I am going to die.

 
Not soon, as far as I am aware, but it's going to happen. I and everyone I love will someday not exist.

There's this idea that time heals all wounds. That if we just soldier on things will get better. That somehow hard times mean that we are due some happiness.

But if course none of that is guaranteed. All we can be sure of is that nothing is forever. That all things end.

Welcome to the Halloween edition of Chercheeze la Game!

It's already scary! Existeeeeeeeentially terrifying!

So this week I'd like to look at the scariest game I've ever played. Silent Hill 2.

Please be aware, this will contain spoilers for the game. I don't know that I can actually spoil it though...I went into it myself knowing exactly what the story was and it's still one of my favorite games of all time. Still, if you don't want to know anything at all going in, then please stop at the giant spoiler tag when I drop it.

From a very young age I've had a fear of death.

 
Since about age ten I've regularly had panic attacks about the heat death of the universe. Over the years that fear has had some interesting effects on my psyche. It slowly began to replace all other fears. I'd almost argue that it unmasked them. If I know something won't kill me, why bother being afraid of it?

I am, of course, not completely immune to the window dressings of horror. I still can start at a jump scare and gore is certainly unpleasant, but they are reactions of surprise and disgust, not fear. The things that scare me are facts about black holes, deep time, news stories on epidemiology.

This is all too say that, as a result, I am not the target audience for horror games. I find them fairly dull as a rule. Silent Hill 2 is different.

SPOILERS BELOW!

 
So, quick synopsis. Your name is James. You get a letter from your dead wife asking you to meet her at a town called Silent Hill.

Once there you meet a woman who looks just like your dead wife, alive and fairly handsy. She is killed repeatedly by a slow moving man with a huge wedge of red metal over his head and a giant knife.

There are also weird sexual nurse monsters and a couple of other people he meets along the way, mostly to serve as counterpoints to his own journey.

Almost everyone drops subtle hints that they know about your wife, and slowly you begin to remember more and more until finally you realize that your wife died by your hand, partially because she was very sick said she didn't want to suffer, but also partially because you had come to resent her for getting sick.

There are a few different endings, presented here from most to least satisfying: you drown yourself. You leave with one of the other people who is more than likely a delusion. You appear to be trying to resurrect your wife. You find out this was all orchestrated by a dog.

All of this is mainly a delivery system for what the letter your wife sent you actually says.

So when the game reveals what you did and why, it really was a gut punch. It made me think about my own death, or worse, the death of the people I loved. Will I be any more able to deal with it than James was? I still don't know. But I'll find out. We all will.

But, of course, that’s not really what the story is about.

 
Our memories are lies. We fabricate a narrative to try and understand them, to control them, but we can’t really control how we feel.

James killed his wife. A woman he loved, and hated, and who terrified him and disgusted him even as he missed being with her. Instead of embracing who she had been, he shied away from her memory because it was too hard to face how it had ended. The only way for him to move forward was to not only accept how her life ended, but his part in it.

None of us have a mystical town that will take an interest in our personal growth. Perhaps the truest horror we all have to live with is the likelihood of a universe that is not interested in teaching us lessons.

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HAPPY HALLOWEEN!