WHEREFORE ART THOU, MARIO
It can be difficult to take video games seriously. A lot of us, of course, have convinced ourselves that we do — otherwise the hundreds of hours we’ve invested in them over the years seem all the more pitifully squandered. But a faint halo of shame still clings to the pastime.
Enter Silent Hill 2, one of the greatest video games, great precisely for the way that it’s unlike other games.
There’s no busywork, no sidemissions, no shooting or killing or looting for its own sake. Silent Hill 2 is a video game largely shorn of the traditional video game excess, the nerdy stats- based trimmings that put us less in mind of cinema or literature than of LARPing or pen- andpaper RPGs. And most importantly, the story told by Silent Hill 2 is the main event, served by the gameplay rather than the other way around.
The premise of Silent Hill 2 — a sequel by name and setting only — is refreshingly simple. James Sunderland, a middleaged widower, has received an inexplicable letter from his wife, who succumbed to an illness years before, asking him to return to her in the town of Silent Hill. It soon transpires that Silent Hill is more spiritual purgatory than sea- side haven. Mummified nurses shuffle around a decaying hospital, a grim reminder of James’s wife’s last months.
Animated mannequins lurk in a disused apartment complex, a grotesque caricature of domesticity. Issues are being worked through here; these foes aren’t merely ghoulish for the hell of it: they are manifestations of what turns out to be James’s guilt over his wife’s death, which proves rather complicated.
More refreshing still is the fact that vanquishing these enemies doesn’t give you experience points, upgrades or even standard pickups like health packs and ammo.
There is no benefit to fighting in this game. Brazenly, Silent Hill 2 would prefer you to run away. It’s part of the brilliance of the game that its hero, a man afraid to face up to his personal demons, should be woefully under equipped to handle them in the flesh. There’s a certain dignity in that fear, in the truth of it. We’ve left the realm of the super- nerdy. We’ve come upon something better: art.