So last time I talked about the experience of exploring Midwich Elementary School without a map, and how enjoyable most of the puzzles were.
This time I wanted to talk about the transition to the Otherworld, Silent Hill’s ultimate nightmare realm, a place of decaying, bloody walls, dangling corpses, and other delightful sights and sounds that are a perversion of everything “ordinary” about the Silent Hill you’ve been exploring up until this point.
It’s a great way to ramp up the horror. With three different “looks” that Silent Hill can appear in, namely a) a real-world town swathed in vast quantities of fog, b) an incredibly dark real-world town that contains not a single source of natural light, and c) the Otherworld itself, Team Silent can use the middle transitory stage to begin to ramp up the feeling of tension without immediately jumping it to its natural extreme.
The passageway to the Otherworld, a cramped tunnel through the clock tower, which at the other end emerges at the point at which Harry started – back into the courtyard of the school – serves as a fairly large “mind screw” to the player. While of course the concept of messing with the player in these kinds of ways was not invented here (see Metal Gear Solid), nor was it best used here (see later entries in the series), it’s simple and effective. P.T. even uses this exact idea but takes it to an even further haunting extreme. So if you had any remaining thoughts about whether Silent Hill was going to play by the logical rules of reality, you just had those illusions shattered.
A large symbol adorns the ground in the courtyard, a symbol that long-time Silent Hill players will recognize. Harry however has no clue what it is, and our exploration of a new reality begins. There’s a great piece of camerawork in this scene that pans from cutscene to where it would naturally sit above Harry, as though something is getting ready to attack – or maybe it is just observing. It positions us as attackers ourselves. We’re the ones who put Harry here, anyway.
The exploration takes much the same form as before, except you have to re-explore the area, with several doors that were locked before being able to be explored. New blockages appear – chainlink walls that cannot be broken through. Instead you often have to fight your way through classrooms filled with the creepy knife-wielding child-monsters, and a new kind of enemy, a giant cockroach. I fought my way through the first couple of rooms, but quickly became tired of having to run around the room and shoot the enemies over and over again, wasting a lot of valuable supplies, so eventually I just started sprinting through each of these rooms.
In the “real” Silent Hill, the staffroom behind reception has an odd painting. Harry remarks that whoever painted it surely did so in poor taste. Now, in the Otherworld, the painting has become a grim door that requires a literal keycard (a large card with an image of a key on it) to open. It’s a nice bit of foreshadowing that Team Silent will use a lot, with even more effectiveness, in later entries in the series.
Another bit of great mindscrewery comes when you enter the girl’s bathroom in search of supplies. You poke around, gather up anything you need, and turn to leave. But when you do, you emerge on the second floor, not the first. I felt disoriented and lost as I realized the big painting door I’d entered the corridor through was gone. As I quickly discovered when I opened my map, I’d been transported to the second floor, so that did remove some of the sudden fear I felt. Still, a great bit of horror work undermined a little by the tools given to the player to help them survive. Which works, of course! Resolving a mystery with these tools does make us feel clever, even if it is quite easy in this instance.
In the girl’s bathroom I found some shotgun shells. So I figured I’d find a shotgun soon – but not as soon as literally the boy’s bathroom next door. Next to another one of the hanging corpses too, much like the one in the game’s infamous first alleyway. Written next to the body on the wall was a cryptic phrase: “Leonard Rhine – the Monster Lurks!” I took a note of this, then picked up the shotgun: but held off using it. I figured there would be a big enemy round the corner at some point, so stuck with my trusty pistol that Cybil gave me.
In the first piece of new narrative I’d had in a while, Harry tries to exit a room filled with telephones, when the phone rings. (I just knew this was going to happen, horror stuff just can’t resist calling a phone that was disconnected just a moment before!) Harry cautiously approaches the phone and picks it up. It is then that he hears Cheryl’s voice calling for help.
If you’d forgotten the objective of your quest, this reinvigorates you. Surely she must be close! The exploration continues, and you head upstairs.
The most notable things upstairs are in the locker room and in the library. In the dark Silent Hill’s locker room, there’s the famous jumpscare where the cat jumps out of the locker. In the Otherworld, you hear the sound of banging coming from the same locker. Curiosity kills, so they say, and you are naturally drawn to investigate. The banging gets louder and louder, until finally it reaches an awful crescendo as you open it – to reveal an empty locker, smeared in blood. Either annoyed or relieved, you walk away from the locker, only for Team Silent to cruelly ensnare you in their real jumpscare. A locker falls open loudly, revealing a bloody corpse, with a grim close up. A lesson I think that many would-be horror developers should learn is that the reason this bit is scary is not cause of the fact the bloody corpse is gory and shocking or whathaveyou. The gore is an added bonus to the fact that Team Silent has just played both you and I like a fiddle. Like a good joke, the various facets of the punchline have been set up, but the punchline is still obscured – right up until the masters reveal all the different pieces and their true “meaning”.
I really liked this jumpscare, okay?
The other location, the library, is locked, but accessible via simple puzzle. A key is placed down a hole, and you have to wash it down the hole with some water. But there’s another hole that the water goes down first, so you have to plug it up. Fairly simple to solve, you just need the right item. When you’ve washed the key down the hole, you have to find where its been washed down to. The puzzles in Silent Hill are generally natural. Or the best ones are, anyway. The place has rules and logic. You might be in a bloody perversion of a school, but you’re still in a school. Where do drains flow here? You might have noticed drainpipes coming out in the courtyard, so you run down there to retrieve the key.
When in the library, I discovered the book by Leonard Rhine, talking about a large lizard that was killed by shooting it when it opened its mouth.
Hmm.
So now we have access to the basement, and it is here we have the double-whammy of the crummy valve puzzle I talked about last time, and the easy and disappointing boss for the area. The set up is good, though.
You descend an elevator into the darkness onto a large square platform, covered in rust and spikes. In the middle of the arena, a corpse is lit on fire, providing a grim lighting feature for the game’s first boss. Cruel Roman Emperor Nero would have been proud of the setup. A large lizard goes to attack you, this huge, lumbering beast, larger and more dangerous looking than any creature that has come before so far! – and I shot it a few times, did one loop of the arena, it opened its mouth, and I shot it twice more in the mouth before it died.
The creature, who I discovered was called “Split-Head”, has spectacular buildup. If you are paying attention, its weakness is exposed before you even meet it. Maybe this is why it was so easy. Perhaps those who didn’t read the book found the creature harder to kill. And maybe I’ve just played too many survival horror games with tank controls. Anyway, I found this bit too easy, and a bit of a lackluster, anticlimactic ending to the Midwich Elementary School bit.
When the creature is dead, Harry finds himself in the basement, back in the foggy real world we started the game in.
I can hear the sound of church bells ringing. And so it continues.
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