Wednesday, 27 January 2016

Silent Hill 2

Silent Hill 2 is a game that I love so damn much that I'm about to start speed running it.  It's part of the much loved Silent Hill series which was at one point a wonderful collection of genuinely terrifying and wonderfully well written survival horror games.  However, like Resident Evil and the survival horror genre in general, Silent Hill has become complete shit being developed by people who have no clue about what it is about and seem to be allergic to good game design. 

Just like how Resident Evil 4 turned the series from tense survival horror into big loud not scary action, Silent Hill 2 is the reason that the series went from well thought out demonic cult story to series of twats facing inner demons.  Unlike Resident Evil though, Silent Hill 2 was an interesting take on the story from the original team which was then completely ruined by outside influences while Resident Evil just got turned to shit because Capcom thought the fan base was full of thickos.

The story of Silent Hill 2 involves James Sunderland who travels to Silent Hill after getting a letter from his dead wife.  There he has to travel through the town in an attempt to find her all while being confronted by horrible manifestations of his inner self, a power that the town itself gained after Silent Hill 1 happened.  Not only that but he has to deal with a small handful of other twats with their own inner demons that are getting in the way with their shit when all James wants is to just find his dead wife and be happy again.

Silent Hill 1,3 and 4 on the other hand tell the stories of characters dealing with a demonic cult run by some really evil twats that want to birth their horrible "God" into the world.  The town of Silent Hill is still running rampant with manifestations but they aren't the manifestations of the main character but usually someone else and that to me is just what makes these games a little bit scarier.  You aren't dealing with your fucked up brain, your dealing with another persons fucked up brain and they've all been tied up in demonic cult shit so they're way more fucked up than you could ever be.

But then the series ended with Silent Hill 4 and a bunch of westerners decided to give it a go in order to keep it alive.  The most popular game in the franchise was quite clearly Silent Hill 2 so because these people couldn't be fucked to actually learn the ins and outs of the incredibly well crafted plot, they just played that one entry and used it as a template for EVERY OTHER GAME TO FOLLOW.

So that leaves us where we are now, in a horrible situation where there are now more terrible Silent Hill games than good ones.  Games that miss the point of the original series or just flat out get things wrong for the sake of making twats who misunderstood the first 4 games feel good about themselves.  All of these games have that theme of "person facing their inner demons in Silent Hill" and quite frankly I'm sick of it.  This series was never about that, it was about demonic cults and everything came to a nice dramatic close in Silent Hill 3, there didn't need to be more fucking games.

What people are making now aren't psychological survival horror games but action games about psychology and that's just fucking sad.  Genuine terror has been replaced with laugh out loud retardation, jump scares and people ripping off Saw.  The writing has gone from pure excellence with some of the best continuity in any work of fiction I've ever seen to non nonsensical bullshit where the games themes are slammed across your face like a wrecking ball made of adamantium spikes.

Sadly, it's all Silent Hill 2s fucking fault.  If that game wasn't so fucking good then twats wouldn't have tried to copy it in order to make a quick buck.  It's tragic too because Silent Hill 2 is genuinely a really good game that everyone interested in games, especially the ones looking for good examples of "games as art" should play.  Luckily, no matter how hard twats who aren't Team Silent try, they can never ruin the quality of the original games so just do what I do, stick your fingers in your ears, bury your head in a rusty room and pretend like the new ones don't exist.

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