remember back in my re1 review where i talked about how the charm of how "clunky" the voice acting and story was made me really appreciate it as trying to emulate a playable b-movie? in one hell of a twist, that same strength works both ways for this. silent hill is actively straining to deliver smth beyond the normal mould of horror gaming, and even putting aside how it spun off into a gigantic franchise and because a blueprint for the genre, it's almost hilarious how deceptively simple approaching the game is. that might sound ridiculous to some, but when stripped down to its bare elements, survival horror is any other video games' concentration on surviving taken up to 11, where every element from saving items, health, and time works to make for a suffocating experiences that's as routine as a game of catch with your dad and him preparing you for the big leagues when you were fiddling around with shit like a nintendo switch just yesterday

but silent hill never loses sight of the ball. every single minute of this game is milking as much gameplay as it can to see how far it can go to actively torment me as much as humanly possible; not so much in the battles or even the puzzles, but some of the absolute best level design and application of tank controls yet, limiting itself to keep me in the dark about what is essentially many elements of stock horror stories drawn out to liminal spaces akin to an open-air prison. the amount of mental suffocation that the game uses at any time (that sound of the glass breaking out of nowhere even when there was no one around made me scream 'fuck' out loud) is staggering, and enough to disorient my already piss poor sense of video game direction, even with the maps

it shouldn't be ignored tho that, at the end of the day, this is just as much indulgence in becoming a part of horror as resident evil was, no matter how many critics and gamers call this game the moment survival horror "grew up." like i said, it's mostly toying around with how far an experience like this can go made with the same love that keeps the genre alive, and it obviously doesn't take much to get spooked for the same reason

Reviewed on May 30, 2023


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