Silent Hill
I played Silent Hill, a survival horror game,
over the last couple of days. It was $9.99 at CompUSA, and I'm partial to that
sort of game.
One plays a teenage girl
who gets somehow sucked into a nightmare mirror world populated by a variety of
disturbing -- and disturbed --
denizens.
It's a Japanese game. Much
like Chinese games, they often have poor (to our tastes) narrative structure.
The behavior of the characters seems implausible. For example, late in the
game, our protagonist's best friend gets wounded, and our heroine says, "I'll
call an ambulance." She heads toward the nearest phone booth. This might seem
like reasonable behavior, but she hasn't seen a sane human in days, and the
entire amusement park she's in is soaked in human blood. An
ambulance?
The game starts off so
disturbing that I thought there was little room for it to grow in intensity. I
was mistaken, there -- they manage to up the creepiness level from high to very
high to crazy high. Still, I think it would have offered more dynamic range if
it had taken more than 5 minutes to see the first nightmarish monster feasting
on flesh.
After you finish the game,
you're presented with the option of playing again, but this time wearing a
Sailor Moon costume.
The Japanese are
weird.
Filed Wed - January 12, 2005, 09:27 PM in
Return to: |