Restless Dreams, Issue 1
...or how I learned to stop caring and fail to sleep.
As I strive to write up at least one article a month, life oftentimes catches up to me. October has been a busy and terrible time. Work has been slamming me, I feel like my mind turned to sludge for a few days and my mental health is in a pit of despair.
It's not all bad, however: I was selected to write a feature on the Silent Hill 2 remake for Superjump Magazine, wow! I've been quite busy with that. I'm also still working on a Big article. I originally wanted to publish it this month, but I've barely done any of the important work or research related to it because life feels like I'm being constantly punctured by rusty spikes. I'm not Arkane prepping to release Redfall: I'm not going to release a half-baked product. But I want to keep my promises, I don't want to leave this website empty for a month.
With the spooky vibes coming in on a cold breeze, I've found myself playing more horror games than usual. Then the idea hit me: a more consistent feature that can happen every Halloween, similar to my yearly roundup. I thought I would fill the empty space with a write up of some of the scary games I played this month. These two essays are short-form and even more disorganized than my usual ramblings, but I hope you at least get something out of it.
This idea came to me in a dream (no it didn't), but I thought it would be a good treat and a consistent way to have something to write about in October. Enjoy the first issue of the ...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring Halloween Special Spooktacular: Restless Dreams. I am so glad you are here, resting your weary eyes on these words.
ACHTUNG! ACHTUNG! The King in Yellow Calls...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring And Find Queerness Amidst Cosmic Horror.
ACHTUNG! Major Spoilers for Signalis below
I can imagine no worse fate than that of Ariane Yeong's: alone on a derelict spacecraft, doomed to slowly die from acute radiation poisoning, her life preserved via cryogenics. In her pain and suffering, she made the horrible decision to sleep. In her dreams, she conjured up a nightmare – a horror that the clones of her android girlfriend have to venture through, all in an attempt to uphold a grim promise.
Ack, I'm getting ahead of myself, again. Signalis is the best contemporary survival horror game. It synthesizes the mechanics of the genre and presents them flawlessly alongside an impenetrable narrative and a brilliantly creepy atmosphere.
You play as Elster, a Replika (biomechanical humanoid androids who serve as workers under an authoritarian regime), in search of a Gestalt (the term for humans in this oppressive universe) on a space mining colony where something very terrible has happened. Other replikas have turned into bloodthirsty monsters, with rusty sores and tumors secreting from their body, while all Gestalts have suddenly vanished.
From a top-down perspective, with glorious PS1-style chunky graphics, you engage in all the typical trappings of the survival horror genre. Resources are scarce, puzzles need to be solved, and there are scares are-a-plenty. Rarely does the game deal in superficial horror tropes like jumpscares, instead allowing the atmosphere and sound design to do the job of heightening tension for the player.
Signalis shakes up combat in interesting ways: when aiming at an enemy, a small reticle decreases in size. The longer you wait and aim, the more damage you do and the less ammo you waste. Combat should still be avoided: Elster isn't very hardy and you will never have enough ammo or healing items to kill all the monsters or survive constant blows. Not to mention all corpses will rise back to (un)life after a while, unless burned by thermite flares. You have to learn how to sneak past enemies or expertly run past them to survive this nightmare.
The main points of contention for its naysayers are the anime aesthetics and the incredibly restrictive inventory. On the first point: if you can't move past anime robot girls on your screen, and therefore want to pass up on the best horror game in recent memory, go for it. If anime is all that stands between you and a great experience, I'll pray for your soul.
On the second point: the limited inventory space has lore and mechanical relevance. Replikas abide by the rule of six – private property is a privilege, they can't carry more than six items. This serves at heightening the tension, leading to riskier decisions, which in turn increases the anxiety and fear the player might feel. When exploring rooms, I would oftentimes keep my inventory light: a fully loaded shotgun and a few healing supplies, so I could carry all important items back to a saferoom.
The real highllight of the story is the subtle queer narrative that slowly unfolds. There's multiple layers of narrative methodologies in play. The story isn't very clearly spelled out, which fuels the inherent mystery at play. Elster is an unreliable narrator. Certain plotpoints can be explained away via dream logic. There's some esoteric, unknowable cosmic horror that is ruining the metaphysical rules of this universe. Time is stuck on a loop – bioresonance is on the fritz. Very gay indeed!
Underneath all this, lies a love story. A previous iteration of Elster fell in love with Ariane Yeong during a space mission. Abandoned by their authoritarian government, the spaceship soon started leaking radiation from the lack of maintenance, and Elster dies, but not before placing Ariane in cryogenics and the ship crash-landing in a snow-covered world. Other Elsters share these memories of a long lost lover.
There's constant references to a promise Elster made to Ariane. I'll give you one least chance to go to the next section and avoid spoiling the gut-wrenching endings(s) for yourself: the story of Signalis is one of those narraives that is better experienced rather than told, as a lot is open to player interpretation. You've been warned.
Elster promised to put Ariane out of her misery. To mercy kill her. Multiple Elster models have tried and failed to reach Ariane. There's one particular moment where you are pushed down an elevator, safely landing amongst a pile of corpses that are...copies of you. I've managed to get all the endings, and none of them are happy. Elster always dies, the time loop always resets. There's no hope for a better future. Either you kill Ariane, or you die next to her after realizing she doesn't remember who you are. In perhaps the saddest ending, Elster looms over the crashed ship...and is unable to open the doors to confront Ariane. She proceeds to wander away, to die in the elements.
Lesbians know: we must keep our promises to our girlfriends. The depressing endings are accentuated by an innocent scene presented halfway through the game. In a snapshot of the past, Elster and Ariane are dancing, warmly hugging each other. Two queer people, in love, unknowing of the horror that lies ahead. Signalis has made me cry, multiple times, and should be cemented in the queer canon.
Sending lesbians to space is cruel and unusual punishment.
Weird Cult Shit...Or How I Learned To Stop Caring –- I Prefer Silent Hill 2.
When I was looking for a game to play for Halloween month, I was tempted to replay Silent Hill 2 for the 100th time. This was before the wheel of names chose me as the writer for the upcoming Superjump feature on the SIlent Hill 2 remake, so I was given a review copy of the game. I ended up doing a full playthrough of the original afterwards to help with my notes. I'll espouse plenty about my love for the original in that article – this is just to state that I've played and loved Silent Hill 2 for most of my life, but didn't know if I actually had a full run in me before my passion was re-awakened by the remake.
I've beaten the original Silent Hill 1 a handful of times, emulated on my PC (sue me), and recently completed a Hard playthrough earlier in the year, so I wasn't motivated enough to pick that up again. Silent Hill 3, on the other hand, I think I've only beaten once, back when I was a teenager.
So, fuck it: Silent Hill 3 time. I'm just going to state this right now, plainly, so you can skip if you disagree: Silent Hill 3 is probably the worst of the original trilogy.
It's a shame, really, because I think its themes – and how they inform the game's particular brand of psychological horror that focuses on girlhood– are the most relatable out of any of the games, especially now that I've been injecting estrogen for 5+ years.
Heather Mason, the protagonist, is a teenage girl, barely 17 years old. She's self conscious, eisoptrophobic and is wary towards masculine figures in her life. And no wonder: the men that revolve around her throughout the plot of the game are either incompetent, creepy or straight up using her for their own ends. Even her dad, Harry Mason (OG protagonist of the first Silent Hill), the only man in her life that she loves and respects, instilled in her a fear of others: he gifts her self-defense kits like knives and tasers, no doubt out of his own worries over the shadows that haunt him and his daughter. A cult is after them, after all.
This fear of the violence of the patriarchy is reinforced constantly. The horror that is Stanley Coleman's obsession with Heather, only ever experienced through increasingly erratic writings in his diary, which you find strewn about Brookhaven Hospital, didn't hit home until I too found myself afraid of stalkers. Every woman you know has probably been harassed, assaulted or followed home by men. I'm n0 exception. This fear of the worst aspects masculinity are represented in the monster design: many are phallic in nature, many try to entangle Heather with their fleshy tendrils or "penetrate" her with their bladed appendages.
Other than an obvious fear of stalking and random acts of sexual violence, the town's nightmares manifest Heather's subtle fear of giving birth. This spreads the conversation on various fronts. Heather is ascending to womanhood, becoming an adult, which must come with its own weight. The prospect of motherhood is hard on a personal level, the toil a mind and body must endure to create a living being are terrifying for the unprepared. On a societal level, it's what expected of girls when they grow up – it's familial norms and expectations reinforced by a male-dominated society. Heather is only useful to the cult as a mother. The way she is only useful to Vincent as an unwitting accomplice, only useful as a frayed representation of Douglas' son...only useful as a symbol of obsession for Stanley.
You can write a whole book about how Silent Hill 3 explores its subject matters. My gripes are less with the themes, but more with its general story.
See: what was fascinating about Silent Hill 2 was that the horror was more psychological and the town appeared as a character in it of itself. It tormented and cruelly toyed with James Sunderland with personalized nightmares. The intentions of the town always seemed unknowable and unexplainable. It was as if the town had a mysterious, obscure objective.
The Order was never the interesting aspect of the series: it was the atmosphere the town cultivated, the sound design (courtesy of the legendary Akira Yamaoka), the symbolic monsters and its Lynchian characters. Silent Hill 3 is a direct sequel to Silent Hill, so the Order had to play a part in the narrative, but I wish the plot wasn't so adjoined to cultish shenanigans, I wish they kept the more personal, psyhological horror approach and did away with the Order entirely, like 2 did. The supernatural elements become explainable in Silent Hill 3: a cult caused this mess, and therefore it's less terrifying – it is knowable and understandable.
The themes, the horror, the abrasive nature of Silent Hill loses potency when you know humans are behind it. It's no longer representative of an esoteric, almost cosmic horror. It's just weird cult shit. Weird cult shit that draws away from the character of the game.
The Dessert Cart
Nothing much for dessert this month: you've all had way too much candy already!
But uhhhh I did create a BlueSky account, maybe follow me on there?
That's it from me, only two more articles left before I close out the year. Have a good one.
