The New Silent Hill Game (I have opinions)
Also a quick hello to our new subscribers and an upcoming project reminder.
Hello Friends,
First, we’ve had some new subscribers since the last news letter and I wanted to give you guys a proper taste of the kinds of things I talk about here. So welcome, glad to have you!
I wanted to drop by because last night, apropo of nothing, Sony dropped a new Silent Hill game for free and, being a survival horror fan and ranking Silent Hill 2 in my personal top 5 favorite games of all time, I was compelled to play it to completion on the spot.
As a result, I didn’t get much sleep last night (it didn’t give me nightmares, I just had a lot of thoughts and opinions to work through) and this morning I wrote an article for Comic Book Yeti to get my thoughts out there. I won’t retype the entire thing here, instead I’ll just link to it here, but I will give a short anecdote that I wasn’t able to include in the article for additional context.
I generally stayed away from horror media for most of my early life, I was a highly anxious child and got nightmares from Courage the Cowardly Dog and once just from looking at the DVD cover of the movie Hannibal. In short, a wimp. In high school, as I began to realize I wanted to be a writer, I started challenging myself to experience more stories outside my comfort zone. Silent Hill 2 was on my radar from years of watching Zero Punctuation video game reviews, so I decided to start there. It was a 10 year old game that looked like pixelated lego, how scary could it be?
So I bought a copy off eBay since I couldn’t find a physical copy at any video store in the area and dug up my old PS2 to see what the fuss was about. I started the game, took control of James, descended into a forest path covered in fog, and upon hearing the sound of snapping twigs under my feet and distant echos of something out in the woods, I dropped the controller and walked away from the TV.
Never in my life and never since have I played a game with more palatable atmosphere than Silent Hill 2. Eventually I picked the controller back up and, steeling myself, played through a brilliantly horrifying campaign of monsters, resentment, guilt, and subtle reimagining of how a story can even be told. I was hooked and started devouring survival horror games, slasher movies, gothic novels, anything that could make me feel the same sense of deep unease and thrilling achievement of overcoming visceral fear.
In all that time, I’ve only had a few titles even come close, most being disappointing examples of not quite building tension effectively or not having any substantive story to back up the atmosphere they’ve built. Least impressive of all were more recent Silent Hill titles, playing like cheap imitations of a once great series rather than a continuation of it, knocking off the aesthetics without any sense of growth, novelty, or depth. All that to say, I didn’t have high expectations for the upcoming Silent Hill f or the Silent Hill 2 remake, it seemed like Konami had lost its touch.
So I went into Silent Hill: The Short Message with negative expectations. How did it measure up? Read the article to see.
In other news, we’re five days out from the launch of MechaTon Vol. 1, our first collected trade, and I wanted to make sure you guys were signed up for the prelaunch so you could take advantage of the early bird discounts. Most items are 20% off in the first 48 hours as a way of thanking our repeat and early backers, so if you’re curious about our sci-fi comedy about trash robots, kaiju, and loveable idiots doing their best, be sure to sign up for the prelaunch!
That’s all for now, enjoy your Valentine’s Day season or whatever, I don’t know what people do in February.
Wells Thompson