Sewer levels suck.
They are overly dark, claustrophobic, and filled with annoying and difficult enemies. The samey environments create the feeling that you’re just walking around the same space constantly, and it is very easy to get lost. These qualities are undesirable in basically any game, and I’m not going to defend Silent Hill’s sewer just because it “enhances feelings of dread and being lost”, because, simply, they are dull and frustrating segments at their worst, and barely tolerable at their best.
By the time you reach Silent Hill’s sewers, you’ve already dealt with a lot of the really dreadful and horrible monsters the game can throw at you. Rompers, no matter how many I fight, raise the hairs on my arms – they’re quick and noisy, making them doubly scary. The enemies in the sewers are either the large cockroach enemies or even larger insectoid enemies. The cockroaches are frustrating to hit with melee weapons (the fire hammer being my go-to still), and the insectoid enemies aren’t particularly dangerous in any way, just annoying. They frightened me once, when one of them revealed that it was clutching onto a wall in the dark, and it lunged out and hit me. But then I ran past, and it was nowhere near quick enough to pursue me.
Silent Hill‘s graphical fidelity adds a lot to the mood and atmosphere of the game, especially when the principle of imagination filling in the blanks picks up. But it’s actually not just imagination carrying those spooky moments, I noticed, even if it does help. It’s the behaviour of the monster that helps, their effectiveness. It might be 1999 AI, but Team Silent knew exactly what they were doing with what little they could effect change with.
The Rompers are scary because they are quick and difficult to fight. The skinless pterodactyl demons are faster than the Rompers, but go down pretty easily if you have any ammunition in any of your guns. I still haven’t fired a rifle shot as far as my memory serves me, but I have taken down quite a few of them with a few well placed shotgun or pistol shots.
The sewers are frustrating simply because they aren’t interesting. They add no narrative of any interest, and feel to me like a fairly frustrating space to navigate. Had I missed the map in this area, I would have probably died of exhaustion. It feels to me an awful lot like padding.
I did quite like the bit where you pick the key out of the water after trodding through a long, linear corridor. The water is stained red with blood, and as you stand back up, Harry is surrounded by those insectoid monsters. They’re easy enough to evade, but more do drop down from the ceiling. Escaping is thus a pretty successfully tense endeavour.
When you reach the ladder out of the sewers, Harry climbs out into a new area of town, the Resort area of Silent Hill. It’s completely dark out here, but finally, a vacation – just what Harry was here for in the first place! Except, this area has I think the most monsters I’ve seen so far in this game. There’s an obscene number of bloody Rompers and pterodactyls here, and, given the large hiatus I’ve had since playing the game last, I have forgotten what exactly it was I’ve come here to do. So my first instinct is to run and meet up with Cybil at the nearest building that looks like I can enter it – the bar.
In the bar I see Dr. Kaufmann again for the first time in a while. He’s been pinned by one of the smaller, child-like demons. Harry shoots the demon off of Kaufmann, and we have a quick, terse chat. He wants the army to come roll through Silent Hill and save him and Harry. Still no sign of Cheryl. Kaufmann is pretty determined to keep moving for some reason, but, in my typical thorough exploration of any and all areas that aren’t sewers, I find that he dropped something in the scuffle. A wallet. It has a key and a receipt in it. On closer inspection, the receipt has a code on it – and the receipt is for a store I saw on my map just before. I steel myself and bolt back outside, avoiding all the monsters as best I can. I do get kicked in the head once or twice by a pterodactyl and then pinned by a Romper, but hey – it’s fine. Still alive.
Inside the store (which is, of course, in a bit of a state), I find a safe, which I manage to open. Inside I find white packets – drugs? I also find a note on the wall talking about a code for delivery to Norman something-or-other – ah, that’s the name of the motel! Once again, I head outside, get pummelled twice more by those damn Rompers, but make it into the motel. Inside, I find an abandoned space that I could genuinely relax in for hours. It’s peppered with a remarkable amount of detail for a PS1 game, but I think that’s part of what makes such games compelling. They are sparse, but lived in – never quite as detailed as reality, but just detailed enough to seem real.
While here, I also find Kaufmann’s apartment, and discover a key for a motorcycle placed beneath the floorboards. I then find the motorcycle and turn that on – but there’s something in the gas tank. A weird bottle… Harry picks it up to inspect it, but Kaufmann somehow finds me in here, storms in, yells some honestly jarring dialogue at me where he rants and raves for several sentences without any response from Harry, and snatches the bottle away from me. He then says I should stop doing “trivial stuff” and that I should just keep moving to find a way out of here.
Odd. At any rate, the time has come for me to move on. To… oh god. Another sewer!
I apologize for the hiatus this series took earlier in the year. It’s been quite a gap. It really was just a case of priorities, and unfortunately this was one of the things I had to neglect. I’m hoping to at least do some more regular posts at the end of this year and the beginning of the next. I’m looking forward to getting properly stuck back into this game, which, despite how much I loathe the sewers, I love as a horror game. A true classic.
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