Earn this
I finished silent hill 2 today for the first time. I did not like the game at all, but the environmental art and those 2001 PS2 filters/lighting were beautiful. It seems like from what you guys have said, the other 3 shâs are way better each in their own way.
Also, while itâs probably not a good idea to compare these games, I now realize that I really underrated fatal frame 2 (xbox, first person mode). In that game, you are guided by either your sister running off, or these ghost-energy-powered mirages/forcefields, so it has a very natural (or at least believable) event planning/level design, in terms of the narrative. Almost all of the items you pick up are related to the residents of the house, and those backstories are actually kind of interesting, and relevant to what the main character is going through. Silent hill 2 had all this stupid shit like pulling a key out of a drain with aâŚstrand of stray hair tied around a rusty hook? The main character was actually able to find those things on the ground and decide they were worth picking up? With fatal frame 2 itâs basically the same lock and key game design bullshit, but they were a teeny bit more elegant about it I think. Oh and saying that the town of silent hill changes appearance based on the evil in your heart is such a cop out.
Also, fatal frame 2âs ending really got under my skin at the time, but thinking back on it, there is something actually kind of good-spirited about its fatalism, hard to explain but sort of like at the end of HOUSE (1977). Whereas silent hill 2âs ending is making me really bummed out about illness and death in a mundane way.
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I feel like the strange and inexplicable adventure game items and puzzles in Silent Hill really lean into the dream/nightmare logic â it doesnât really make sense, but maybe it sparks a memory off of the main character or the characters whose story this environment is telling.
Just like Resident Evil leaning into its cheesy haunted house cues with comically overwrought puzzle boxes, these adventure game staples seem to work best when acknowledged as a messed-up part of the world. Trying to play them straight or pretending this is a normal place that works this way is riskier business!
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All of your critiques on the game make it sound good, sorry.
edit: Good call on the Fatal frame though, gotta check those out again.
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If you value this, try fatal frame 2!
This is exactly what made me feel, back when it was new, that Killer7 was an excellent send-up of this formula. Youâre literally on rails, and the puzzles donât even make sense in a dream-logic sort of way, but they feel so familiar to the sort of things that RE/SH got up to that it was immediately apparent what they were doing.
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the headshot contest boss really hammers this home
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Fatal Frame is good juju, though like you said, it seems a lot more âsensibleâ within its world. I donât remember the item and puzzle game distinctly, though â were the items mostly mementos from relating to the spiritsâ tragic ends?
The game itself is held together with sticks and glue which is maybe harder almost 20 years later (we are all dust). The whole world is about punishing the self-sinned. Saying that is stupid because it is one of the stronger reveals in the game and like the whole point.
I also like Fatal Frame 2 as this mininalist spiralling semi-open world but I would not want to directly compare them.
Confused where you heard people saying the others in the series were better. Well off to make an axe thread listing Silent Hill games.
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I jumped into Dandara last night and enjoyed it more than I hoped when I saw it last year and then sat on it.
The movement is just shy of fussy â you move by aiming an analog stick and then jumping between targets. Aiming a stick for absolute direction is something Iâve always found imprecise past a short region of the screen, but they snap to landable targets well and, while visually noisy, it works out.
They use the odd movement for some visual tricks like rotating the screen, which doesnât impact how you think about the level like it would in a game with jumping and gravity, and for making deliberate enemies. If you need to aim and then jump, and canât walk, you need to be sure youâre not landing too close to an enemy. How do you make that decision when you might be jumping past or into slow-moving bullets?
Theyâve been clever enough in the first hour at exploring these tricks that Iâm looking forward to more.
More than that, it lets them build deliberate rooms that have concrete solutions and plans. This is what usually feels most neglected in Metroid-likes; those that take the standard platformer language often play loose and fast with their rooms, letting them sprawl out of a general sense of spaciness, and without clear platformer skill checks. Not here!
Iâm also really happy with the sense of place. They build the world out of modern city textures, rendered in SNES pixels: bricks, paned windows, street lights, telephone wire. And they pull one of my favorite platformer tricks, giving every room a name! With the loose topsy-turvy view, you get spiders nests of traffic lights, signaling nothing, and houses and bars with entrances from four sides. Much stronger sense of place than I normally get from a 2D perspective.
and I really like the music, which is like PSX-era Squaresoft synths, a good backdrop to this type of exploration:
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yeah the world design is excellent throughout
my only complaints are with the last hour or so
I laughed when the first boss was M Bison, whose outfit and job also reads more interesting from a South American perspective (the studio is Brazilian).
I should clarify, Iâm not criticizing the real-world soundness/logistics behind the puzzles/items in silent hill.
Weâre talking about a guy, cool as a cucumber, picking up garbage off the ground and macgyvering a fishing hook to get a key that he can barely see, that he doesnât even know what its for, meeting other human beings without breaking down into tears, without asking them where did they come from, where are they going, what are they doing about the monsters, asking to team upâŚ
Itâs the idea that this world is a reflection of Jamesâ psyche, or at the very least somehow relevant to him as a person. The problem isâŚname one of Jamesâ character traits? Is he even human? We know very little about him besides his wife died and he doesnât really react much or comment on the things around him. Without a strong main character the themes werenât working for me.
When I say fatal frame was more elegant, I mean that they avoided the above problems because the characters were totally plastic dolls, and the game was âaboutâ this alien hellscape that existed before the girls, and would continue existing without them. Your motivation (besides escaping) is to break ghost-energy seals by doing a bunch of really arbitrary things like taking a picture of markings on a wall. Itâs ghost-logic, which feels a lot like nightmare logic to me.
3 had a thread and 4 had a post recently that made them sound good to me. 1, I donât know but I feel like itâs still very well liked.
I agree that I can picture a much better version of Silent Hill 2 just over the hillside; 2 is frustratingly bound by pulpy roots and simplistic characterization despite very complex themes. (In this case, I think the intent is that we can read what we want into James before the reveal, and that should speak to ourselves, but I think it could be done better). It reminds me even more strongly of its inspiration Jacobâs Ladder, which is rather flat and obvious in its characters and plot mechanics while striking and percolating in its imagery and theming.
And with that thought, itâs even stranger that no oneâs been able to push past Silent Hill 2. Part of it may be the difficulty in retaining a romantic melancholy as horror gets deeper and characters more observed; the impulse is to get nastier, but the pacing that waves between a boat ride on the foggy bay and the nightmare sewer and jail, the overlook rest stop and pulsing heartbeat streets, the quiet, dusty hotel lit by morning sunlight through curtains and the crowded rooms inside â itâs so delicate and so important to why it fixes in my head.
I still get romantic feelings towards Deadly Premonition in the same way, although I need to extricate them from the Twin Peaks mood itâs borrowing. Empty small town is such a powerful locale, and letting you live there for a few days so enticing, and melancholy and decay fit so naturally atop these places.
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Ahh yeah this stuff was all good. Why do I hold horror games to impossibly high standards?
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Oh yeah, I got around to playing through Gunstar Heroes after mentioning it within the past week. I thought it was okay, but I think the first combo I stumbled upon being the homing laser deal kinda hurt things as I basically just held the button down and watched all the enemies die for the first half of the game. Even after that there were whole boss fights I basically skipped by just playing keep away.
It would have likely blown my mind if I played it when it first came out.
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Finished MK11âs story mode, which was pretty good! Itâs definitely way above MK9 and X, on par with Injustice 2 as far as direction goes. I got the âOKâ ending, so I guess Iâll drop the difficulty and nab the good one. That final boss fight is a pain in the ass.
The Krypt is pretty fun! Itâs cool to run around through all these connected stages from the games I used to sneak away to play as a kid.
Too bad about the busted economy, though. Guess Iâll hop back in when they dole out the âwhoops weâre sorryâ currency with the patch.
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one of my favorite videogame places
I always think of the walk into town too. the part where you go under a overpass thing is a picture thats got stuck in my head over the years for some reason.
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Silent Hill Musou was the best one
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