Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Silent Hill 2

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  7 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 162019
 

With as much as I like the Silent Hill series, it might surprise you to know that this month was the first time I ever played Silent Hill 2.

I got into the series by watching Let’s Plays, so I was familiar with the game and its story, but I hadn’t actually played it myself.

This year, however, I picked up a used copy of Silent Hill 2 (and 3!) and sat down to play it as one of my spooky October games.

Silent Hill 2 is a fantastic game and one of the best survival horror games out there. I know everyone says that, and I still personally favor Silent Hill 4, but Silent Hill 2 really is great. It’s mechanically sound, and its structure and game design are still fantastic.

When I think of the Silent Hill gameplay formula of exploring, solving puzzles, and unlocking doors while following clues or trying to reach your actual destination, Silent Hill 2’s structure perfectly demonstrates what I have in mind.

That might sound a little weird, but that’s really one of the things I love about this genre.

The atmosphere is great, too. Silent Hill 2 isn’t the sort of horror game that’s filled with jump scares or will have you hiding in dread, but it builds up a wonderfully unsettling atmosphere. The nurses in particular stood out to me. I had never realized just how freaky the Silent Hill 2 nurses are until I had to stand there, waiting to strike while they lurched closer and closer.

A lot of modern survival horror games choose to make you a helpless protagonist instead, but games like Silent Hill are proof that you can have the ability to fight back but still never quite feel safe.

And can we talk about the radio? The radio is a great gameplay feature, because it lets you know when there are monsters nearby, but that also increases the tension. Whenever I heard that radio crackle, I knew I couldn’t let down my guard.

Story-wise, Silent Hill 2 isn’t disturbing so much as sad. It’s really a sad story, not only for James, but for the other characters as well. Even though I knew how everything goes, I still loved watching each scene and even thought of some new things about the story’s foreshadowing that hadn’t occurred to me before.

Click for Silent Hill 2 spoilers
I had always wondered why Silent Hill 2 references Walter Sullivan not once but three times. They can’t have planned his role in Silent Hill 4 that far back, right? As of Silent Hill 2, he’s just a random backstory character, yet he gets undue attention.

Then last night, as I was finishing it up, it occurred to me: it’s foreshadowing the truth about James.

Walter is a murderer. He’s seen Pyramid Head. He has a grave in the graveyard.

What if the recurring references to Walter are meant to point toward the inevitable conclusion, that James, who has also seen Pyramid Head and has a grave in the graveyard, is also a murderer?

Regardless, I like it, not only because of the connections to Silent Hill 4, but also because the quiz show part of the game is so bizarre and surreal.

In short, Silent Hill 2 is a fantastic, atmospheric survival horror game that still holds up well today, and if you haven’t had a chance to play it, I really recommend you do so.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: FAITH Chapter II

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  2 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 142019
 

A week ago, we talked about the indie horror game FAITH, and now it’s time to discuss its sequel.

FAITH: Chapter II is not free but can be bought for a minimum of $1.00, and it improves on its predecessor in many ways.

You still walk around and lift your cross to exorcise items and/or demons, but it didn’t have any point where I felt like I was wandering aimlessly in search of random objects to exorcise. It’s a more focused experience, more like the second half of the first game.

Set after the events of the first game, although I’m not entirely sure which ending(s) it considers canon, FAITH: Chapter II has you once again investigating demonic activity. Instead of dealing with a single house and the woods around it, it features more locations and events – such as notes left behind by paranormal investigators in a seemingly-haunted church.

I was more interested in the story this time around, and I started trying to piece together events to try to figure out where the story is going next.

It also was much creepier. The creepiness of the first game didn’t really hit me until later on, but the sequel has some great horror moments that are executed in a fantastic way.

Click for FAITH: Chapter II spoilers
The one that stands out the most to me is when you’re reading a note, just like any other note in the game, and it gradually shifts from being a normal newspaper article to addressing the main character directly.

Breaking the game’s normal format like that took me by surprise, and it was a pretty creepy moment when I realized what was happening – especially since I didn’t know what to expect after that.

There are multiple endings again, but this time it’s not quite as straightforward. The two main endings are easy enough to get, but there’s also a third secret ending that makes you work for it a bit more.

And while there’s still some degree of ambiguity, I feel like FAITH: Chapter II comes down a bit more strongly on the “yes, there is definitely something supernatural going on” side of things.

The only thing I dislike about the game is that you have to fight enemies, but you die in a single hit. When a single mistake in a battle means you have to start the battle over (and not all of them auto-save right before the battle), it starts to feel tedious after a while.

Anyway, there’s a third FAITH game currently in development, and since FAITH: Chapter II left me interested in the story, I’m looking forward to seeing what happens in the third entry and how it improves upon this one.

Celebrating All Things Spooky: FAITH

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  8 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 072019
 

A friend recently recommended that I check out the FAITH series of horror games, so when Ocober arrived, I went to itch.io and picked up FAITH.

(It’s available for free, but paying at least $1.00 like I did gets you the Deluxe version that comes with some bonuses.)

FAITH has simple, retro-style pixel graphics and pretty simple gameplay.

Set in the 1980s, you play a priest who participated in an exorcism that went badly a year earlier and now returns to the house in search of answers and closure.

There are two controls: you can walk, and you can raise your cross to exorcise things. The start of the game didn’t impress me too much. You’re walking through the woods leading to the house, and you can exorcise objects in the environment to get notes that flesh out the story a bit.

Once you get to the house, you’re still collecting notes, but you also begin to have more direct confrontations with the demon plaguing it, which adds more tension.

It took me a little over an hour to finish. There are multiple endings, but it comes down to a fairly straightforward choice at the end. Some of the endings imply different things about what happened during the game, adding to the ambiguity already present because of the premise.

Anyway, I walked away from the game thinking it was a bit creepy but nothing special, but the ambiguous story details ended up lingering in the back of my mind longer than I expected, keeping me up as I tried to sleep. It left me interested enough to try the sequel, so we might be discussing that this October as well!

In the meantime, if you’re interested in a short, minimalist horror game, FAITH is available on itch.io.

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