face the strange

More of the Silent Hill 2 remake! I'm still working my way through Brookhaven Hospital.

James, you cannot keep jumping down or climbing into or sticking your hand in or fucking every hole you come across! It's such a bad habit!

You also probably shouldn't keep injecting yourself with every syringe you find lying around Silent Hill. I'll be honest: I think these are unlikely to be sterile.

I yelped aloud when Pyramid Head said hello on the roof. I wonder if they changed that particular encounter specifically so it could still startle people who'd played the original game.

Actually, it might be a camera angle thing. In the original Silent Hill 2, hearing the door to the roof open just out of shot and not knowing what's coming is absolutely terrifying, but that's something you can only do with a fixed camera angle. In the remake, with its freely movable camera, you could swing the camera over to the door as soon as you heard it open, which immediately strips away that 'oh, God, I know something's here with me but I can't see what it is' terror.

I hadn't really contemplated it before, but going from the restricted camera of the original to the free camera of the remake is a pretty huge change in a horror game. What you can and can't see makes such a big difference to the atmosphere in horror, and it's a lot harder to limit what the player can see if they have full control of the camera.

I'd be interested to know all the ways the remake team tried to address this issue. It might be the reason some monsters, mannequins in particular, will run away from the player when spotted and hide in a different room. You've seen the monster, you know it's here, but it's removed itself from your sight; all you know is that it's somewhere nearby, waiting to attack. It's a way to create that sense of 'there's something here, but I can't see it' even when the player can quickly scan their immediate surroundings. (Of course, the radio is also good for creating that sense in both the original and the remake.)


The YouTube music algorithm recently served me a song that I might have heard in passing at some point, but had never really listened to before. Listening to the lyrics, I found myself thinking, Wow, this song is absolutely perfect for James and Mary.

Had it been any other song, the logical next step would be to contemplate naming a fic after it. Unfortunately, the song in question was 'My Immortal' by Evanescence.