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The Split Sun of Silent Hill 2

Spoilers for the Silent Hill 2 remake

I think everyone has moments where the sun looks especially beautiful. Well maybe not just the sun, don't look directly at that by the way, but the surrounding sky. Maybe the clouds are a shade of pink and orange in the late afternoon, maybe you're spending the day with someone you care about and that make the surrounding world just a bit more lovely. I'm sure you can think of a moment in recent memory. For me it was two moments, one after the other, separated by a table and and a bunch of ones and zeros. Silent Hill 2 does not let you see anything with a clear lens. In the over world you have the signature fog obstructing everything that is further than 5 feet in front of you. The original Silent Hill fell back on this due to the technical limitations back in 1999 but subsequent releases make use of this fog as a intentional stylistic choice. Any time there's any fog outside you bet your ass I'm audibly saying "in my restless dreams I see that town, Silent Hill". It's a piece in what I think is the most oppressive atmosphere I've experienced in a piece of art. Yet later in the game, that fog becomes comforting. You spend a lot of time in and around the fog, you wade through it while walking the streets of Silent Hill and watch it seep in through doorways and windowsills. There's comfort in consistency, which the game breaks that with the Otherworld sections, somehow taking an already oppressive atmosphere and shoving rust and rot down your throat for good measure. The Otherworld sections are dark, wet, and nightmarish in every aspect making it all the more impactful when you go through a doorway and you're suddenly back in Silent Hill, fog and all. You never see the sun in Silent Hill 2. There's never a moment where the sky clears or it gets any brighter than the gray in the air, except for one fleeting moment. After you meet Maria, you travel the town a bit and make your way to the hospital in pursuit of Laura. Once you get there, you're greeted with a small section that subtly points you towards a particular staircase that you need to go up in order to progress. The moments before your ascent aren't particularly special, you pick up some bullets, grab a syringe with throbbing heart eyes, and probably get jump scared by James staring into the camera while you save. The moments between you and that staircase are mesmerizing. Golden light pours in from outside while a subdued, almost lifting melody plays. The hospital is a abandoned, disheveled mess with dust particles floating in plain sight due to the sunlight. Despite all of that, it's a notable and welcome shift from the rest of the game. You know there are nightmarish horrors lurking behind those locked doors, everything outside of this hallway will torment James to no end, it's the only reason they exist, after all. This is a moment of reprieve in an otherwise suffocating experience, and breath deep I did. I also needed a break after that, I'd been playing for a while at that point. I decided I wanted to draw for a bit, my small drawing desk being conveniently next to the desk with my computer. It was late in the afternoon, the sun was low. I could see the one high rise building in the distance through my window. There was a slight haze, that same golden light bounced across my room, I could see just a little bit of dust in the air. In a game filled with moments memorable for their sheer creative terror, the one moment that offers reprieve has stuck with me. As that hospital hallway drifted further and further away as I progressed, I found myself yearning to be back there when the game was at it's most bleak, I found myself yearning to find the emotion of seeing the same sun within two separate realities.

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For the Emperor... I Guess.

When gaming journalists said that Warhammer 40K: Space Marine 2 was a "Xbox 360 ass game", they were right... kinda? For better and certainly worse, this is a game out of time. It plays what I imagine a Gears of War game would play like (I haven't actually played any of them) and it's narrative flows exactly how a third person action game with a mission based structure and emphasis on flashy set pieces would. Yet most of the faults of Space Marine 2 lean heavily on things that can't be hidden behind the crystal clear pillar of "PS3 ass game". Gameplay is really simple, you shoot things, melee sometimes, and have a heavy reliance on using finishing moves when an enemy is low health. This will restore one armor charge, which is huge, especially on higher difficulties. You'll be introduced to new guns and sometimes get a jump pack that lets you dash and jump around but other than those things, the gameplay loop never changes. After mission three, save for a few weapons that don't change much of anything, you've seen what Space Marine 2 has to offer. After mission 4, the game was really dragging and it doesn't help that the narrative in this game is pretty mediocre. It's a Warhammer story, I'm not trying to pull anything out of it, I'm already reading this back in the voice of Jacob Geller, but I really think they could have went harder and some of the decisions they made were really crazy to me. So, the game has a campaign and sometimes another squad will go do something else that will affect the main campaign in major ways. You can play as this other squad but it's basically a side mission as this doesn't move the story forward. There are two particular instances of this that baffled me. The first being where you're tasked with delivering a message. The team that you don't play as is tasked with killing a giant psychic hive mind monstrosity in order to shut down the connection with the main hive fleet. This is prime main quest material and would have really split up the middle chunk of this game from feeling kinda boring before shit goes crazy at the end. I would be happy that there's basically two missions instead of one, but the combat being how it is, I don't want to go back and play that mission when it could have just been a cool set piece. Same with the mission towards the end. While it's really cool that the squad falls through low orbit as battleships explode all around, the other squad gets to fly a 200 year old ship and ram it into a giant heretic obelisk. While I think those are slight missteps, the set pieces that are in the main campaign are absolutely fantastic and those paired with the phenomenal art and set design are the only reason I kept playing. That and I like Warhammer a lot, so I did shout "for the emperor" a few times while doing the same melee combo I'd been doing for 3 hours. I repeat, the art design is so fucking good, the tech they use for meshing sky boxes and giant hordes of enemies is unreal. If they release an art book I will be buying.