"Like fucking a burning dolphin"

Via Making Light, we have a foully erudite, fantastically observed explanation of why people still love Silent Hill 2, including why the story needed to be told via a game rather than a book, film, or zoetrope. (Wait until he mentions imperialism. Make sure your drink is well away from your keyboard.)

God, I have such a serious urge to go kick the shit out of some vomiting ghost babies, right now. Which is sad, because I’m woefully bad at playing these games — I love everything about them except how hard I suck at them. I even like the parts that Ben Croshaw hates, because the story told from game to game is a total tease that never fully explains the cyclical nature of the town’s sudden impositions on consensual reality. Unlike another famous survival horror franchise, Resident Evil, there’s no overarching goal to be met regarding the origin and ultimate destruction of the town’s threat. The series is about escaping with your life intact, if possible. That’s it. That’s the larger horror. You go to Silent Hill with a goal, you find out that your goal is a fool’s errand and you were an utter moron to even consider achieving it, and you leave with psychic wounds so big and so fresh they make your daddy issues look like a stubbed toe. It’s complete nihilism from start to finish.

It’s great.

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