i can think of no other series where the source of horror is derived more exclusively from what is implied rather than what is actively shown or obscured. From the inscrutability of another's intentions, paired with our own readiness to read danger into their strange gesticulations and stilted cadence. The presence of almost pitifully freakish "monsters" writhing beyond playable boundaries in what could just as easily be orgasm as agony. The distressing gurgles, expulsions, and phallic exaggerations of beings driven by unadulterated libidinal energy. Silent Hill's insight: Hell is not just other people; it is caused by other people. It comes easier to see, then, for the miracle that it is, how consistently the journey through hell leads to the foundation of better things. To the possibilities of life, love, truth, and even beauty. Every Silent Hill game thus has aligned you with someone deeply personal to yourself worth fighting for: a missing daughter, a dead wife, an avenged father. Silent Hill 4 is a game about saving total strangers. The titular room, traveled between by you alone via umbilical-like tubeways (room=womb), beginning as your greatest healer and sole sanctuary, contrary the otherworld, turned worst oppressor (not even mentioning Sullivan's mother complex) is as mechanistically intuitive the series's Freudian metaphors come. That Townshend is the least impressionable of all previous protagonists is no mistake because he is a symbol of the monad, which proves false not because it is wrong but because it is impossible. Because even our isolation becomes haunted by others. Because every problem is interpersonal. Every experience interexperiential. And so even the girl next door becomes a reason to live.

badly wish I had the wherewithal to power my way through the early/mid-game slump becasue past the rigorous difficulty scaling is a genuinely fascinating world full of character and curiosity when you aren't interacting with it through one-sided combat. Surely there are more interesting ways of crafting an oppressive game atmosphere without feeling like a clockwork ball kick (which this game achieves, however fleetingly) than increasing enemy rat health by fivefold, or getting instantly swiss-cheesed by a chance enclave encounter. Can't with it right now, but I'll probably pick it back up in the future.

good propaganda: Acknowledges and even embraces our innate violence. Ethics are evident as the side with superior morale and zeal emerges victorious. It is "othering" to the extent we commit daily upon our fellow man, e.g., Top Gun

bad propaganda: Lampshades our violence as tough but necessary evils at worst and, at best, misunderstood benevolence. Ethics are suspended in the realm of subjective value judgments—the historiographer's luxury—which can wait. Meanwhile the Highway of Death happens, e.g., Call of Duty

I live in a low income housing environment that goes by the government name of "Section 8." Me and a group of my allies control certain areas of this section in order to run our illegitimate business. We possess unregistered firearms, stolen vehicles, mind-altering inhibitors and only use cash for financial purchases. If anyone would like to settle unfinished altercations, I will be more than happy to release my address. I would like to warn you; I am a very dangerous person and I regularly disobey the law.

Probably my favorite era of games almost purely because of how they looked—Textures just a little too sheened over to convince you they aren't game objects. Faces a little too polygonal to convince you they aren't plastered mesh, but not enough that they enter the uncanny valley. Enemies a little too near-sighted or proficiently accurate to convince you they aren't functioningly oscillating A.I. And lighting just a little too sharp to convince you of unadorned naturalism—this is where everything should occupy in my opinion. Not necessarily between realism and artifice or functionality and jank but between dream and reality. Onwards is a sunk cost. This game is good.