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As I write this, I have just entered the door to my apartment. I have been away for a few days; on the returning bus, I began to tense up. It was strange to feel; I haven't had this sensation since I left home. My life there is a scar best left unopened in this context. Suffice it that the only time I felt free was when I was not at home. Where outside might have been uncertain, the return was horror.
I thought I was cured of this. I just moved clean across a continent. I had begun my own life. I no longer had the ghosts to face that I did in what is now my mother's house. Yet there it was. Then it struck me: bills. Obligations. I don't have the rent this month. Reality. Fuck. As long as I'm away, at least I am removed from these problems. I might be hit by a car, or I might get jostled by a street person or yelled at by a light rail employee or frowned at by a cashier at the market, or I might just lose my way -- yet it's a fantasy violence. I grit my teeth, shudder a bit, and move on. None of it matters.
When I come home, it all matters. It's all that matters. Home is reality. Today, I'm safe. No bills. I still have to call someone and grit my teeth and get some money that's not mine moved around, so I don't get kicked out of my home. That's not so bad, though. There are no new surprises. I can relax. I am safe, for now.
This is the kind of horror that The Room depicts. True to the series guidelines, this is a much more specific blend of emotion than is standard for the genre (or indeed for videogames in general). The original Silent Hill broke from the date-movie shocks of Resident Evil by anchoring its nightmare in a real, tangible horror: the loss and uncertain fate of a loved one. Silent Hill 2 takes another step. Again, there's the missing loved one. Again, there's the fog-crusted city. The artifacts of design -- radio, flashlight -- return. On the surface, it looks like an upgraded clone of the original. In some ways, it even looks like a misstep. The world-logic is often contradictory; James can step over things during cutscenes, yet during gameplay a line of orange police tape is enough to barricade him. He has the radio, which, as in Silent Hill, screeches with static when enemies are at hand -- yet the game is scattered with "shock" moments, where, say, a monster lunges at James from beneath a car. In these moments, the radio fails to operate as it should. The only explanation for the failure is that, had the radio worked, the surprise would have been spoiled.
I could write a whole article on the game's blunders. And yet -- yet, yet.
Silent Hill 2 might just be the most adult videogame I've played. If I can point at one, and only one, example of where videogames should be heading in the next decade, this is it. On a mechanical level, the game is stilted as hell. It's assembled from a tin of Lincoln Logs that has been sitting on Konami's shelf for a decade. That would be a problem, if -- like modern-day Nintendo -- the game's designers expected the tools to speak for them: the player will collect the stars because that's what players do. Instead, the tools remain tools. If the game screws in a bolt with a fork, it's just a way to get the bolt in place; to get the player where he needs to be, practically and emotionally. It's used because it's at hand.
Silent Hill 2 is a study of despair. It is an exodus leading the lead, James Sunderland, toward the natural conclusion of a guilt too great for him to handle. Since James can't contain his demons in his conscious mind, his subconscious spills out around him, affecting his sense of reality. Likewise, the player's unconscious decisions eventually decide James's fate. As the game progresses, the holes in James's story grow larger, and darker. The player finds a sinking feeling, deep in his chest. A question forms that no one wants to ask, because then maybe someone will answer it.
There comes a point where it all becomes too much. All the player wants to do is sit still, lest the situation become even more suffocating. There seems no way around the hole, and it's dark down there; filled with demons. Despair, fueled by guilt -- that gnaws at the player as it does James -- yet which, as despair tends to do, becomes its own force.
The Room is tied to Silent Hill 2, both in some details of its plot and in its use of psychology. It is, in a sense, the inverse of the earlier game -- or, maybe, a layer on top of it. On top of the whole series, for that matter. If the earlier games were influenced by David Lynch and Adrian Lyne, this one is more a product of Hitchcock and Charlie Kaufman. In turn, the game trades tones again over its predecessors, feeling -- at the start -- more bizarre than scary. Through the first half, I played more out of fascination for the scenario, and how it was unfolding, than out of any visceral impulse.
And then comes that moment.
See. As an instrument of the plot, the protagonist, Henry, has been trapped in his apartment for the last few days: his door is bolted and chained; his windows are stuck; no matter how hard he yells or pounds on the walls, no one can hear him. Henry's nobody special; just a twentysomething slacker with a bottle of white wine and a carton of chocolate milk in the fridge. If you've ever had a good, low-key roommate, he probably was kind of like Henry. He has lived in room 302 for a few years without event; the game describes his life as comfortable, if a bit quiet.
Just after the game starts, a hole appears in the bathroom wall; big enough to crawl through, dark enough that it could lead anywhere. When Henry first notices the hole, he voices the obvious question: "what... the hell?" He is apprehensive and confused -- yet he's also curious just what's going on. As disturbing as it might be, the hole seems to offer the only obvious way out of his apartment -- so, with a deep breath (and perhaps that bottle of wine), in we go.
Wherever Henry emerges -- a subway station, a forest -- he will come across similar holes, leading back to his apartment. There, in Henry's own living room, the player may save, catch up on current events, ponder the plot, and generally decompress. You could think of Henry's apartment as a glorified save room. That's not inaccurate. The problem is one of perspective.
Note that all scenes within Henry's room take place in the first person. When he enters the world on the other side of the hole, the game switches to the more familiar third-person of the earlier games. Henry runs around, attacking monsters that (for a while) don't seem to particularly notice him, collecting bizarre videogamey artifacts, and exploring a domain not intended for him. When he returns to his apartment, Henry opens his eyes and blinks, to find himself looking up at the ceiling fan above his bed. He gets out of bed, and we are left free to amble around his apartment.
The game becomes mundane; now we have a bunch of waking tasks to attend to. We check the window. No, nothing out there. We check the door. Oh, look. There's a message someone shoved under it. We look through the peephole, to see the landlord staring at the door and scratching his head. We go from room to room, checking things. Performing maintenance. And it all happens in the first person, again.
More than just a save room, Henry's apartment is a safe room. It is his reality; where we retreat to, when we've had enough action; where he keeps all his stuff; where we can let go, relax. Recharge. Let our energy return to us. Check up on what we've missed while we've been away. Listen to the radio. See what Aileen, next door, is up to. Putter around and look at Henry's photographs. We find that he's rather obsessed with Silent Hill. He's been collecting a bunch of things that relate to it.
When we've had enough of reality, and we want to escape again, it's back into the hole. Back to the game. And sure enough, the game we return to is Silent Hill.
...
Henry has this thing about peeping. When he's in his apartment, he peers through his rear windows, into the apartments across the way; as the game goes on, the player comes to know the occupants of each apartment. There's the cat lady, there's the guy who's always doing an air guitar or (apparently) playing Dance Dance Revolution. There's the gun nut.
There's the peephole in Henry's door, through which you can trace the action in the hall. There's even a tiny hole carved in the wall, Norman Bates-style, for Henry to keep track of his neighbor. Later puzzles will capitalize on the player's familiarity with peeping.
There is a certain connection here with the hole that Henry crawls through. At the end is nothing but TV static, representing, it seems, the game-reality of the world on the other side. Yet, it's another peephole. It's not all that different from the hole dug into his living room wall; it's just that it's big enough for Henry to transmit himself through, bodily. Of course, he can enter the videogame world with no problem; it's the real world around him, outside his apartment, that gives him trouble.
That world on the other side of the hole, we can explore without fear. It's a bit unnerving, sure; more than anything, though, we feel curiosity. We have the liberty to be curious, because it's not real. Or if there is some reality, it's not Henry's. This is not his Silent Hill; he's only visiting it. We always have somewhere safe to retreat to. Even the soundtrack (by series composer -- and now producer -- Akira Yamaoka) reflects this change from the earlier games. When you're in the hole, you get the mildly creepy music you'd expect a guy like Henry to listen to; in tone it reminds me, more than anything, of that Songs in the Key of X album; pop music inspired by The X-files. You've got your Portishead and your Massive Attack moments, interspersed with Fragile-era Trent Reznor and some of Angelo Badalamenti's lost movie scores. Far from the atonal bangs and screeches of the original Silent Hill, this is pretty jazzy stuff; the kind of material you'd play in the car when driving down unfamiliar back-roads in the middle of the night.
Then something happens on the other side which hits a little too close to home. And everything changes. The apartment no longer feels cozy. I found myself staying longer and longer on the outside, in the fantasy, than at home. Although there were monsters out there, at least it wasn't real. At times it was downright silly, with mile-long escalators and hands that knock Henry back as if this were Mega Man or something. The sound design is less threatening than in previous games; even at times, subtly inappropriate: when Henry hits one of the gargantuan nurses, it emits a loud, unmistakable belch.[1]
Meanwhile, things aren't all that great at home. And they just get worse. As the game progresses, the danger becomes more and more real -- until the perception is that the outside, the fantasy, is more stable, is safer than home. Even toward the end, when the game is getting difficult, the question presents itself: I know I have to change some items around, and I know I should save. But do I really want to go back? Who knows what I'll be faced with in there. Can't I just stay here? Maybe there will be another hole later. Maybe I can hold out. Can't I just keep playing this game? Can't I just stay asleep? Can't I just keep walking around the block?
The answer, ultimately, is no. There comes a time to turn the game off, and deal with your own problems. And the longer you put it off, the worse it will get.
...
Fuck. I need to rewrite my résumé. Do I have the energy for this? Maybe I'll go play Animal Crossing for a while.
Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
dreams in the third person, always.
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