The view from the bathroom mirror
I recently had the opportunity to play rose-engine’s sublime survival horror SIGNALIS. Well, no, I didn’t really. I watched my friend play it. Then, I bought it myself, so I could get another friend to play it. I have already lined up the next friend to play it after that. My modes of horror consumption are exclusively vicarious. Let’s not mince words here: I am a dyed-in-the-wool pussy.
Enjoying the game this way is not a new approach for me. I’ve done the same for Silent Hill 2 (and select titles from the rest of that storied series) on multiple occasions, shepherding people into an experience I consider absolutely unmissable. I’m the “one of my friends” mentioned in that linked article. ‘Tis I.
But SIGNALIS calls Silent Hill 2 to mind for more reasons than the way I chose to engage with it. You don’t need to hear the creators spelling it out in as many words to see the influences. From the proliferation of holes into which LSTR (‘Elster’) - our determined gynoid protagonist - recklessly dives, given new symbolic meaning by the game’s sincerely heartbreaking plot, to this distinctive shot in a bathroom from the very beginning. Where have we seen this before?
You can hardly spend a moment in the dense atmosphere of SIGNALIS without reminders of Silent Hill 2 bombarding you from every direction. This includes - or is perhaps exemplified by - the game’s soundtrack, echoey piano underscored by wavy, windy synth as labyrinthine as the compound you explore, clattering into industrial life during combat sequences, the metallic clunking and pounding of some unseen infernal machinery overwhelming your senses. I’d like to think Akira Yamaoka would smile knowingly to hear it. ‘I see what you did there. Good job.’
Combat is handled in the classic Resident Evil style: hold to aim, shoot with your feet planted, get distance when you can. The player’s perspective sits at a fixed, orthoganal angle like a security camera passively observing Elster as she picks through the horror room by room. It’s masterful, tense, and deeply nostalgic.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
Retreading old ground is - by definition - nothing new, and even if the proliferation of ‘boomer shooters’ like Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun and DUSK speaks to a certain cultural stagnation in the modern appetite, to see it done half as well as SIGNALIS is no tragedy. But it matters that we keep coming back to Silent Hill 2. That is, after all, precisely what the game is about.
Silent Hill 2 is a game that requires no introduction. It needs no summary. It can be described most simply as a story about a man struggling to handle the immensity of an insurmountable grief. It can be called a benchmark in psychological horror, a raising of the bar from the comparatively shallow horror-by-association of the original Silent Hill. It can be called a timeless classic. All of these things are true, but they don’t really scratch the surface, do they?
Okay, sidenote. I took a swing at the king there (the Stephen King), and I apologise. The first Silent Hill is a classic in its own right, and rightfully so. I’m merely suggesting that it is not as psychologically and thematically dense as its follow-up, and I do hope that’s not a controversial statement. Friends again? Back to it, then.
Silent Hill 2 is a game that is haunted, and haunts. James, our gloomy protagonist - so clearly a shell of whomever he might have been long before grief and heartbreak hollowed him out - is beset metaphorically by the memory of his late wife and the guilt of what he did to her. More literally, he is stalked by misbegotten abominations spawned by the town’s malicious prying at his subconscious mind. Other figures - tragedies playing out in real time around him - loiter around the town, fidgeting with kitchen knives and wretching into toilets. They, like James, are people set on self-destruction, wilfully hurtling full-bodied into the abyss, resigned to whatever lies within it.
It’s really not hard to see why the game has captured so thoroughly the imagination of its fans. It absorbs you. Like the dense fog of the town itself, it smothers you and never lets you go, a pillow pressed to your face with a twisted kind of love.
Let’s Play: Lifelong Obsession
I was… I want to say thirteen, the first time I watched someone play this game on my behalf. I’m on the sunset side of my twenties now. It was a stranger on Youtube, during the first wave of what would eventually come to be called Let’s Plays, fertile soil in which Twitch would plant its seeds before long. I’ve watched other strangers play it, too, years before I brought my friends to it. I scoured Wikis and fan-pages, hungry for more of this game. It is perfect in its finitude, but the mind wants what it wants. I read interpretations of what Masahiro Ito’s exquisite monster designs ‘meant’ - the Mannequins and Bubblehead Nurses manifestations of James’ sexually frustrated libido, the Lying Figures depictions of his feelings of entrapment during the last days of his wife’s illness. Everyone’s got their own idea of what Pyramid Head ‘means’, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The game demands analysis, dissection, consideration, discussion. It sits under your skin like a tick, and no-one can resist scratching an itch forever. So we come back to it. Having exhausted our own private means of engagement, we proselytise. We spread the parasite like ants bulging with cordyceps climbing stems above the nest. ‘You’ve never played Silent Hill 2? Mate. Come round on Thursday, we’ll fix that.’ Silent Hill 2, a game released in September of 2001, is still gaining new fans to this day.
There’s a remake coming up soon, and I can’t say I know how to feel about that. I’ve been burned before. In my restless dreams, I see that fucking Comic Sans sign.
But the remake’s as-yet-unknown quality, and that of the 2012 “remaster” (double air quotes for that shit), are secondary to the simple fact that they exist at all. We’re still in that God forsaken town, after all these years. We get a letter, and we come running. We never really left.
And in SIGNALIS I see it too. I see that yawning hole, and I see that prompt - ‘Jump in?’ - and it’s never a question, because of course we do. Of course we jump. James always jumps. Elster always jumps.
We can’t turn away. We’re as haunted as they are.
‘I’m alone there, now.’
I’ve led this piece with the fact that I can only enjoy these games through someone else’s experience because truth be told, it’s something I deeply want to remedy. I’m intending to buy the remake, and - with firm resolve - embark upon that journey solo for the first time. Because there’s two games, here. There’s the game I’ve shown people: a pseudo-cooperative experience, Dante and Virgil touring the Inferno with critical detachment. Then there’s the other game, the one I only know from the accounts of braver souls than I, of a crushing loneliness, a sojourn into the abyss undertaken with nothing but your own mind for company, and whatever demons you bring in with you.
Like James, I too bear a guilt I’ve buried. I stole that game from the people I brought to Silent Hill 2. My ever-present, voyeuristic spectre cheapened their loneliness. That’s my pillow, my videotape, my Pyramid Head.
Perhaps, alone in that town at last, I’ll find my punishment, or my atonement.