Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
When two people decide to meet in town to rent a nice two-player game for the evening, this may not seem like a likely choice. Especially not when one of them has played it before. Right? I agree completely.
Yet there was a lack of any multiplayer game that we really felt like renting, and in the end we picked this. I was pretty curious after all he'd said about how scary the game and the previous one was. When we picked it he even said in a not-even-close-to-joking tone that I might be scared to bike home in the middle of the night afterwards. So we got it, went back to his place and sat down to play.
I was in a kind of skeptical surely-it-can't-be-that-scary-mood, but I have to admit the game's winning me over. It didn't do any cheap shocks or bad splatter stuff, but it really made its way in under your skin, slowly. It's a very subtle game. It didn't make me scared of my own shadow either, but in the right circumstances it may well have.
So I started out in skeptic mode, and at first what I saw didn't make me believe any more. Things looked pretty bland, lots of grey and brown and really not as rich in polygons or details as I would have expected. Plus there's some of the classical third-person camera and control issues to get into, even though these were pretty minimal and acceptable once you got into it. Walking to the town itself, fighting the first monster and so on didn't feel too special either. I wanted to see and find out more of the story, but in all Henrik seemed much more caught by it than I.
The change of my attitude came very gradually. I guess it really started with the game itself and just kept going on slowly all the time. I can feel my attitude to it hasn't really changed at all, that I'm still just curious to find out where it's all leading. But then it really has got under my skin and been successfull in grabbing me. As we explored more, got into the dark apartment buildings and found the flashlight things started to look and feel a lot more interesting than in the outdoors. And I kept realizing that as we moved I wanted to find more things, but really had no wish to run into any monsters. Not that the encounters with them were that scary or difficult (at least not as far as we got), but you never know what might be hiding behind the next door, right? It works, it really does. Nothing is as effective to get you worked up as your own imagination and some silence ...
Silent Hill 2 is a game of much more sophisticated and psychological creeps than your average Alone in the Dark clone. I'll be happy, and pleasantly creeped out, to come back for more some day :-) ...