Content Warning for Attempted Suicide, Terminal Illness, Death, and Chronic Illness

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It’s September 2011 and I’m seventeen years old when I try to kill myself. There are two ponds near my parent’s house. It’s like 4 AM. I like to be out this early. Nobody else is awake, and they won’t be for a while. It’s like the whole world belongs to me. I wander around between the neighborhoods, along the roads, and in the fields. In ten years these will be fresh real estate properties but today they’re still farmland. This hour and a half is the only time the anxiety quells. The real world never knows peace. There’s a dread that accompanies every action and every moment; living in that house, going to school, hanging out with my friends (are they my friends? They are but I won’t be able to understand that until I’m healthier). I’ll always have to go back home. I’ll never be able to articulate what’s happening to me. The pressure is too intense. I don’t plan it, but, the pond is right there, and it’s deep enough, and early enough that no one will hear me. Not having a plan is what saves my life. Turns out impromptu self-drownings are difficult to pull off when the water is still and not THAT deep. So, it doesn’t work, and I’m soaked, and grateful to get home and hide the evidence before my parents wake up, but I don’t feel BETTER. I feel despair, still. There’s no way out. I wish I could just climb up the stairwell, out of this. I wish I had the clarity to understand what was wrong with me.

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What do you even say about Silent Hill 2? To say that it’s one of the best video games ever made feels simultaneously obvious and like I’m underselling it, right? Fuckin, uhhhh, Resident Evil 2 is one of the best video games ever made. Ace Attorney 3 is one of the best games ever made. Come on! When we see people talk about old games that they like they’ll so often say stuff like “it holds up really well for its age” or some similar comment that implies that progress is the same as quality. This is, of course, nonsense. I wouldn’t say video games are better as a medium in 2021 than they were in 2001; on the whole and in the mainstream I would say they’re demonstrably worse in almost every way – how they look, how they sound, how they feel. Silent Hill 2 was a AAA game. What do we get now instead? Far Cry 6? The fuckin, THE MEDIUM? We’ve lost everything in pursuit of bad lighting and looking like a mediocre episode of whatever was popular on HBO three years ago. Silent Hill 2 looks great and sounds great and fuck you it plays great too it feels good and even the puzzles are MOSTLY FINE. MOSTLY. Listen I’m saying this is the all time best video game I’m not saying it fuckin ended world hunger.

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It’s October 2012, I’m nineteen and I’m sitting in a business communications class when I get the text confirmation that Sam’s brain tumor is back, again. It’s not the first time, and I know that there’s nothing left to do, he’s going to die. It’s fast, untreated. He’s one of my best friends, and the only person I know from home who went to the same college as me, but we live really far apart on a big urban campus and I haven’t seen him as much as I’d have liked to. Now he’s gonna spend the rest of his time with his family back home. When I see him next it’s at a hometown charity event for his family in December. He’s unrecognizable physically, and he can’t speak. The event is at our old catholic elementary school, in the gym, where in the years since we graduated they’ve painted a giant tiger on the wall. It’s the school mascot. I feel incredibly awkward around him and spend most of the time away with our other friends. I only speak to him briefly, and when I do it’s a stupid joke about the tiger mural. These will be my last words to him. I do know this will be the case, I think. Later that month I’ll be one of his pallbearers. I spend a lot of time angry and ashamed of myself for not being better to him, not knowing how to act or what to say. I’m about to drop out of school for reasons financial and related to my mental health.

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So what DO you say about Silent Hill 2? That it’s a masterpiece? That it’s the most well-conceived and executed video game ever made? That every detail of it dovetails into every other in a legitimately perfect cocktail story, presentation, and play? That the performances, cinematography, soundscape, all of it are untouchably top of their class? That when Mary reads the letter at the end I WEEP because it’s one of the best pieces of acting I’ve ever heard? That if I ever meet Troy Baker it’s ON SIGHT? These things are all true. We all know it. Everybody knows this. It’s Silent Hill 2.

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It’s August 2019, I’m twenty-five and I’ve just managed to graduate college in time to move to a new city with my partner as she enters her third year of medical school. That’s the year they kick you out of the classroom and you start going to the hospitals to do your real hands-on training month to month. I’m job hunting unsuccessfully and we’re living exclusively off her loans, when what seems at first like a pulled lower back muscle becomes a fruitless early morning ER trip (five hours, no results, not seen by a doctor) becomes an inability to get out of bed becomes a forced leave of absence. Without a diagnosis she can’t get disability accommodations. While on a leave of absence we can’t have her loans, and in fact we have to pay them back. We’re getting desperate, thousands of dollars in debt, and I take the first soul sucking job I can find. It takes almost a full year of visits to increasingly specialized physicians but eventually my partner is diagnosed with non radiographic axial spondyloarthritis, an extremely rare condition that culminates in the fusion of the spinal column. We can treat the pain, sort of, but it’s only a matter of time until it’s likely to evolve into a more serious condition, she’ll never have the strength or stamina she had before, and the treatment options are expensive and difficult. Her diagnosis doesn’t even officially exist as a recognized condition that people can have until September 2020.

Suddenly I am a caretaker and everything is different now. Obviously our mood is stressed from the financial dangers, but she’s in pain, terrible pain, constantly for months. She can’t sleep, she can’t eat. There’s nothing I can do. It’s exhausting to live like that. She’s depressed. On good days we try to walk outside but good days are few and far between, and grow fewer over time, and her body makes her pay for the walks. She’s on drugs, a lot of them. Do they help? It’s unclear. They don’t make her feel BETTER. Nobody knows what’s wrong with her. Her school thinks she’s faking, they’re trying to concoct ways to get her kicked out. She wants to die. It breaks my heart. She’s everything to me, all that there is. She has literally saved my life. And I can’t help her. But it’s exhausting for me too. I don’t want to admit this, not even privately, to myself. It is hard to be the person who is leaned on, especially when the person you love can’t give anything back. I’m tired. I’m not angry, and I don’t think I’m resentful. But I’m tired. I feel shame for thinking about it, for acknowledging it. I know it’s silly to feel the shame but it’s there. I do find a job eventually, thankfully, but it’s still a long time before we get a diagnosis, much less an effective treatment. Even after things settle somewhat, it’s a hard year. And there are hard times to come.

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Ever since I first played it as a teen, Silent Hill 2 is a game that has haunted me through life, like a memory. It struck a deep chord with me when I was too young for that to be fair, too young to identify why I could relate to these people and their ghosts. I used to think this was a special relationship that I had with the game, the way you kind of want to think you have these when you’re younger, but the older I get the more I recognize this as part of growing up. Silent Hill 2 doesn’t resonate with me because I’ve encountered situations in life that closely mirror that of the protagonist. I mean, Angela’s story resonates deeply with me despite little overlap in the specifics of our family traumas. Silent Hill 2 touches me – and most of us – so deeply, because it has such a keen understanding of what it feels like to be Going Through It. It is a game that knows what it is to grieve, to despair, to soak in the fog, and also, maybe, to feel a catharsis, if you’re lucky, and you do the work.

I’ve been Angela, parts of her. I’ve been Laura too. I’ve had more James in me than I would prefer. I suspect all of us have these people, these feelings in us, to some degree or another. We collect them as we get older. That’s just part of it. Silent Hill 2 isn’t a happy game, but it’s one that Gets It, and lets us explore those spaces in a safe and cathartic way. It does this about as well as any piece of media I’ve encountered, on top of being so excellent at all the cinematic and video game stuff. But that’s really what makes it what it is. The empathy, and the honesty. I think it’s beautiful.

After all these years, Cave Story has cemented itself as a legend and titan of the indie game scene. This must've set a hell of an example back in '04 as a type of game that AAA was moving away from (that we appreciated was still being made), and as something truly accessible to anyone with a computer, while being consistently quality throughout. A one-man passion project that somehow manages to hold its own in a fair few ways - the music slaps, the gameplay is solid and has cool ideas, the theming of the game is cute with a lovable cast... who knows how many creators this inspired. It being free ensured that so many people were able t- wait shit this isnt that one. yeah fuck there's a + on the end of the title lmao i goofed hard. uhhh lemme fix that rating real qui

[bass riff, shot of apartment]
[inside, Kramer is ruffling through silverware, Jerry enters the apartment]
JERRY: Oh Jesus... Kra-Kramer! Whaddaya think you're doing?!
KRAMER: Oooooh Jerry I've got something big this time and I just- listen... Ok... Using the internet... With. Your. Mind! And-
JERRY(interrupting): You- oh god... Kramer I swear-
KRAMER(interrupting): Wa-wa-wait! It gets better... While. You're. Asleep!
JERRY: ... Kramer what do you think you are? Some kind of, I don't know, Hypnospace Outlaw?
[bass riff, credits]

When the B side of This Heat's sophomore record, "Deceit", begins, the first track starts the exact same as when the A side plays. The listener may, for a brief moment, think that they may have a faulty vinyl & are lulled into believing that the opening song may be repeating itself. That is, until, an entirely new, manic, anxiety inducing song commences to completely tear the rug out from underneath you. During some vignettes of 2:22 AM, a similar instance occurs when suddenly, a stroll around a desolate city that you thought you knew erupts into a nightmare when the buildings begin to ascend to the heavens, shattering whatever dreamy scenario you thought to be experiencing.

Played at 4 AM. I'll see you in my anxiety dreams.

i had some mixed expectations going into this. on one hand it seemed not to my taste; i looked at the flashy geocities/angelfire era it was going for and was worried it would just feel like a kind of nostalgia pandering to me, seeming too over-the-top ironic with its cheesy autoplaying midis and brain-melting scrolls thru choppy 3d gifs. on the other hand i saw a great deal of sincerity and consideration in dropsy, a game jay tholen made before this, so i felt like i needed to look past my weird hangups towards its aesthetics, and a couple years later i felt like i could.

turns out i was way wrong and it easily surpassed the positive expectations i had from his previous game. not only does hypnospace greatly amplify the subtle worldbuilding and christian faith of dropsy, it sets that up with a more critical take on irony poisoning seeping thru the cracks as not representative of the whole, and this allows its own sincerity to shine through even more strongly. truly affectionate depictions of the most innocent cringe are interspersed with people's real flaws and sins put on full display: children's digital growing pains causing them to express themselves violently and angelically in ways we all recognize, old people's sweet prayers and sorrowful mourning are taken with their absolute inability to take in what the net throws at them with any nuance, creatives both humble and full of themselves do their best against the corporate sanitization that threatens their spaces. tholen and co's love for people and how they interact with the virtual world, combined with a frankly staggering attention to detail with those numerous interactions among many characters, is really something to behold. they made a character out of hot dad and gave him pathos.

there's a lot said about this game as replicating 90s internet and yearning for a time of more wild and unrepressed expression, before more entrenched social stigma and algorithms, but what drew me in to hypnospace was the feeling of how little things changed at their core. it understands that pining for "the good old days" can be blinding, and goes to great pains to make clear that it wasn't all that pure in many ways; what's mourned is that its problems were only superficially cleaned up rather than compassionately solved most of the time. the cliquey conflicts and cruel mockery and cynical capitalist machinations in the background in hypnospace just felt like blunter versions of whats still here, well after 2000. yet there's some resemblances of naivete and sincerity and love that still exist in the net too, no matter how small it must feel, and the game wants you to understand your own self and others in the here and now through those moments. try to forgive the faults of all of us as individuals on the web if you find it in you, including yourself, because it's y2k that let us down.