[internisus]

You're doing a great job for avatar positioning and cinematic framing. I hope you do the whole game like this!

[internisus]

Wow, very nice summary right there. I love your thinking on the corpses and agree that it's a very interesting implication that they were themselves exploring the town in their own ways, and that you can guess at what it is they saw.

[internisus]

SH2 is the reason why I look forward to FKW.

[internisus]

This is a thread from last year chronicling my impressions during my first playthrough of SH2. Towards the end, there was a lot of discussion regarding the symbolism of the monsters in the game. We also talked about the different primary characters' subjective views of Silent Hill (Angela and fire, Laura seeing no monsters, etc.) and the ties of those experiences to each's reason for coming to the town.

My only disappointment in SH2 was that, excepting events from the Historical Society onward, the town's transformations into its Otherworldly form were uninteresting. Without question, the most distinctively frightening and interesting aspect of the first game was the fact that the town transformed into something horrifying when Harry needed a new route to open up.

His goal as he explores the school building turns out to be unlocking the schoolyard clocktower; he enters, climbs up, walks through a corridor, climbs back down, and exits from the same door through which he had entered, only to find that the school is now a terrible, bloody, industrial complex. This excursion in, through, and back out of the tower exhibits a spacial discontinuity implying that Harry's movement is not from one place to another but rather between worlds.

Later, in the hospital, Harry explores the building and charts out all of the locked doors on the first, second, and, finally, third floors, eventually coming to a point where it becomes clear that there is way for him to work his way deeper inside the facility. Upon reentering the elevator to leave, however, he suddenly finds a button for the fourth floor. You aren't quite sure, but you don't remember it being there before. The map indicates that no fourth floor exists. When Harry presses the button and exits the elevator on the fourth floor, the corridor he finds himself in is vastly different from the first three floors. It is dark, metallic, and gory, much like the transformed school had been. He makes his way along and comes to the previously inaccessible stairwell, but when he descends to the third floor and turns around, he finds that the route he had come from is now a solid wall. The fourth floor is gone. He now has access to the rest of the building, but the nature of the place is horribly different.

The implication in both of these situations is ambiguous. It is unclear whether the town's transformations are manipulated by Harry when he has nowhere else to go or whether the town itself is changing while granting him passage. However, when Harry later leaves the hospital, the outdoor spaces of the town have transformed as well, and, gradually, the routes open to him simply disappear until he is penned into a single thin catwalk. When I first played the game, this left me utterly terrified. My impression was that the town, whether it had been awakened by Harry's having abused his power over it when reaching those desperate dead ends or had always been sentient and guiding him along a path, was taking over and caging him in. Experiencing this progression in the manifest town as a character all its own could never be translated to a non-interactive medium. This fear is very special.

In SH2, movement through the town is much less interesting, but the things that you find are much more interesting. I really would have liked to see both types of psychological horror implemented simultaneously.

[internisus]