers in cutscenes. But more curious is probably: why pyramid? The giant sword has its obvious connotations, but why an odd shape like a pyramid? The final design looks somewhat phallic, but I guess there isn’t a definite answer for “why pyramid” and “why head”.
It sucks more when he shows up however he pleases later on in the game in hallways that fit ONE person. Hard enough running past normal enemies as is.
Laura is a little girl that shows up in odd places that I never ‘got’. I originally thought Angela and Eddie were real people, whereas Laura was a manifestation, but it seems as though she is a real child—how she got to Silent Hill, and how she survives is another thing. Laura’s probably in a safe world that James is not in. James is not that lucky.
Eddie and Angela serve to foreshadow James’s misdeeds, when they reveal theirs to James. What’s remarkable about all three of them is none of them perhaps did what they did because they had the intent to do it. Or maybe they did, but the morality of their actions are highly ambiguous.
Angela and James are murderers. Eddie is a dog killer and football player shooter, but he didn’t kill anyone. All three don’t seem to acknowledge or admit their crimes when they first show up in Silent Hill, but obviously in a place where you are losing your mind it won’t matter much to start spewing your life secrets anyway.
Angela’s dad ‘forced’ her to do things (the implication here is that he raped her, perhaps multiple times), and she killed him one random night when she lost it. Despite her reasons, I suppose as a murderer she must be judged; at the same time, I think Silent Hill serves as a trial, but not one with higher powers judging you—merely your mental manifestations as your means of absolving your guilt. Angela never gets over her guilt—the last time you see her, she’s walking around in fire, and she says this is how the world always is for her. It makes you wonder if in the previous two times you meet her, did she see the world full of flame? Is she feeling so guilty that in her mind she wants to be burning in hell always? Even though she is a murderess, I don’t view Angela as committing an unforgivable crime that deserves a fate of everlasting fire. What happened in the end is that she couldn’t forgive herself.
Eddie is someone who has been laughed at and jeered at his entire life for his looks and obesity, and snaps one day, kills a dog, then shoots a jock in the knee. Did he kill people after? Hard to say. Eddie denies killing a man nearby when James first encounters him throwing up in a toilet. But towards the last time James sees him, Eddie rants about killing everyone that looks at him funny. He distorts James’s disapproving words into insults. Eddie’s insecurity is understandable, but his portrayal is less sympathetic than Angela’s. He decides death for everyone else is the solution to his mental agony; he thinks it’s better to suppress and ignore reality rather than to try some way to fix or face it.
James has multiple endings. When it comes down to judging James, it’s the player’s actions that determine his fate. The pieces revealing the backstory to his act of murder give no definite black and white. Mary was sick, and she asked to die but then cried about not wanting to die; James himself suffered from being tied down to a diseased person, even though he loved her. The two of them spent quite a good deal of time loving and hating each other before he ended it by smothering her with a pillow.
Spelling it out this way seems very cut and dry, as if James deserves whatever he suffers because he should have been able to bear the burden of his wife’s sickness. Then again, the visit to Silent Hill is triggered because he is weak and unable to face reality. He wants to know what his wife really wanted, and he also seeks some kind of justification for his actions—he’s not sure if he did right or wrong. Rather, that’s the impression I got from the double-sided memories he has echoing about when you walk around in game.
There’s definitely a part of him that wants Mary back, as manifest into Maria, a woman who looks like his wife barring the part where she’s suddenly sexy. Maria can be considered an idealized Mary, but she seems to wish to be her own identity more than to be Mary. In Silent Hill, I guess if a mental image is strong enough, it’ll come to life. She’s the final boss, when she transforms into an upside-down monster trapped in a rectangular prism-frame of metal. Unlike other monsters, Maria retains her face, and when she first transformed, I wondered if she was changing into the clothes of a nun. The wrappings around her head resembles a nun’s hood.
There’s actually a part where she falls to the ground screaming, trapped in the metal frame. Then it turns to game again, and I didn’t know what to do. I tried running but there was no place to go, and she kept saying James’s name. In the end, you’re supposed to deliver the final blow, and I guess that seals the deal about the murder.
An abusive father, who not only abuses through fists but through sex—can we claim that the killing of such a man is a crime? Do we forgive the killer if she was a victim? For someone who has been bullied and oppressed his whole life, can we say such a man is a criminal for killing a dog and shooting most likely one of his bullies? Who is the real unpleasant man here, the shooter or the oppressor?
In a court of law, black and white means James Sunderland is guilty. To you as a person, would you consider this man guilty if what his wife wanted was reprieve? Any one of us may someday be delegated to the question of life support for someone important. Are we guilty if we allow our important ones to die?
But to the man himself, is he guilty? Silent Hill needs to answers from society, nor does it demand answers from its guests. It’s the man who seeks the answer to his guilt himself.
