Player Experience vs. Character Experience (Some Spoiler-Free Silent Hill f Stuff)

 

 

I’ve been playing Silent Hill f and absolutely loving it, and while I was working my way through NG+ I was having a little bit of a think as to why. Normally I’m quite effusive when describing what I like (see; Slitterhead, where I just write variations of ‘this rules’ for a thousand words) but I thought I’d take a bit of a more measured approach and do a little bit of a dive into one single aspect that I think makes SHF stand out. 

This will not contain any spoilers - please do not provide any otherwise I will take critical damage and die. 

Silent Hill f is full of tricks and schemes to get you to flinch or jump back or otherwise engage you in the stressful dance of the horror game experience, but it never prioritises the player’s experience of the horror over the character’s experience. It’s a phenomenal return to examining the psychology of the player character rather than using game psychology against the player directly - I care about Hinako in a way I never cared about Ethan Residentevil or Jacob Callistoprotocol, even though those other two protagonists leaned heavily upon the cool Dead Space trick of actively demonstrating fragility to shock me into connecting with them.  

Oh no Ethan! A hand injury! Hopefully this will be the very last time something like this happens to you!

I think Silent Hill f shows that we’ve relied a little bit too heavily on a player-focussed horror toolbox, so I’m happy being challenged here to put myself in the position of Hinako and be freaked out by stuff that scares her rather than directly scaring me. 

First of all I enjoy the buffer zone because I’m a huge scaredy cat who will flinch at everything and anything, but I also enjoy being dragged into the mindset of a complicated character and being forced to ask ‘why am I doing this? What about my history as this character makes this make sense? What isn’t making sense and why, what pieces do I need to pick up to make this clearer?’ I enjoy when the solipsistic fantasy of a game is curtailed and I’m forced to actually read into actions and motivations.

 

More than anything I like this kind of horror construct where we have to look at our actions as important because we sometimes take steps that are contrary to our character’s best interests. If we don’t, the game stops - so we have to take these actions and then think about what new wrinkle has been exposed about the story and about the growing internality of the player character. Invisible forces act upon us in games all the time (we often call them ‘levels’ or ‘mechanics’), but Silent Hill f turns these into metaphors to hide things behind, emphasising a world built around Hinako instead of a world to convenience the player. It’s incredible - and by no means unprecedented! - but it feels so extraordinarily fresh that I didn’t know how much I was looking for an experience like this again. 

 

These flowers show up a lot in SHF. They're a sort of used traditionally as a metaphor for fun summer days and cracking open a couple of cold ones with your pals. 

When we started to get a wave of silent protagonists in horror we doubled down on the concept: our actions in-game were our own, but now our emotional response to our actions were our own as well, because our player character wouldn’t emote or otherwise provide a lens for us to interpret events through. We could aim even more things at the player directly and develop more ways to make their out-of-game experience delightfully miserable. Also, as people discovered to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, the silent (or mostly silent) protagonist is a great indicator to the player that their reaction is the more important one, and what is the point of a reaction if it cannot be observed, recorded, streamed, and shared?

It does feel like a natural progression too - horror (like most… art, I guess) wants you to feel something, to become emotionally engaged with the work in front of you. The jump scare is such a reliable tool, and, like in film, the target is squarely set on the audience so why fuck with a sure thing? Why ever stop, why not, hear me out, make a whole game out of jump scares? Why not make ten sequels to it?

Surely we will return back to the silence and back to the blank protagonist who exists for us to maneuver around like a camera. It is clever and effective, it allows access to a large toolbox that takes advantage of the player’s desire to interact with stuff, it amplifies everything good about the hooks that horror can sink into the viewer and grants them terrifying efficacy inside a world built from the ground up to evoke fear. 

But for now I find myself refreshed by Silent Hill F’s approach and how it demands that I engage with a metaphorical landscape that is more meaningful to Hinako than it is to me. In not using some of the easier tools horror can (and should continue to) deploy, it has created a world and a story that intrigues and haunts me without ever really directly addressing me - honestly (and I should say now that this is the end of the blog; we can take this thought for a walk later once I’ve finished more endings) the relationship it builds reminds me more of Fire Walk With Me than Resident Evil 4 and that’s a pretty fuckin crazy comparison for a game to draw. 

Go play it! Or like wait until the price gets less insanely steep - I had a super worthwhile time with it but I can spot a world through the veil where I accidentally incurred an additional cost somewhere in real life that made me enjoy the game less! Is this a review now? 9/10. 

 

A little postscript: In attempting to scare the person behind the controller, video games have developed a frighteningly (ho ho ho) sophisticated bag of tricks, and I wanna quickly shout out RE: VIIIage as having one of the absolute best, instant classic jumpscare examples where you’re solving a puzzle that requires you to look through a window at a code. Phenomenal.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent also gets a little shout out here for another reason - I think it got pretty nasty with having you open doors manually! An innocuous thing in such an era-defining spooky game, but I thought it was a neat way to get my physical action (moving a mouse backwards or forwards) to mimic the movement on the screen, subtly bringing me closer to what is happening when I really, really want to be further away.