Anyway, for my first entry, I wanted to explore possibly my favorite piece of horror media ever. The seminal, unforgettable Silent Hill 2. And yes, there will be several spoilers, and yes, this game is Not For Everyone, so both of those warnings apply.
"No, don't pity me. I'm not worth it. Or maybe... you think you can save me. Will you love me? Take care of me? Heal all my pain? ...Hmph... That's what I thought."________ The Background
The first Silent Hill (released in 1999) was a critical and commercial success on the Playstation 1, and a sequel on the Playstation 2 was inevitable. What nobody realized though was how different it would be. You see, the first game focused on the town itself. A man named Harry Mason loses his daughter Cheryl in the aftermath of a car crash on the outskirts of the town of Silent Hill, and in his search for her discovers the town’s dark secrets, involving a cult, some sort of God being born, and some sort of screw up which leaves the town either a) quiet and desolate and raining ash from the sky that looks like snow, with a few scattered townspeople who seem ever so slightly mad; or b) a twisted industrial nightmare filled with monsters and even more deranged townspeople.
The key takeaway here is that the story of the game was about the town itself, and Harry was something of a sympathetic cipher to the events around him. Nice guy looking for his kid is an excellent motivation for a video game character, but Harry wasn’t the deepest of souls, and his main job was to go “What the hell is THAT?” whenever something weird happened.
And then Silent Hill 2 came along in 2001, and the story of James Sunderland managed to make Harry look like a cardboard cutout (which he kinda was), and the plot of the first game like so much hokey gibberish (which it also ... kinda .. was). ________
Returning to Silent Hill
"Don't worry, I'm not crazy... Least, I don't think so."James Sunderland arrives in Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his wife Mary, who has been dead for three years. Here the shift is subtle, but extremely important. Harry was looking for someone who he hoped was alive. James is looking for someone who he knows on some level is already dead.
“In my restless dreams, I see that town, Silent Hill. You promised you'd take me there again someday, but you never did. Well, I'm alone there now: in our special place, waiting for you.”
He heads into town, and discovers, much as Harry did, that there is something very wrong with the town. He runs into Angela, a seemingly friendly but oddly juvenile young woman, who is looking for her mother; Eddie, a disturbed, overweight man; Laura, an eight year old who claims to have befriended Mary at the hospital; and eventually Maria, a woman who looks strikingly like Mary, and swings back and forth between claiming to be her and claiming to be her own person.
It goes without saying that all of these people are deeply off. Voice acting in early 2000s video games was, in a word, shit, but here the stilted delivery works because all of these people seem at times to simply be talking past James, and James is doing the same to them.
The final character is, of course, the town itself. Gone is the history, the cult, and the broader connections to and between the characters. Instead, the atmosphere is one of a mostly passive presence that absolutely hates you. It’s difficult to describe just how crushing the atmosphere in this game can be.
The monsters themselves are strangely non-threatening by contrast. They attack you, and can kill you, but they also seem to wander the streets, purposeless, jerky automata in the fog. They are scary, but also pitiable, with the exception of the Red Pyramid, probably better known now as Pyramid Head. Even then, the hulking behemoth of the movie and the later games is a presence terrifying in a different way. He attacks and appears to sexually assault the other monsters in the game, his helmet and sword are are almost too heavy for him, and half the time he seems as content to stand and stare at James as he is to attack (and probably kill) him.
Maria is another thing entirely. Killed repeatedly by Pyramid Head, she reappears, seemingly fine later on. What the hell is she? ________
Denial and Despair
So I hope I’ve established that Silent Hill 2 is an incredibly creepy game, dripping in atmosphere, and all those other buzzwords games journalists like to drive into the ground. Where this goes from being merely that (although that is rare enough) is in the plot itself, both in what happens, and what it implies. Major spoilers from now on.
The true genius in the plot is that while there are several twists, they are twists in the best storytelling tradition. The best plot twists don’t come out of nowhere, blindsiding you by, ahem, “subverting expectations” (No, Game of Thrones is a wound that will never heal). The truly shocking ones are ones that on some level you already suspected or knew, even if you didn’t want to accept it. Foreshadowing is everything.
"It's hot as hell in here."
"You see it too? For me, it's always like this."
It’s only in a very late game conversation with Angela that something is explicitly stated that has only been implied up to that point: the other characters don’t see the same town James does. No wonder talking to all of them was so weird. Angela, who has murdered her abusive father and brother, sees the town as a kind of inferno, and is last seen ascending a burning staircase.
Eddie, who has become completely unhinged from a lifetime of bullying and verbal abuse, and has made the shift from doormat to sociopath. His town is ice cold, and filled with meat hanging from hooks. Where Angela seeks to punish herself, Eddie has disconnected from humanity. Laura, the 8 year old, sees the town simply as a town: she has done nothing wrong.
It’s at this point that we, the player, are invited to do something we very rarely do. We turn our gaze upon our player character. James is one hell of a study. So what does his town, the one we’ve spent several hours having the piss scared out of us in, represent?
In a word, denial. _______
The Sins of James Sunderland
"Forgive me. That's why I did it, honey. I just couldn't watch you suffer. No... that's not the whole truth. You also said that you didn't want to die. The truth is, part of me hated you. For taking away my life."James murdered his wife Mary by holding a pillow over her face, possibly a scant few days before arriving in Silent Hill. He even took her from the hospital, propped her up on the back seat of his car, where presumably, she still is as you “search” for her in the town. The letter, the three year time jump, all of it, are the products of James’ delusions. Never before has a video game put us in the shoes of someone so utterly damaged.
The town, then, becomes both a far more scary place than in the first game. The town and the cult are evil, to be sure, but a place that takes all of your darkest thoughts and desires and sins and makes them real is one of the most horrible thoughts imaginable.
The monsters snap into focus as something else entirely once you realize their source. The nurses, faceless yet well-endowed, are James’ suffocated libido at the side of his dying, withering wife made horribly real. The strange, armless, strait-jacket prowlers that wander the streets represent his restraint. And Pyramid Head, who pursues you and murders Maria over and over again in front of you, has one source: guilt. Only when he accepts what he has done does it stop, impaling itself.* __________
Multiple Endings
"I was weak. That's why I needed you... needed someone to punish me for my sins... but that's all over now... I know the truth. Now it's time to end this."There are four possible endings to the game (plus two joke ones**), dependent on the player’s actions. They are, briefly summarized, as follows.
- James encounters Maria, who transforms into a hideous monster (having always been another creation of the town intent on torturing James). After destroying her, he meets with Mary one last time, she gives him the letter he thought he started with, but ‘dies’ before they can reconcile. Unable to live without her, he drives himself and Mary’s body into the lake, committing suicide.
- After encountering Maria as above, he meets with Mary. They reconcile, and she forgives him for killing her, telling him to get on with his life. James leaves the town with Laura.
- James encounters Mary, who transforms as Maria does in the previous two endings, unforgiving of James’ role in her death. After destroying her, he leaves town with Maria, who is once more resurrected, but begins coughing in the car, implying Maria has the same illness as Mary.
- The encounter is with Maria, the same as the first two. James then takes Mary’s body and rows it out to a temple on the Lake, convinced that there is a ceremony he can perform to resurrect her.
The true genius of this is that none of these endings are considered canon by the developers. They are all as valid as each other. _________
Where I Come In
So why do I like this story so much? We-ell ‘like’ is maybe a strong word. It’s an incredibly dark and adult story, driven by guilt, delusion and despair. I would not play this every weekend. And yet, it remains a touchstone for me in terms of what can be achieved in the medium of interactive storytelling.
But first, the negative. This game is 19 years old, and therefore has the conventions of that time period. It has a slightly clunky interface, an older-style control scheme and graphics which, even in the HD Remaster, are showing their age. The camera swings around like a dodgy fairground ride, the combat is, for lack of a better word, bad, and the puzzles run the gamut from the merely baffling to the downright obtuse. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend anyone set out to play it now, for these reasons.***
However. However. It is still something I mull over regularly over a decade and a half after my first play through. There is so much I could talk about, from the way the game questions the relationship between the protagonist and the player, to the protagonist’s assumption of ‘being the hero’ ruthlessly shut down, to the less interesting (to me) stuff, like the lore of the town and how it operates.
But I am going to focus in on one aspect that, while everything else has shifted in and out of focus, continues to resonate with me as strongly, and that is the idea of how we influence the environment around ourselves, and what we can do with that information.
It is very, very easy in the modern world to feel powerless. News media, the decline of collective action and corresponding rise of individuality, and increasing financial instability have increased our sense of being essentially “not in control” of our own lives.
In addition, many of us feel a crushing sense of guilt about things for which we have very little individual responsibility. I know many people who worry about their carbon footprint, for instance, despite the fact that mass carbon dioxide production is a problem largely of industry and not the individual (or at least, accountability for one without the other is pointless).
Mary and James were two people stuck in the worst situation imaginable, but it is imaginable. There are probably hundreds, if not thousands of people in their position around the world, and disease, illness and death are, ultimately, the removal of choice. You can’t choose to not feel pain.
It is a scary thought to think we aren’t in control. It’s an even scarier one to think we are. Our environments and ourselves, even if not as starkly and horribly as in Silent Hill 2, still reflect each other. Is it too easy to surrender to bad circumstances? Jean-Paul Sartre famously stated in No Exit that “Hell is other people”, but what if Hell is simply the pain we inflict on ourselves, and everything else is just window dressing?
In that same play, Sartre also has a moment where the door out of Hell opens, and nobody walks out. There is nothing in the narrative stopping James from simply leaving Silent Hill and going home (I suppose the player equivalent is switching the game off) and why he doesn’t do so is one of the games best questions. The answer it provides is that, despite the horrors, on some level he doesn’t want to. He both deserves to suffer, and hope. Is that a good thing?
I think what gives me hope is the game’s ultimate message. James may not get a ‘happy’ ending - it’s worth noting in all four that Mary is still dead - but where he ends up is a result of the choices he and the player have made. If a man who has so utterly surrendered his own agency as to be in deep, deep denial still has the chance to make a choice about his fate, surely we do too, in our small way. If we can create Hell for ourselves, surely we can work towards the opposite.****
"Even though our life together had to end like this, I still wouldn't trade it for the world. We had some wonderful years together."
________
* There is only one monster in the game, called the Abstract Daddy, which is not the product of James’ emotional turmoil. A grotesque figure writhing on a bed, it instead represents Angela’s sexual abuse by her family and only appears in association with her.*****
** The two joke endings are that in one all the events of the game are being controlled by a dog with a computer, and in the other, aliens turn up and abduct James with the help of Harry Mason, Silent Hill’s protagonist. Neither of these are available on a first play through and are meant more as fun Easter Eggs.
*** A remastered HD version is available on the Playstation store, but there are some important differences, notably all of the voice acting has been rerecorded with a new cast. The voice acting now is objectively better across the board, but it has lost a lot of the weird stiltedness that made everyone seem so off and in my opinion the game has lost something in the transition.
**** Sadly none of the sequels ever came close to this level again. Silent Hill 3 continues the story of Silent Hill the town, bringing the cult back front and center and underwhelming those who had played 2, but a recent re-evaluation has elevated it to something of a cult classic (if you’ll pardon the pun). Silent Hill 4 had a strong original story, although it lacked the same psychological depth as 2 and was marred by some terrible, terrible gameplay. Origins, Shattered Memories, and Homecoming are somewhat less well regarded, although I am playing Homecoming at the moment and it seems OK.
***** Ew.
