Yeah, Exhum, that particular puzzle that you mentioned is in the school section.
Because my Internet is currently out at home, I decided to get back to Silent Hill in lieu of my usual Thursday gaming. Rocket League and Payday 2 would have to wait. Instead of heists and goals(who am I kidding, I play RL like a goon), I had Hell to deal with. I booted up the game and left the windows open so I could experience twilight turn into darkness while I played.
There are technically three versions of Silent Hill: day, night, and netherworld. Daytime has the fog and snow but is reasonably well lit. Nighttime also has the snow and fog but is dark, thus limiting your already enclosed viewpoint. The netherworld version...no idea what the outside streets would look like, as so far my only experience with it has been limited to interiors, but it's definitely a night version of the world. It also replaces many of the interiors with chain fencing or bloody, fleshy textures, along with strung up corpses for that extra-homey touch.
The transition from the rowhouse interior to the backyard marks the transition point from daytime Silent Hill to the night version. Harry immediately activates his flashlight as he ends up in the backyard which leads to a cul-de-sac, revealing that using the flashlight in open areas can actually hinder you since it blinds Harry's peripheral vision beyond the light. I immediately turned it off to experiment with the darkness a bit. First things first, you cannot pick up items in the dark because Harry cannot see them. Second, you also cannot look at the map in the dark. However, you can open doors and fight if you so desire, so progressing is still quite possible. Since you can also open the map directly from the status/inventory screen, you can turn on the light there, check the map, then return to the status screen and shut off the flashlight so as not to attract monsters. Because yes, monsters are attracted by sound and light, so running or using the flashlight means you are more likely to have to fight.
All of this means that I shut the flashlight off for my outside experience, save the few times when I went through the menus to check my map or wanted to pick up an item. When I had to fight, I'd walk up point blank and put a round into the side of whatever was directly in front of me, though this generally only happened when I was in the narrow cul-de-sac or trying to gather up items in certain locations. Most of my walk through the dark was spent slowly strolling down the street, about a 1/4 of the way from the west curb. I chose this because dogs tend to stick to the sidewalks and birds tend to favor the center streets and intersections, so I had maneuver room and could avoid cars. The radio static operates as a much better radar than my view in the dark, so whenever I heard a nearby enemy, I'd inch forward until either the sound died away or I could see them to sneak past and keep going on my journey. In this regard Silent Hill operates like a stealth game at times, or at least I play it like one. Anyway, after a long sojourn through the darkness, I quickly put a couple of rounds into the two dogs outside the elementary school and made my way inside.
The school brings back the first enemy of the game, the Grey Child(only in the US. PAL and NTSC-J versions use a different enemy, the Mumbler, over concerns that the Grey Child looks too much like an actual child). The Grey Child wields a knife and tries to slash or stab Harry in the thighs and legs by falling on him. On their own, they're not so bad. Unfortunately they're often encountered in packs, where one will attack Harry by stabbing his legs and holding on to immobilize him while the other moves up to slash at Harry's torso. Still, they're not particularly fast, so I swapped over to the steel pipe for most of the school unless threatened by a group of three or more Grey Children. The pipe shines against lone Grey Children because you can effectively lock them down in their brief stun animations. Even if they manage to get a lucky hit in on you, they then fall prone to the floor, where you can immediately beat them to death in a proper revenge killing. There are also translucent children wandering the halls that set off the radio, but they're harmless.
The Grey Children are supposed to represent the school children that bullied Alessa as a student for standing out. Conformity to the cult is the rule here in town, and any nail who stands up must by necessity be hammered down...through abuse. When I was a kid, I attended a school where I was regularly bullied by kids who were friends with the assistant principal's daughter, who was the same age as me. I was an easy target I suppose: smart but socially awkward, not athletic, with parents heading towards divorce(Dad served Mom the papers on my 12th birthday. Mom waited a day to sign them, and I officially came from a broken home). Those kids never got into trouble for it no matter how I complained or who I complained to. In my frustration and anger I eventually acted out, and I ended up being the one who had to go talk to the school cop. Eventually a shrink was called in from a children's psychiatric hospital to speak once a week with the "problem children." I got put into the room and discovered the "problem children" were all my friends, the socially awkward ones who were preyed upon by the assistant principal's daughter's friends. To her credit, the shrink treated us like adults and figured out by the end of the first day what was going on. She let us use the weekly appointed time to vent and relax from that point on.
As for the school itself, yes, it's modeled off of Kindergarten Cop. The teacher roster is actually the roster for the band Sonic Youth, and the actual name of the school, Midwich Elementary School, was borrowed from the movie
Village of the Damned. There's also a reference for Dean Koontz's
Phantoms, which leads one to surmise that even in Silent Hill, Ben Affleck was the bomb, yo. By the time I made it into the school, it was now fully night outside. Since I was forced to explore in close quarters, I opted to finally turn on the flashlight, pulled out the metal pipe, and completely dropped the stealth approach. In here I instead became the hunter, slowly moving down hallways to smash anything that moved. The school actually railroads you through much of the building via locked or blocked doors to form a set of two loops comprising the two main floors of the building. Once I had pushed through and completed the circuit, I then headed back to the puzzles necessary to solve to advance.
The game kindly gives you some cryptic clues to handle the puzzles, the first of which involves you finding the "Alchemy Lab" to use the "Alchemist water" to destroy a hand and free a gold medallion. The lab in question is the science lab. The water however is not the distilled water found in the lab storage room but concentrated acid. This puzzle is pretty easy as it just requires grabbing the right item and using it in the right place to grab the gold medallion for the central clock tower in the courtyard. The second puzzle is the stumper, one that requires tapping bloody piano keys in a particular order based on a poem about birds flying. I've dreaded this puzzle for years because I have little understanding of how to play piano. Revisiting it now though, I realized the birds corresponded to key colors and that the necessary keys made clicking sounds. After experimenting a little, I accidentally put in the right combination... You know what? I'll take it. With the silver medallion gained, I put it in the clock tower and activated the boiler to open a door.
That door marks the first real transition into the netherworld version of the school. As I said earlier, the netherworld's interior decorator must have been Ed Gein because it uses fences, flesh, blood, and corpses for its motif. Not exactly my personal taste, but whom am I to judge? Even Hell needs to have style. The Grey Children now come in packs and are occasionally flanked by Creepers, giant cockroaches from Hell. Otherwise it's similar to the initial run with the two giant loops and locked or blocked passages railroading the player. There are a few more puzzles involving blocking a drain pipe to acquire a key(Hell's drainage system has surprisingly clear water) as well as a mystic bathroom of teleportation which leads you to free stuff. Oh, and there's a shotgun in the boys' room...next to a strung up dead guy. This guy formed the basis for the Janitor minor plot point and monster in the first Silent Hill movie. Cool.
I rushed through the netherworld school as quickly as I could, nabbed the new shotgun, and headed through a security gate puzzle in the Hell boiler room to take out the first boss, a big lizard whose mouth was put on sideways. Dropping him with the shotty wasn't hard at all, and I was then presented with a hallucinatory vision of a woman in a school girl outfit basically going, "Well shit, he killed my lizard pet" and vanishing. I walked out of the boiler room and discovered things were back to normal, it was now daytime, and I could hear distant church bells ringing. I rushed to the nearest window and demanded a boy buy the biggest turkey in the shop to send to Bob Cratchit's house. Then I remembered I was still in Silent Hill, the boy was a ghost, the turkey was likely cooked but still alive and wriggling on a meat hook, and Tiny Tim had likely been dead for a century. Thus ended my Christmas Carol.
I head to the church next.
