#I'm sry for all the international fans that deal with this

[chaotic-cinnamonbun]

holy shit the quality of the twitch stream compared CBS all access. Is it  this blurry in real life? Jeez

[mal-likes-biscuits]

I hope i don't annoy you, but i wanted to ask, what do you think of the Silent Hill series, more importantly the Purgatory and Hell Silent Hill is and the beings inhabiting it? (Sry, i'm on a Horror binge)

Not annoying at all, don’t worry! :) But I’m going to get a bit nerdy here, so buckle up.

I haven’t actually played any of the Silent Hill games myself. I absolutely love reading atmospheric horror, and I am a huge fan of things like the SCP Foundation, but when it comes to horror games themselves, I am a horrible wimp. I watched my husband play Alien: Isolation from behind a pillow. (Amazing game, btw. Highly recommend. I screamed lots.)

That said, I really respect the Silent Hill series for the influence they’ve had on the development of psychological horror games, and I’m fairly familiar with them. They do a great deal with implied threat. I took a course on gothic fiction ages ago, and one of the things we discussed was the split between horror fiction and terror fiction, and how the latter relies on the fear the reader experiences before the monster is revealed, or when it is revealed but with only glimpses. You see that at play in Silent Hill’s gameplay (fog, so much fog), as well as in the creature designs.

The creatures are fascinating, because they’re really unsettling in how alien and yet how familiar they are. Blurred faces, mangled forms: this is the stuff of nightmares, but also of an unsettled psyche, and of the nightmares that dog all of us at night. It’s the shape we can’t quite see in a darkened mirror. I personally prefer these types of creatures compared to the more classic demons we see in games like Diablo, which read a little more horror-trope and less terror-trope.

When I see horror-horror games, it reminds me of SF where aliens are depicted as grotesque, and because of that, they’re frightening. And that totally works. Games like Silent Hill take the horrific and make it personal – make it internal. It’s not something external you have to fear. It’s a facet hidden inside you, given form and description. I think that’s honestly more frightening.