by Ack Tue Jun 28, 2016 10:46 am
Ha, double post. Cry about it.
I only had about five minutes to play Silent Hill last night, so I started up the game and rushed through the opening "dream sequence" to appear in the diner. I saved immediately and then grabbed the kitchen knife for the first encounter, letting the first enemy kill me to finish my run for the night. The knife always did suck now that I recall.
The first time I played this game was in February 1999, when I was about 14 years old. At that time my experiences with survival horror video games were still fairly limited, and I had only just begun branching out beyond the likes of the Resident Evil series where I had gotten my start. The experience was one of both dread and wonderment as I explored the average American ideal small town turned into nightmarish wonderland. This was my suburban America, only now crawling with the worst that my mind could conceive, and it was amazing to me just how at home I felt with the experience. I didn't get very far, getting stuck in the school due to a puzzle based around a piano(I'm terrible with music), but the experience of playing what was dubbed at the time "the scariest game ever made" had a profound impact. I openly sought horror games regularly after this.
Going back now, even through just the brief introduction, brought back a wave of nostalgia just as I felt the tentacled pangs of dread roiling around in my stomach over a quick and gory jaunt in the dark. It's like coming home almost. The American suburban experience is a somewhat sterile idyll that so often serves as a veneer for harsh truths of the American experience. Pulling back that mask to find the worms wriggling underneath is cathartic, even if it's only done through the preconceived fantasy of a video game. It reminds me of the times in my life where I found the cracks in that idyll fantasy, but it also tells me that it's ok, that the reality could never be as bad as the nightmare that I play, even though the predesigned nightmare will never be as bad as the things I occasionally suspect may lurk around any given corner.