The Aberrant Gamer: 'Sympathy for the Devil'
[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media. NOTE: This week's column analyzes a game's plot from beginning to end; be advised it contains spoilers for those who've never played it.]
After last week’s look at symbolism in Silent Hill 2, a lot of feedback asked AG to look similarly at other Silent Hill games, and the most popular request was AG’s take on Silent Hill 4. It’s my pleasure to oblige— please keep the requests coming!
Silent Hill 4: The Room is generally considered the least popular of the series among fans. Let’s consider why this should (and shouldn’t) be the case—and, of course, we’ll visit all the deliciously twisted elements of aberrant psychology that make the Silent Hill series so compelling.
The town of Silent Hill is almost a character in and of itself in each game in the series. It advances to enshroud each protagonist—always an individual on the point of emotional crisis—in a sort of Biblical purgatory, a transient, flexible reality that calls them to account for past sins. And yet, throughout the course of the series it becomes evident that the town is more than a mirror for others; it’s got its own native history, the dark tale of a morbid cult whose disciples abused children, performed occult rituals, and disregarded the fabric of reality. We learn a little more about the over-arching story of the mysterious town in each game, and perhaps no greater quantity of history is revealed in any previous game than in Silent Hill 4.
That can only be a good thing, right?
The use of location as its own living, breathing entity is one of the series’ biggest charms, to be sure. But Silent Hill 4 introduces a new living location—the titular room, Apartment 302, belonging to one Henry Townshend, chained from the inside and from which he cannot escape, even through the windows. Though apartments feature prominently in the previous Silent Hill games, the game’s primary setting is instead the town of South Ashfield. Henry has, however, visited Silent Hill before, as is demonstrated by some rather artistic photos he’s taken and hung on his wall.
One identifying factor of Silent Hill is that it doesn’t seem that one can ever merely visit that place. Those who stumble into it by accident are often compelled back—as experienced by Harry, James, and Heather from the previous three games—when it’s time to account for the past or to play their role in the disrupted reality created by Silent Hill’s cult. The town also demonstrates that its reach extends beyond its own bounds; the summons of Limbo reached James via Mary’s ghostly letter, while in Heather’s experience the depersonalization and disruption of Silent Hill came initially to her own stomping grounds, as if it had followed her from her first experiences there.
This makes the sight of the Silent Hill photos, and the revelation at the opening of Silent Hill 4 that Henry Townshend has visited the fatal site especially chilling. In fact, the presence of the images in the protagonist’s home (by proxy, the player’s “home”) feels like an invasion of ghosts, a rather delicious portent of future danger.
The exploration of that room is the player’s first act in the life of Henry Townshend; armed only with the knowledge that it’s his room and he can’t get out, the peaceable environment feels strangely surreal. We search the room for clues to Henry’s identity—what is his dark secret, what’s his hidden sin? But we find precious few.
One weakness in Silent Hill 4 is that Henry isn’t really the story’s protagonist; he acts as the vehicle for another sinner’s account, that of the murderer Walter Sullivan. And the “protagonist” of the story is not the infamous town of Silent Hill, but Henry’s own Room 302, once the childhood home of Sullivan and now, in his demented mind, the avatar of his estranged mother. As the unfortunate inhabitant of Room 302, Henry is almost an innocent bystander, a voiceless observer to the horror that unfolds.
This is not in and of itself such a bad device, although the purgatory-allegory feel of the previous games make it reasonable for us to expect we’ll get to trace the mysteries of another new protagonist’s madness, and somewhat disappointing for us not to. In fact, the use of the room—one’s own home, and initially one’s only safe refuge as the inexplicable horror begins steadily encroaching—is a stroke of brilliance. It’s always frightening to see Silent Hill transform, to trace the parallels between something that was tolerable by light and horrific when the dread sets in; Silent Hill 3 accomplishes this particularly well, as there are several stages of transition therein and some are deliciously severe. But to see the same gradual toxicity beginning to overwhelm our own home, to see that the horrors on the other side of the quietly moaning bathroom hole that Henry uses to travel between the worlds can follow him inside.
The disembodied ghouls that pull themselves through the walls of Henry’s bedroom, or the grim and fetid relics that hide and threaten in the corners of the living room make the sense of invasion particularly acute. Silent Hill features some theme of rather disruptive pure violation in each game—the robbery of Harry Mason’s daughter from him, the abuse of Alessa, the rape themes of Silent Hill 2, the impregnation of an unaware Heather, for example, and this stealing of your safe place by the fingers of Hell is one of the most arresting experiences in survival horror.
Similarly, in the previous Silent Hill games, the protagonist is also a violator—James’ prior bad acts, or Heather’s rage and vengefulness, for example. Here, Silent Hill 4 stays delightfully on-point. Trapped in the Room, Henry’s only connection to the world outside are the glimpses he can get of others’ business through his back windows, or in a rather pleasing turn of voyeurism, of his pretty neighbor Eileen’s bedroom through a hole in his wall.
Henry always seems vaguely disoriented, dazed. He’s locked in his room for days before the proper story begins, and treats it as a minor, if perplexing inconvenience. When he begins being haunted by the gruesome visions of murders that we later learn are part of Walter’s planned “21 Sacraments” ritual aimed at resurrecting his mother through the Room, it’s rather easy to believe that it’s Henry obliviously committing these acts—shy, unassuming, and trapped in unreality by day, a vicious killer by night.
It’s a disappointment to learn that, uncharacteristic for the game’s usual format, Henry’s a largely innocent party—as if we as players are intended to invest in a guy who essentially moved into the wrong apartment at the wrong time. The potential was there, and the shift of focus away from Silent Hill’s stable core—making the player an accuser rather than an accused, an executioner instead of the condemned—just doesn’t work.
It should be noticed that in its pure horror elements, though, Silent Hill 4 excels, perhaps in areas where the other Silent Hill games sometimes felt irrelevant or disjointed. The cursed ghosts of Walter’s victims who dangle like corpses in the air, bearing the scars of their execution, are enormously frightening, as is the fact that they can’t really be defeated—on top of that, one must get quite near them to immobilize them. The locations are vividly gory, as is the subtle and chronic unraveling of Eileen into a mad juvenile, whimpering into the dark as the numbers that spell her end are scrawled into the flesh of her back. Of particular note is the way that the game’s puzzles were always quite directly connected to its story and action, something that wasn’t always the case in earlier games. While the palette of symbolism in previous Silent Hill games was usually tied, even if abstractly, to the protagonist’s hidden journey (like James being asked to select the innocent from a group of criminals sentenced to hang), the fact that Silent Hill 4’s puzzle imagery always directly correlates to the situation adds a certain nerve-wracking immediacy—even if it comes at the expense of the suspended-reality surrealism that characterizes the previous games more faithfully.
And the puzzles and symbols of Silent Hill 4 ring the knell of Walter’s truths, not Henry’s—if Silent Hill’s relegation to weakest in the series had to be decided by one element, that would have to be it.
Is the thing we enjoy most about the Silent Hill games, then, the chance to be sinners? Is it the accounting for crimes that inspires loyalty to this series, or is it the committing of them? Or is it our sympathy for the devil, our empathy for the traumatized and damned?
[Leigh Alexander is the editor of Worlds in Motion and writes for Destructoid, Paste, Gamasutra and her blog, Sexy Videogameland. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]
Comments
Not to go too off topic or sycophantic, but have you thought of publishing a book of your collected essays? I know that print media is, dare I say it, passe in post modern America, but I for one would love to see a gaming book exploring the boundaries and symbolism presented in games.
Now as for SH 4, what upsets most people about the game is the fact it started not as a SH title and thus feels like something different with a SH coat. That and how repetitive it got towards the end really puts some people off. That being said, your article hit the nail on the head with what Silent Hill, the town and the game, is all about. I've always seen the SH series as being about damnation and how, sometimes, things get fucked up and stay that way. I'd lying if I didn't say there wasn't a morbid part of my personality that is absolutely fascinated and repulsed by that theme.
Damn, you've made me want to go revisit that game again. Hopefully the emulation on the 360 works better for SH 4 than it did with Knights of the Old Republic. I stand by what I said; there's got to be plenty of material you could collect for a book. I'd be first in line to buy it.
Posted by: Dave | July 26, 2007 10:33 AM
i am a huge, huge silent hill fan.
i've read tons of essays, developed theories of my own, played all the games many many times over.
except the room.
never finished the room.
hated it.
it was a nice try, but it ultimatly sucked all the fun out of the franchise.
those damned flying zombies.
and now SH5 is being outsourced....what has become of my beolved franchise?
Posted by: fish | July 26, 2007 10:48 AM
Great post. Totally interesting read. Not sure that I agree with your characters innocence. I had the feeling that, as henry, I was responsible for the victims death due to my own ineptitude and apathy.
As you state henry is sort of dazed...I found myself solving puzzles and watching people (or hearing people as in thecase of maria) die and thinking "wait, is that supposed to happen am I getting the bad ending?"
I always felt like, "get your shit together...one step behind."
And I hated the damn invincible ghosts...part of the lurid thrill of older SH's was that you had to work to kill everything...really beat everything to death mercilously. Which made the ambiguity of you actions all the more chilling. You could not be excused...it wasn't as easy as pulling a trigger (for the most part although the games do have some gun play) you were covered with blood spatter.
The deathless ghosts keep you from making the questionable decision to kill because they can not be killed. No moral delima.
Posted by: t. ryan arnold | July 26, 2007 12:27 PM
This was the first Silent Hill I played. It made me confused when I read negative responses to it. Now I understand what was missing for people. It felt like something terrifying I was being put through rather than something terrifying I was responsible for. I do remember fearing initially that maybe Henry was Sullivan, or that he was replaying Sullivan's life.
It did accomplished so much though. If this hadn't been a Silent Hill game it would have been more acclaimed.
The starting sequence in the room before going through the hole was brilliant and very subtle. The appearance of the hole terrified me. I wanted to close the laundry door and hide in a corner. The voyeurism through the opposite wall was fascinating. It could be a great premise for a vast variety of games.
It seems a bit like they came up with the Room first, and found it such a great concept they built the game over it. It starts out almost like a detective story, think Raymond Chandler. Philip Marlowe slowly uncovers the world of a killer, the pervading sense of threat creeps up all around him and he's painfully aware of it. Except obviously for Henry he doesn't get pretty broads to sweet talk him into it, or whisky to dull the wacks to the head.
In the context of the others it is suprising that they didn't make it more of a phycological (for Henry) survival horror. Especially since it seems like Silent Hill is really expected to be about surviving the horror of ones own mind, or not.
Posted by: nectarine | July 26, 2007 1:40 PM
"It seems a bit like they came up with the Room first, and found it such a great concept they built the game over it."
From what Dave says above, and what I've read elsewhere, SH4 originally wasn't a Silent Hill game. As such, perhaps it did start around the concept of the Room, started to build a game around it, and then were told to turn it into a Silent Hill game.
Posted by: Baines | July 26, 2007 5:17 PM
I never understood why this game wasn't given the attention it deserved. True it had faults but for the most part it was actually more gripping than previous Silent Hill games. The fact that it did not start it's life as part of the franchise waters the effect somewhat to people who know.
Looking at it in pure terms of psychological horror though it stands as the best of the bunch. It matters not if the main character is innocent or guilty, just in that we absorb the story. It still tells a gripping,strange tale which you can not but help be pulled through.
Every enemy can be dispatched, even the everlasting ghosts, though their method of dissolution is not simply to be "killed".
It makes you think, it unnerves you and it treats the subject matter with the respect it deserves.
Posted by: Tallim | July 26, 2007 9:48 PM
"Looking at it in pure terms of psychological horror though it stands as the best of the bunch."
I have to agree with that, Tallim. As I said, it was the most immediate and the most scary Silent Hill game in my opinion, and a lot of the elements you mention might have been overlooked by Silent Hill fans who were expecting a pure return-to-form for the series previous.
I've heard the same thing that others here mention-- that it was never meant to be a Silent Hill game. Though, I think if it weren't, we would have shouted "but it's ripping off Silent Hill!" at certain points. I always advise people who've never played a Silent Hill game before to play the fourth one first, so that I can find out what they'd think of it without the ghost of the other three haunting it.
Posted by: Leigh | July 27, 2007 5:07 AM
Leigh;
Great article, as was the SH2 piece. The problem with SH4 is that, rightly or wrongly, it has nothing to do with Silent Hill (the town or the canon). What eventually became SH4 started out as a pysch horror title called "The Room". The dev team had the game largely completed (i.e. story, plot and art were finalized and coding had commenced) when Konami management ordered them to turn it into an SH title. Apparently, management thought that Konami didn't need to add another horror title to their portfolio and figured they could kill two birds with one stone, by leveraging the work already done on this pre-existing horror title while simultaneously fulfilling their need to churn out another SH installment. This explains, of course, why the game is not actually set IN the town of Silent Hill - the locations were basically already complete when they got the order to switch!! The whole plot structure of being locked in a room for the entirety of the game had already been settled upon and all of the levels had already been laid out. This also explains why the references to the town of Silent Hill feel so "tacked on", almost as an afterthought to the plot, because they largely are. When you play and evaluate the game knowing these facts, it becomes very easy to see what "The Room" WAS and what got changed to make it a "SH game".
Of course, the irony of all of this is that, by ordering the change, Konami management ruined the chance for the game to be evaluated on its own merits - instead, it gets critiqued as part of the SH canon. And to add insult to injury, "The Room" would actually be a pretty decent little horror game if it hadn't been saddled with the SH name. It has some really neat and innovative little elements in its core design that I have not yet seen imitated in other games. But because it the stuck the SH moniker on it, it comes across as being merely a deeply flawed and poorly plotted SH title.
Posted by: wearedoomed | August 1, 2007 8:22 AM
Silent Hill 4 is one of my favorite games of the last generation. I hold it as at least equal to part 2, though it's great for largely different reasons. It stands above parts 1 and 2 as being actually well designed as a game, and the combat is considerably more thrilling and entertaining than in the more traditional games of the series. But what I mostly admire about it is its storytelling. While Silent Hill 2 was strong in this regard as well, it was mostly because the story told was interesting and had a great hook. Silent Hill 4's story is somewhat more pedestrian -- it's basically a murder mystery -- and there's no real surprising twist. But the way it's told using gameplay elements -- through exploration, and the way the game's environments subtly and sometimes dramatically change as time goes on -- is masterful in a way that reminds me of Hitchcock. Silent Hill 4 is a slow burn, the true impact of which can't be appreciate until you've completed the entire game.
If you're really interested, I wrote a lengthy analysis of the narrative workings of this game in the first issue of the Gamer's Quarter.
Posted by: Andrew Toups | August 5, 2007 11:15 AM
Silent Hill 4 is my favorite of the series. It's perfect. I think it suffers from that inevitable sequelitis; for some reason old fans don't seem to like it if it has a tagline after the title.
I loved playing the true protagonist (that would be Walter Sullivan) as it were by proxy through Henry Townsend. Seems to me that one can see more of Walter's personality from an exterior viewpoint. I felt so much empathy for him when he tried to give Harry the doll on the stairs, in his conversations, and, most of all, at the end when he died; uttering that one last, feeble, gaspy cry for his mother before ceasing to be. He was definitely the one for which the story was told.
Another thing i liked about The Room was the onion-skin like layering of realities and unrealities. The other iterations of the series seem to have two different worlds--a foggy, slightly twisted off-reality and a totally inverted, rusted and perverted otherworld. The games take you back and forth between the two worlds; back and forth, back and forth. In The Room, however, i always had the feeling that i was falling deeper and deeper through inner reality after blacker inner reality, never taking a step back out of the delusion. Harry would collapse and find himself back in his room, but the room would be.. different. Not that familiar place. A new layer.
Kind of like a dream in which you dream of waking up, but you are in fact still asleep; you wake up again, and again, and again but you never actually reach the real world. This, i think, makes the most oppressive and broodingly frightening environment possible. Silent Hill 4 was brilliant.
Leigh -- "I always advise people who've never played a Silent Hill game before to play the fourth one first, so that I can find out what they'd think of it without the ghost of the other three haunting it."
That's what i did; played the series ass-backwards. Silent Hill 2, of course, is my second favorite. Number 3 kinda received a 'mmmmeh' from me.
Posted by: systmh | May 22, 2008 11:03 AM