There’s an argument in horror game design circles that says, “if the player is unarmed and unable to defend themselves against the monsters, the game is always scarier.” I would say that this is only occasionally true. The problem lies in variety. In a horror movie, if the characters are unable to defend themselves, that situation only runs for so long, say a couple of hours for the average film. But when you are playing a game and get stuck on a segment where you are unarmed and have only the option to run away and try to hide from whatever creatures are chasing you, you begin to feel frustrated with limitation. It descends into trial and error, and swiftly becomes frustrating.
Where Silent Hill and other survival horror titles get it right is in the inclusion of weapons that come with a cost. That’s where the survival comes in. Bullets are scarce, melee weapons are generally terrible or at least come with significant risk to using them, and some enemies are tougher to kill than others, making initial encounters even more of a toss-up. As I’ve discussed in previous (ancient) entries on this blog, choices need consequences. But you also need choice in the first place to have consequence. If you were, for instance, playing Outlast 2, a horror game I really don’t like, and you decide to run away from the enemy, and then you die, you are being punished for a choice you didn’t even make. There’s no option but to run in 90% of the segments of Outlast 2, and it becomes even less than trial and error, it becomes luck as you stumble round in overly-dark environments running into walls and evading AI which often gets spawned closer to you depending on where you are, especially in a number of flashback sequences.
Silent Hill, on the other hand, takes weapons away from you sparingly, and it is during these moments that you feel naked and vulnerable, as the crutch of weapons that you’ve been relying on to defeat the enemies has been taken away from you. If you run out of ammo too, that’s generally your own fault, a consequence of your decisions. It is when a game punishes you too harshly for a decision they forced you to make that you encounter problems.
Silent Hill’s opening alleyway scene in the Otherworld is genuinely disturbing, and it is capped off with a brief look at a number of grotesque little creatures that swarm Harry. The player can try to escape, and I managed to run a little way before another one waiting for me grabbed a hold of me and damaged me til I was unconscious. Fortunately, this was not a scenario you were supposed to survive, so I received no punishment for the game’s enforced defeat.
I found this scene quite harrowing, and yes, a large part of this was due to the fact I had no weapon. But if the game had put me in situations like that all throughout, I would have been really swiftly frustrated at the fact Harry couldn’t fight back with anything. It would have been artificial difficulty, and a sort of enforced character idiocy. Fortunately, Harry Mason doesn’t fall prey to those.
After being assaulted and left for dead by these strange creatures, Harry abruptly wakes to find himself in a small roadside cafe. The cafe is home to the only track of Akira Yamaoka’s Silent Hill 1 soundtrack so far that I can listen to without some discomfort. While I love the heavier industrial tracks of later games, there’s something really awful and discordant with the tracks of Silent Hill 1, making it feel quite separate in some way from later games, not just in console generations. Silent Hill 2′s soundtrack contains not a bad song, and I’d argue neither do 3, 4 or even Homecoming. I have yet to play and listen to the other games and their soundtracks, but I’m sure they will be genius. As I encounter more music tracks, I’ll come back to this line of thought, but so far, Silent Hill 1’s soundtrack is awful and anxiety-inducing and… I love it.
Harry meets police officer Cybil here, who really doesn’t seem to be good at her job, considering the huge decision she is about to make. Harry at this point is justifiably confused about what is going on with the town, and is more anxious than ever to find Cheryl. So he inquires with Cybil as to whether she’s seen a little girl, seven years old, with short black hair. The stilted dialogue is charming and evokes that bygone era where loading times were present everywhere, even in between lines of dialogue. Cybil says that sorry, she hasn’t seen anyone, but she does think that something bizarre is going on. Both characters wonder aloud as to why they haven’t actually seen anyone, and Cybil thinks that probably she should call for reinforcements.
Harry gets up, and Cybil actually tries to stop him from leaving, bizarrely asking “Hey, where do you think you’re going?” even though Harry is quite clearly anxious about finding Cheryl. He replies “My daughter… I’ve gotta find her!” which I think is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do in a dangerous town like this one. Cybil replies with “No way!”, and this sort of cements her as a no-nonsense cop who does everything by the book. Or you’d think so, wouldn’t you?
She says it is dangerous out there, and Harry just reiterates what he said before, saying that basically “Uh, well if it’s dangerous then I should probably go out there and look even harder!”
It is here that Cybil changes to an interesting tactic. “Have you got a gun?” she asks.
“Ummm… no.”
Cybil then gives Harry, an untrained civilian, her only gun, and says only “before you pull the trigger, know who you’re shooting.”
Harry thanks her, and Cybil heads outside into the fog, entirely unarmed.
As much as I love these games, it feels like there are several logical jumps in this scene that make it hard to stay invested, even while I do sympathize with Harry for wanting to go save Cheryl. I’m willing to suspend disbelief because I’m hoping that there’s a specific reason beyond just plain old stupidity that Cybil runs out into the fog unarmed, having given a man she has just met her weapon. But it does strike me as fairly contrived, which is unusual for the Silent Hill series, which usually has everything thought out in advance very carefully. I guess they thought there was no other way to both introduce a friendly character while setting the stage for combat to enter the game.
But why doesn’t Harry warn her about what he’s seen out there? He wonders if what he experienced was a dream, but even so, you’d imagine that with Cybil’s admission that it’s dangerous out there that he should warn her about what he saw. I guess that would make him look crazy, and Cybil wouldn’t want to give her gun in that instance. Or heck, maybe she would, I don’t know. She tells Harry to stay put, but we all know that’s not going to happen. It’s time to head out into the fog…
Horrorgameanalysis 