First, let's make sure you have a chance to experience this game. It's not the same as playing it, you'll be in a well lit room and won't be controlling the character, but you'll get the point.
Oh what a great image for this game! The pale skin, the horrific dentist nightmare of teeth, the slime like substance pouring from her mouth. PT was a technological wonder to those who loved horror video gaming. That's mostly because the library hasn't really expanded that much in comparison to the past console generations. Sure, we got Alien Isolation and The Evil Within (Which deserves several posts but its not here.) What we didn't have is a large amount of developers pumping our veins full of adrenaline and exploring a lot of different themes in horror. At least not yet and if you're a PC gamer the indie scene exploded taking attention away from consoles.
So, how do you bring it all back around?
Silent Hills. That's actually what PT was pointing us to, but that's not the ending that everyone got. PT put you in the shoes of an unnamed person who explores several corridors of what appears to be an old house over and over again. The sound, the controls and the unavoidable feeling of helplessness settles in quickly. There are no weapons, no health bar and you are quickly a pawn to the environment. Exploring the concept of the environment changing in small ways and then in dramatically huge ways changes your trip through the house each time.
Sometimes you might have a voice crying in the bathroom, sometimes you might explore the bathroom, other times the radio personality might tell you that the gap in the door leads to another reality. Silent Hill has been known to explore these concepts. When in Silent Hill and inside of its horrific fog you become an unwilling participant in an alternate place. Sometimes the meaning was that the things you killed were actually people. Objects created by the mind of your broken protagonist. Always there were direct psychological connections between the broken worlds and the real world. Pyramid Head, don't get pissed off, this blog isn't about you but I'm thinking of you as I write that statement.
As the unnamed character exploring this environment you're almost always pushed to go into further exploration of things you don't really want to see. You're always feeling uneasy about your next step forward and you're never sure of what's going to happen to you. That's why I've chosen this play through to post on this blog. With the players constantly narrating their reaction, I can't help but smile from my own thoughts of the game running parallel with theirs. "Fuck that hallway."
The radio announcer is a very important piece of the puzzle of breaking out from one ending to another in PT. The first thing you hear is a scripted news story that leads to the talk about a murder. In this murder you could be any one of the people being talked about or no one at all. Fun fact, the news story that's played is also played in Metal Gear Solid V, another Kojima production. The radio does offer some other pieces of dialog. You're told to not touch that dial and then a sequence of numbers are mechanically spoken about and finally you're told to look behind you. I SAID LOOK BEHIND YOU!
Fuck that! I'm running! The sequence of numbers likely relates to the first story that's played on the radio. The news story states that the man who murdered his family would chant numbers like a prayer.
The next things that you notice in the environments are the photo frames. They are almost always changing. In fact, I didn't realize it until looking up information to write about the game, but the fragments are all different languages. Sure you get some English, but you just think its a scary sentence and then its time to move along. The languages all tell a small story within a story. There's no specific links but it's all linked together. That's just how psychological fear works.
There are other statements that appear with each traverse through this small terrible universe. Some of them state there's a demon inside me, others ask for forgiveness, and all of them are fucking creepy.
The radio continues its none stop narration and sometimes add some other things to the script. This includes a statement about the father who committed the murders hanging himself with a garden hose (Umbilical cord!!) Remember, the radio states earlier that mom is pregnant in this story, so this fucker went and killed her and then hung himself with the umbilical cord. How amazingly cool is that! Well done, demon bro.
The radio man continues on as you continue traversing the different hallways...er...realities? The story goes something like this. The guy lost his job and started hitting the alcy a little too hard. Meanwhile, the girl, mom, the wife you know the lady with the umbilical cord (or formally had the cord) got a job at the grocery store. The store where the manager liked how she looked in a skirt. That was 10 months ago...
Larger environmental changes take place. Sometimes a swinging bulk of mass in the large part of the hallway starts crying and spilling blood all over the place. Sometimes the time on the clock changes. Sometimes furniture appears and disappears. Sometimes, a woman...monster...thing jumps you and after a few chewing noises you start back in the original room with a talking brown paper bag and the flashlight you picked up from the roach infested bathroom.
In order to actually earn the trailer of a game that will never come out, you have to make it through the loop around 15 times. I've been checking guides and videos and this seems to be what it takes to get to the true ending. You actually have to make a fetus laugh 3 times to get a phone to ring before you're brought to the trailer for Silent Hills. Unfortunately, Silent Hills was canceled and PT removed from the Playstation store in April of 2015. So, Roy, why write about this today?
This was a brilliant piece of interactive horror. This was accessible to so many people. Unlike VR. VR itself is expensive and the access is going to be weak and I don't predict a fan favorite there. Not by a long shot. What we had here was some really well done horror tropes. Bloody fetuses, bug infested bathrooms, hanging bleeding appliances from teh ceiling, a radio show that makes your skin crawl and if you did it right you could see a trailer for a game that was going to use all this wonderful tech to scare our pants off.
With the ending of Silent Hills, I wonder what will happen with horror on the console. Again, if you're a PC gamer, you have no worries! Console gamers are confined to a much smaller circus. With that said, there are alternatives that I'll write about. One in particular I mentioned The Evil Within which is a great title to enjoy a few jump scares. Until Dawn is a wonderful title that has a lot of tropes to explore in the span of one game. You can also argue that some games have several genres within it. Last of Us has some horror elements. Bloodborne and Outlast all put together some great horror elements within what I think is a less creepy outing then what can be a full loving helping of horror.
No comments:
Post a Comment