After being drip-fed narrative for basically the last nine blog posts, Silent Hill finally decides to dish out the goods today.
After leaving the hospital, I have a go at taking on some of the skinless dogs with my emergency hammer, wanting to conserve ammo, since I’m still basically out of handgun ammo, and I’m keen on saving as much ammo for my shotgun as possible. As it turns out, fighting those jumping dogs requires incredibly precise timing. I lose quite a bit of health before it finally clicks, and the experience of fighting with the emergency hammer becomes even more enjoyable than it was before.
The moment-to-moment gameplay of exploring the town is a constant push-and-pull between exploring to find more ammo and running away from monsters because you’re running out of ammo. It’s your classic resource dilemma, pared down to its simplest element. More exploration can get you more goodies which make your future encounters easier, but less exploration might actually save you resources in the long run.
There’s an odd kind of peace that settles over me when I explore in this game, though. I explore a few places, like up a fire escape that leads to a wide roof with red tiles, and a serene location where you can stand and look forever into the fog.
It’s a portal to a time that has long since passed. A town poised on the cusp of a new millennium, forever.
It’s an interesting experiment to think of games as time capsules to places that no longer exist. I think that’s part of the seduction of Silent Hill though. It promises a portal to a place that might as well exist. That’s why so many people seek it out in real life, wishing that somewhere, in the back roads of America, there’s a town that sucks people in and shows them everything they don’t want to see. This is something I want to talk about elsewhere though.
After a while of wandering, and being jumped by a set of particularly eerie looking monsters, probably the scariest the original game has to offer so far, I find the antique store that Dahlia Gillespie referred me onto last time.
The antique store has a claustrophobic opening staircase, which descends into darkness. Just a little light from the day shines onto a desk which has a save pad on it. I flick my torch on and have a look around in the darkness. The space here is comforting, the kind of area you’d find yourself in on a cold and stormy night, and safely bolt the door. There’s even an old couch you could curl up in and go to sleep. The shop also has no ambient soundtrack, and no light. It’s as quiet as the grave. But in a game like Silent Hill, that means a certain amount of tension abated.
As to be expected, however, an antique shop that a deranged woman has sent you to is no ordinary antique shop. A cabinet is able to be pushed to one side – as Harry does, it reveals a gaping hole in the wall, that leads into even more darkness. It is just then that the game surprises me in a positive way – Cybil appears behind Harry!
Cybil says that she shouldn’t have left Harry, since the town is “nuts”. No kidding. She explains that a) she couldn’t leave town, as all the roads are blocked, b) cars and motorcycles are all refusing to work, and c) all the phones and radios give nothing but static. Harry quickly asks whether or not Cybil has seen Cheryl. I sit there, waiting for her to say no, but then she says something surprising. She did see a girl!
Harry presses for more questions. There’s a quiet desperation behind this scene, from both Harry and the player. This is the most we’ve really heard from Cheryl since the phone call way back in the school. This is a moment of great tension, made even greater by the slow dialogue, loading straight off the disc.
Cybil explains that she saw a girl walking – but walking on an impassable road, across one of the huge chasms. “On thin air”, she says. That’s her reason for not going after her when Harry scolds her for not even trying to follow Cheryl.
It’s here that the conversation gets kind of weird, and makes me really think something’s going on with Cybil that she’s not letting on. Harry asks whether or not Cybil has seen Dahlia Gillespie. Cybil exclaims: “Dahlia Gillespie!” and again, I brace for some new, revelatory information. But then Cybil says she doesn’t know anyone by that name. I take notes for these posts, and next to this bit of information, I scribbled down, “Weird…”. I’m looking forward to digging into characters at the end of this series, after I’ve done an overall dissection of the game via all other facets that interest me. I have a feeling Cybil is going to be a character that will require some serious examination.
Harry explains that Dahlia’s kind of crazy, explaining how she said that “the town is being devoured by darkness”. Cybil can only offer up a fairly weak argument regarding the fact that Dahlia’s on drugs, and she might be connected to the drug trade. I’m not even sure if she believes this herself, but she also doesn’t seem to have encountered any of the monsters I have. Or at least, she can’t have right, if she believes that the problems in this town stem from the drug trade?
Harry also asks Cybil whether or not she’s been in the Otherworld. Harry says that he tries to make sense of the place, which he says something along the lines of “I was there, but not really though. It feels like a hallucination.” Every time he tries to make sense of his surroundings, he blacks out. Cybil once again draws a blank. For an investigative police officer, she’s not particularly helpful.
Harry decides to go into the tunnel alone, and Cybil again lets him, taking up the guard position. I’m really not sure why she was the one sent to the town to investigate if she lets a civilian boss her around. Granted, Harry has obviously been through some stuff at this point, but Cybil is still a police officer.
Harry discovers that tucked away back here is an altar to a strange god. He wonders who the altar is for, and surmises that this must be “the other church”. I pick an axe up off the wall, which has kind of a useless swing, so I switch immediately back to my emergency hammer. As I go to leave, the altar springs to life. Flames everywhere.
The camera cuts to Cybil. She calls for Harry. Harry doesn’t respond. She calls again; still nothing. Now she goes down the corridor – to see a completely fine altar, and no Harry.
Harry wakes up in the hospital, which is rusty and blood-red. The camera itself seems to have been smothered in red, making the whole environment even seedier than it was when we last came here. Lisa is waiting at Harry’s bedside, and for what must be the first time in the game, someone is actually able to give us some straight answers.
Lisa talks about how the town used to be fairly quiet and reclusive before it became a resort. She says that the townsfolk were all part of some “queer religion”, and that when young people left the town, they assumed they had been called away by God. This is a lot of new information that she gives us, which helps to contextualize a lot of what has happened to us already. We can guess that Dahlia has something to do with it. And Dahlia herself lost her daughter in a terrible fire. Other than that, Dahlia never sees anyone, so Lisa doesn’t know much more about her.
Harry is pretty quick to slap the label of “cult” on these guys, which is fair enough. None of what he’s seen in the town would indicate that a friendly religion operated here.
After their conversation, Harry wakes up again in the front of the antique shop, except it’s the dark Otherworld again, and there’s no Cybil. I head up onto the streets, and it’s filled with skinless dogs and Rompers, and the streets themselves are long, wire mesh platforms now. Below that is infinite black abyss.
I run around a bit panicked for a bit before the camera helpfully guides me to a broken down gate into the Silent Hill Town Center, which seems to be a mall. I step into the mall, and head up the escalator. But then something happens – the large television sets (one giant tv to the left, and a set of nine smaller televisions on the right) turn on.
Cheryl! She’s alive, and she’s calling for help! After a brief cry for help, her face is replaced by a number of strange, esoteric symbols, likely relating to the cult Lisa talked about.
Silent Hill is ramping up the tension now. At this point, Team Silent assume that the player knows how to play, and the general formula of playing. Now, they are pushing the plot to the forefront, instead of letting gameplay take the lead. Story is now driving gameplay in a way that was less obvious before, as the clues were less urgent. Now, you can Cheryl is in visible distress and danger – and she is tangible again. It has been a long time since we’ve actually been able to catch a glimpse of Cheryl. Now that we have, parental instincts kick in – which is exactly what Team Silent are counting on.
I save my game in a little store, pick up some rifle ammunition, and head on, but the floor collapses under me, and I drop down into a sandy arena. A large worm rises from the earth and spits acid at me – a fight begins. It takes me a few laps of the arena to find the hunting rifle, and I empty all the bullets I have at the worm, but still it doesn’t die. I resort to finishing it off with my shotgun, and when it goes down, it curls up for a moment – then burrows underground, and smashes through the glass door that was blocking my escape before.
I still have a serious problem with combat against bosses in this Silent Hill. I like that you can avoid combat with the lesser monsters if you’re quick enough, but bosses lock you into a large room and perform repetitive actions against you, while either being way too easy or too frustrating. The worm was particularly annoying since the hitbox was so small and Harry is a pretty terrible shot. I was forced to waste a lot of my health potions just because the worm didn’t feel like a fair opponent.
At any rate, I leave, and am forced to fight a hell of a lot more beasts in the Otherworld before I finally wind my way to where I’m supposed to go, back to Lisa at the Hospital. It could have felt a little esoteric and frustrating if you were wanting the game to be over faster, but I was more pleased that the game didn’t point me there with Harry saying “guess I’d better check on Lisa”. It was a natural thing that I elected to do, and it paid off. Empathy pays, people.
Harry asks for a way to the lake, which is where Cybil said Cheryl was walking before, across thin air. Lisa suggests a road, but that road is blocked off. Luckily for Harry, Lisa might know another way to get to the lake. There’s a water pumping station next to Midwich Elementary School – so that’s where I have to go next. Lisa refuses Harry’s offer of being escorted to safety. She “feels she has to stay here”. Part of me is disappointed, but another point of me breathes a sigh of relief that I don’t have to deal with an escort mission in the Otherworld.
I head outside, and the wire mesh walkways are restrictive to such a degree that there’s only one place to go. That fire escape, up the roof, where the water tower is. I had a feeling there’d be something up there. And, typically, it’s the worm – but the worm is back as a giant moth. The moth spits acid and stabs with a stinger. Fortunately the wide area is a pretty easy area to back up.
I unload every single shotgun shell I have into the giant insect, but it still doesn’t die. I have to pull out my handgun – I have literally fifteen bullets left. Fortunately, fourteen bullets are all it takes to kill the thing.
Harry collapses, and wakes up in the foggy real world again.
If I had more space, I’d analyze the hell out of this chapter. I might have to do that in a later post, really delve into what happened. I could only give a brief overview here this week – a lot happened.
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