The blood cools in your veins, the skin trembles with fear, and the hair stand on end the common phrases plucked straight out of horror novels. Long it took, for it to transcend the books leafs into the gaming world. And for all its worth, Japanese horror still reigns supreme.
The sheer depth of story to delve into human consciousness can only be achieved by writers of considerable mettle. This beginning of a fantastic genre took recognition with Silent Hill. The wispy fog streaking the streets, and the shrill sounds of your radio managed to build up a sort of tension in players, never before experienced in video games.
Blue nightmares trickle your dreams.
Silent Hill introduced so many metaphors, and recurring themes that became the staple of series. The blood-stained gurneys, knocked over wheel chairs, covered corpses, and halls of the famous Silent Hill hospital engulfed in the stillness of death; it was an engaging game, one that you could not hope to forget soon.
Together with such a chilly, riveting atmosphere made to switch between light and darkness the metamorphosis of Alyssa’s living nightmares came the brilliant characters. Each with their own story, their own nightmares.
The series became truly a legend in the eyes of us Horror enthusiasts, who cannot wait to sink their teeth into horrors of psychological value, that cast aside all gore and gruesomeness of Western macabre. A genre that solely lays its focus on exploration of human consciousness.
Wield a flashlight, to keep a bit of your wavering sanity.
With the arrival of Silent Hill 2, the series took a bolder turn, and evolved to make SH2 the most memorable of all SH games. It explored more sensitivities, untouched and unheard of in most games, even today. The pain of forgetfulness and the pain of not being able to forget the past were the two leading themes, and again, the main character went back and forth through night, and light.
It is interesting, how this concept of other-world splashed out of subconscious was created in such detail in every Silent Hill. In each game your character learns to face up to the truths, which in reality, are so hard to face and so easy to forget. Silent Hill tells a story with which anyone can relate, as it is told through ordinary people, people like you and me.
As Silent Hill progressed on, another lovely addition was made to the dark plumes of Japanese Horror; Fatal Frame. Set in gothic, and eternally dark cramped spaces, Fatal Frame takes the exploration of characters to the next level, but does so superficially, and it does it marvelously.
Where SH explores the fears inside, FF delves into the fear and exhibits it freely, and hauntingly. Your surrounds are forever draped in mild light, and unlike the pitch blackness that ensnares you in SH, FF lets you experience it by lulling the intensity but never truly detaching from it.
Mary’s tragic demise, cleverly cloaked under Maria’s sensuousness.
Each game circles around tragedies brought about by human errors, mass killings, and the lingering malevolence that follows. Your characters are bound my human bonds, which are unbreakable and the fuel of your strength.
SH and FF draw up a contrast of relations here, each there in full ardor, but presented in a different zest, which is suitable for both the games in their own right. None is superior, or inferior, they just explore humans differently.
How right it was to just take all this, and bring more into the horror game, but as all good things come to a swift end, so did Japanese Horror, now probably working on its final breaths. Team SH disbanded and so did the talented people behind the FF series. The last was made by Grass Hopper and released for Wii. It sold fairly well, but just like the mishandling of SH it suffered from the tender handling of atmosphere…a thing so crucial for Japanese horror.
In today’s generation of gaming when art and general aesthetics matter little, SH and FF did just that, bring forth the sensibilities of emotions, desires, and human perseverance. It is a shame how quickly these games met their ends or got mishandled when most of the non-sense craving gamers did not let their gaze even linger for a bit their way.
Are gamers to blame for the death of rare art? Is gaming really headed down a path where only a select few genres will crowd the gaming library? It is a most concerning question.
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