I am a huge proponent of video games as a creative medium, as equally capable of artistic expression as any film or book. There are even things believe video games are more capable of communicating that other mediums cannot, such as empathy, compassion and for the sake of this blog post, fear. Horror games, when done correctly are great at instilling a sense of fear that films and other works of fiction cannot hope to achieve thanks to a sense of agency, the result of the player being a direct participant in the narrative. In my opinion, no video game series has balanced effective fear with a compelling narrative quite like the (original) Silent Hill series, most notably the second game in the series Silent Hill 2. Silent Hill 2 puts the player in the shoes of James Sunderland, a man in search of his wife, who sent him a letter to come to 'their special place' at Silent Hill, the catch being Mary died of a terminal disease three years beforehand. The events of the game take us the player, as James, into the deep recesses of James' troubled psyche, as we navigate a town littered with monsters that reflect the character's guilt and inner turmoil.
Every design decision carries thematic weight, from the town's fog which represents our main character's clouded memory to the theme of decent prominent in the architecture and layout of the town, symbolic of James' descent into personal hell. Unlike most video games in the horror genre (and most games in general) Silent Hill 2 deals with some very adult fears, such as terminal illness, sexual abuse and loneliness. It's not so much the monsters themselves which are frightening but rather their implication in the wider story. The scantily clad faceless nurses that roam the corridors of Brookhaven Hospital aren't just scary because of how they move but how they represent our main character's sexual frustration and longing for the nurses whilst his wife was dying in hospital, we learn things about James which are uncomfortable, contradicting how we initially perceive him as a character.
Towards the end of the game we learn that James smothered his wife in her hospital bed while she was dying because he couldn't see her suffer anymore, fabricating the letter in order to soothe his guilty conscience. The journey through Silent Hill represents James' coming to terms with his actions and can be seen as a sort of metaphorical descent into personal purgatory similar to that of Tim Robbins' character in the film Jacobs Ladder, telling a story of inner torment through external means in a narrative parallel to the other, a film which developers Team Silent have acknowledged as a key influence.
We also meet a character called Angela, who also appears lost in the town of Silent Hill, looking for 'her mama'. Her unusual behaviour hints towards her troubled past, as we encounter her lying on the floor staring directly into the mirror with a knife, contemplating taking her own life. She seems not to trust James, pointing the knife at him when he moves to take it away from her, hinting at her deeper mistrust of men in general. We learn why this is when he encounter her later on, huddled in the corner of a room wallpapered with human flesh with holes scattered all around the walls with metallic foreign cylinders moving in and out of them in a suggestive manner as she is attacked by a fleshy creature in the shape of her father. From this scene we come to a horrific revelation that the reason Angela is in Silent Hill is the guilt she has for killing her sexually abusive father, but the game never outright tells us this, it is something we come to learn ourselves by piecing together various clues in the environment and the way characters interact. The game shows remarkable restraint and subtlety in it's depiction of a character with such devastating inner turmoil, treating the situation with the realism and seriousness it deserves while also not making us judge the character of Angela one way or the other so we can come to our own conclusions.
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