Storytelling in Silent Hill

My review of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories went up last week at gamecritics.com, and I really regret that I had to pan it. The game had some good ideas buried in it, but the overall experience was just miserable, oscillating wildly between deadly boredom and screaming frustration. I covered most of the gameplay issues I had in the review, but I only lightly touched on the positives and negatives of the game's storytelling. My reason for this is that it's difficult to talk about what's really going on in the story without revealing the game's central twist. I think it's unfair to even slightly spoil a game in a review (I felt I had to change the review's subtitle for just this reason), and like many Silent Hill games the twist at the end is profoundly important to the player's experience. Here on the blog I don't feel so much restraint, however, and I think it's worth discussing what the game gets right and wrong in terms of the characters, locales, and echo messages. That means the following discussion has massive spoilers, so be forewarned.

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Glitches in the Animus

I think it's fair to say that one of the things Assassin's Creed II is about is immersion. The fiction of the game concerns a completely immersive virtual world reconstructed from one character's DNA, which allows him to inhabit the bodies of his ancestors. The game world itself is constructed to resemble, with startling fidelity, famous locations in Italy. The game also adopts a 3rd-person open-world approach that produces at least a competent illusion of player agency in the game world. Genuine player immersion is, at least with present technology, an unreachable goal, and so of course Assassin's Creed II never manages to achieve it. What struck me during the course of play, however, was how many times the game simply gave up on the pursuit, falling back on old game tropes that betray the illusion, despite how easily this could have been avoided.

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Haiti

I can barely imagine a worse place for a devastating earthquake to hit than Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere. Even worse, the main shock originated very close to its largest city, Port-au-Prince, and nearby aftershocks are continuing. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, died in the earthquake itself, and given the lack of infrastructure even more may perish in the near future from disease and starvation. Many of the nation's most significant structures (including the National Palace) have been destroyed, its slums have been flattened, and many of the buildings still standing have suffered irreparable damage and will have to be demolished.

You can help the survivors by donating to the Red Cross, Medecins Sans Frontieres, or Partners in Health. Wyclef Jean's Yele Haiti is also taking donations for earthquake relief. I know as well as anyone how hard things are right now. I know a lot of my readers are unemployed, or living on a limited budget. Small donations add up, though, and much of what will be desperately needed in Haiti in the coming weeks and months comes very cheap. If you can spare $50, that's great, but if you can only spare $5, give that. No matter how bad your lot is right now, I can guarantee you it's better than living in a shattered country without power, food, medicine, or clean water.

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