I think I enjoyed Silent Hill 2 (PS5) as much as I enjoy any good book there is. I felt there was such thought in the details of the game, that I found myself making meaning in places where the developers may not have placed any. The way I put it all together is I’d say pretty similar to how other people do; it’s based on the knowledge that James is guilty of having killed Mary. It’s a lot in the enemy design for sure, and a lot of other meaning is spread out onto the town and it’s bowels, reflecting on who James might really be; assuming of course there is such a thing as meaning in this game, which I do.
A lot of what the games imagery communicates on the surface is really dirty, sexual, and works perfectly against a subtle Christian backdrop. Ya’ll remember that poem on the fish in the garden? The one that goes:
Large one of the west
tempted by the lure’s appeal
failed to resist it
Yea, that made me think of Eve eating that beautiful but forbidden fruit. The greater theological point being that if you give babies little colorful plastic toys, they’ll eat it and die. But that isn’t necessarily my main go to example for why I think the game has a Christian backdrop, I just thought it was a cool intertextual read on the universality of babies putting death in their mouths.
Anyways, I wanna talk about how bad this town makes James look. The walls breaking away onto rusty cages and so many mannequin fights in apartment rooms, every time I fought a pair of those dirty legs in an apartment room got me thinking some awful real world stuff! And the prevalence of beds throughout really got me in strange ways. One maybe minor bed detail I saw was a bed with messed up bed sheets, and then immediately after, another pair of messed up bed sheets in a moldy blue room with bloody red paint all over everything, man, somehow I put it together, there was some cheating happening here for sure. There is also Abstract Daddy, but I’d like to try and talk about something hopefully no one else has talked about yet.
One of those things is the office desk that is the center piece of this one room, as if to suggest James’ occupation, or worse, bureaucracy. It’s an unsettling detail because a video game like this, like any good book, gets me thinking about real people and what might really be eating at them. It’s a very silent detail, this office desk, and I think that’s why it does such a good job of drawing out my inner thoughts on work life and bureaucracy. In other words, it’s a point of deep connection with James, even if I don’t want to, because I think whatever I think about that desk and what it means about James, there will probably be nothing in the game to prove me wrong unless I say something like that James loves bureaucracy.
Anyways it’s getting late and this ain’t my full time job exactly. So yea, this game’s real cool for how it externalizes James’ guilt onto everything for us to interpret. I would say it reminds me of how like when people are heartbroken and they can’t stop thinking and seeing that fly away birdie in everything around them.
-Danny