So last time, I talked a lot about the actual feeling of wandering the streets and the enemies themselves not being necessarily scary, it’s the way in which they are used that is valuable. The main reason I did this was because I hadn’t had much time to play last week.
This session of play I spent wandering around the streets, trying to get to the school.

I don’t want to linger for too long this time regarding minutiae and every step I take, as this blog will already be long enough as it is. Suffice it to say I figure out my way around town, discovering the huge gaps in the road, little bits of ammo tucked away, and make my way to the alleyway where I was last knocked out and attacked.

There, I find some drawings that Cheryl did, and a lead – “To school”. Harry automatically marks that on his map (something delightful that pleases me to no end, having the map automatically update, but not in an overt, gamey way) and so the quest begins. Sadly, as Harry and I quickly find out, there are plenty of nasty gaps in the roads of Silent Hill that means he’ll need to find a way to cut through a building. I narrow down my options, and eventually find some bloodied papers that read “Doghouse, Levin St.” This is all the information you need – no artificial markers lead the player right there. I have to fight (or flight) my way through a few more monsters of the four legged, and winged varieties, and reach a nasty, viscera-soaked doghouse.

I do want to spend a little time talking about the interior design of this house. It’s a masterclass in making the everyday seem haunting and wrong somehow. As I said in the last post, it is all to do with silence, and the things you don’t see.

The place is functionally safe, with no enemies, and nothing particularly hostile about it.

However, the place is tight, and dimly lit. Doors to elsewhere in the house are locked, and the place feels like it has been freshly abandoned, as though the people who lived here heard you come inside and are hiding just out of sight, waiting to ambush you.

And that doesn’t happen either, of course. No monstrosities jump out at you, and in fact, a seasoned survival horror brain determines that this place must be safe because there’s a save point in here, and they don’t put enemies in rooms with save points, no siree.

But that doesn’t matter. It’s the silence. The game sells you silence, and you buy it up, even subconsciously. You walk around in the semi-darkness, clutching your gun, awaiting some new revelation… none comes. Nothing but a door locked with three keys, and a note that lets you circle them on your map.

This is a fairly formulaic fetch quest to find some keys. It’s not particularly exciting, but at least you do get to see more of Silent Hill as you run around and run away from the enemies. One “problem” I did notice is that it is very easy to escape and dodge enemies in the wide open streets. This is generally fixed in the tighter, more claustrophobic environments, but wandering the streets and being able to consistently kite enemies, even the dogs, who I discovered since last time can actually be effectively dodged if you wrangle the tank controls in your mind (which I managed to do back in Silent Hill 2, the first one I played, and Resident Evil. Not to mention Grim Fandango. So many good games…). So I run around, soaking up the atmosphere and being slightly underwhelmed by the enemy encounters, and hoarding ammunition. The town itself is laid out and paced well, making the quest to find the keys more tense and stressful just from the atmosphere and graphics alone. If the town wasn’t so atmospheric, wandering round and finding the keys would be much, much less engaging.

After I return to the house with the keys, Harry unlocks the back door and I step out into pitch-black darkness, a change from the grey fog that I’ve been dealing with up until now. It’s here that the game’s training for running away came in handy, as I dodged and weaved past quite a few angry enemies and booked it down the street to reach the school…

The school is deathly silent, as I would have expected. Fortunately for me, I find a save point right off the bat in the nurse’s office, and it’s there that I pause. There haven’t been a lot of narrative developments so far, so I’m hoping that either the school contains some seriously awesome scares (which I have a good feeling about) or some new story stuff. At any rate, the gameplay has left me on the edge of my seat, peering into the shadows…

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