My Favourite Video Game Featuring: Sea Sleeper
My Favourite Video Game is a guest feature from bands and artists where we set them a simple task… tell us about your favourite video game. In this feature
Bassist/Vocalist Nick Kessler of post/prog and death metal band Sea Sleeper took up the mantle and you can read all about his choices below.
The year is 2008. I’m 19 years old, a junior in college, and I’m having a small impromptu gathering at my apartment. Everybody is drinking, laughing, having fun, poking fun at each other for recent indiscretions and generally being normal. I, on the other hand, am glued to an ancient television connected to an already outdated gaming console, leaving friends and beer both badly neglected because I am finishing Silent Hill 2 for the first time and even with all of the friendly banter, all of the familiar company, I am scared.
Silent Hill 2 had a lot going for it when it came out in 2001. The sequel to the legendary PS1 game had crisp, impressive graphics for the time, improved by the clever use of obscuring fog and near constant darkness, a brilliant score by Akira Yamaoka and a willingness to indulge in adult themes to an unusual degree for the Playstation 2 era (just Google the term “abstract
daddy”).
Yet the feelings of dread and unease this game instilled then and, I believe, is still capable of inspiring 20 years on transcends any one element. Silent Hill 2 may be the scariest game ever made and it accomplishes this through vulnerability, unrelenting sadness and a calculated grounding of its supernatural elements within the real world of the game.
Silent Hill 2 is not a power fantasy. James Sunderland is not the slippery and resourceful Leon Kennedy. He is not the rugged and brutal Joel Miller. He’s not even the dude with the video camera in Outlast. James moves like an overburdened dark souls melee build. He is a lousy shot and his main weapon attack, whether with a 2×4 or a metal pipe, is essentially a clumsy flail.
Every time he groans a little when slowly bending over to pick up a blood stained trinket we are reminded that this is just a sad man in his mid 30’s trying to find his dead wife and as we control the guy in a cheap jacket who looks like he would throw his back out if he even tried an evasive roll, we as the player know we have no real choice but to slowly deal with the world the game lays out for us. There is no blasting through, clearing the area to then explore safely.
The only options are running (badly) or fighting (badly) and in so, there is no real way to avoid dealing with the awfulness head on and fairly slowly. Feeling powerful is arguably antithetical to feeling afraid and Silent Hill 2 never gives us that relief.
Another deviation from the norm that serves to gleefully torture the player is the replacement of the usual dose of action and excitement in survival horror with sadness and loneliness. The
action movie elements we might find in a resident evil game (imagine James Sunderland driving away from the lakeview hotel in a speedboat) are instead replaced with slow, sad, contemplative moments.
Our first glimpse of the town of Silent Hill is accompanied with sad piano music and a regretful monologue, and although the music turns ominous as James heads towards the town, we simply walk alone for several minutes and digest the grimness of what we just learned. Later, when (spoiler alert but, I mean, the game is 20 years old) pyramid head gruesomely murders Mary’s flirtatious doppleganger in an elevator and a horrified James escapes, the player has no choice but to slowly walk the fairly long route to the building’s exit as a simple piano minor scale repeats.
Instead of moments of triumph and satisfaction like those following an epic boss battle, moments of violence are often followed by moments of slow, solemn contemplation. To move back and forth between fear and sadness instead of fear and relief, or even elation, ratchets up the emotional relentlessness significantly.
Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining is often praised for the fact that the Overlook hotel is structurally impossible, lending to the sense of tension. I have sometimes wondered to what extent the audience is able to perceive this wrongness from an outside perspective. In Silent Hill 1, which is unimpeachable but very different, the world actively changes from “real” silent hill to “evil” silent hill. The player is primed by a repeated pattern and often an audio cue to understand that we are moving from the scary but mostly just abandoned town into its dilapidated, dripping, groaning nightmare version. Silent Hill 3 similarly features “normal” and “evil” versions of its locations and in Silent Hill 4, absolutely everything is a nightmare.
In Silent Hill 2, there is no such distinction and rather than turn grotesque or change, the world is mpossibly and upsettingly inconsistent. Some floors of a building are beyond disrepair. Some areas house gory horrors, bodies, crawling and churning walls and then some areas are dizzyingly pristine. Still other impossibilities emerge.
James finds a chainsaw early on, a chainsaw that is somehow running in a completely abandoned town. The first time we meet Eddie, in a fairly well maintained bowling alley, he is eating an apparently hot and fresh pizza, again, in a completely abandoned town. Rather than signal to the player that the supernatural threats are about to emerge and then recede, the decay of the town is merely sprinkled in, bit by bit, paired with moments of untrustworthy clarity.
When James visits an empty but clean and well-lit strip club, the player, whether consciously or not, has to wonder how real it is. And if so, what about the corpses in the hospital basement, the crawling walls in the prison, the hot-n-ready pizza? Even as James emerges as an unreliable narrator and ultimately responsible for the horrors, whether real or perceived, the player is always left unsure and never quite on solid ground and that uncertainty, that constant shifting that is always unexpected and never plainly spoon-fed, makes the game an experience every horror fan should have.
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