The two hits of Goldstar dissolved on my tongue like nothing but an hour and a half later someone puts on a Throbbing Gristle record and things begin to take a bad turn. Oscillators bend and scrape against each other as barely understood words drip from the speakers. “Qualified technicians… medical advances… everything is burned off, ears, nose…” I look around and the room is succumbing to a nervous, festering sickness. Ragged sumi-e splashes of red stain the walls. The sticky, humid rot of menstruation fills the air. I lick my lips and taste the salty, metallic tinge of blood. My nose is bleeding again. Then the cramps start…
Do dead gods stink? Imagine if you can “Music From The Death Factory” reincarnated as a video game. Picture that and you begin to step into the unrelentingly grim world of Silent Hill 3.
God is slowly dying in the womb and desperately wants to be born into the world. A debased pagan cult dreams of midwifing this profane birth and has selected Heather Mason to be the sacrificial vessel. Although Heather seems to be a normal teenager, there are hints that her childhood may be darker than she remembers. Playing Silent Hill 3 casts you in the role of Heather as she struggles to uncover the secrets of her past and prevent the apocalyptic “rebirth of Paradise.” On the surface, the narrative of Silent Hill 3 functions as a direct sequel to the events of the first game. As such, it sheds some light on Silent Hill’s sometimes mystifying plot but unfortunately dispenses with much of the emotional resonance of Silent Hill 2.
However, the pleasures of Silent Hill 3 lie deeper than its visually stunning surface. At its heart the game wonders, is it possible to “kill” death? This is a delightfully subversive question to ask in a video game. From the beginning, video games have almost always revolved around conflict. This conflict is rarely expressed in the “win/lose” outcome of traditional board and card games from which video games evolved, but rather specifically in terms of “kill/die.”
Although progress through Silent Hill 3 is accompanied by much whacking, stabbing, and shooting it becomes clear that there is no favorable outcome to all the bloodshed. No “Good Ending” can ever really be achieved. There is a chilling moment in Silent Hill 3 where Vincent says, “Monsters? Is that what they look like to you?” and the futility of killing settles uneasily over the game. The opening lines of the Dhammapada tell us “…if a person speaks or acts with an unwholesome mind, pain pursues him, even as the wheel follows the hoof of the ox that draws the cart.” In these few words we get a brief glimpse of the vast, turning gears of the universe, driven infinitely by the fuel of delusion. Completing Silent Hill 3 brings little sense of accomplishment. A strange feeling of emptiness lingers. You may have finished but you didn’t “win”. Like that other student of half-assed buddhism put it; “No one gets out of here alive”. Oh, well. I guess you can hit the reset button and once more while away the hours guiding Heather to the dark terminus of her fate.
The Tibetan buddhists have an interesting concept called the “Bardo”. The idea is that once a person dies their soul enters the bardo which is a temporary and indeterminate place where they will wander for up to 49 days. During this time the frightened soul is assailed from every direction by ferocious and hungry demons. The accumulated karma of their life rushes out in a chaotic fury and the “I” trembles and evaporates like a drop of dew before a typhoon. Occasionally the onslaught will diminish and the soul will have an opportunity to escape from the ravaging demons. However, these moments of warmth and safety are really traps which draw the soul back down to earth where it is subjected once more to the suffering of existence and the endless cycle of death and rebirth. Fortunately the Bardo does in fact have a “Good Ending” but I’m not a proselytizer so you will have to find your own hint book. I’ll only say that we should keep in mind that Silent Hill 3 is the product of a culture that has been under the influence of Buddhism for 1,465 years. Whether overt or subconsciously, Silent Hill 3 is suffused with the Buddhist science of death.
In playing Silent Hill 3 you will wander through a multilayered Bardo where demonic entities press close and the few people that you encounter may be devils with human masks. It is a lonely and menacing landscape that follows the confusing logic of nightmares. Maze like halls shift and decay. A sepulchral air of terminal illness and charnel house gloom clings to everything. Masahiro Ito’s art direction for Silent Hill 3 is an uneasy pairing of occult symbolism with the Lustmord fantasies of the criminally insane. Dried blood lit by sodium vapor is the dominate color palette. A subtle wash of digital noise gives images the appearance of 16mm atrocity footage.
The soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka is alternately bracing and lush. Yamaoka uses guitar and electronics to create a sound that seems to crossbreed Glenn Branca with Angelo Badalementi. He eschews the usual creaking and groaning of spook houses and instead fills Silent Hill 3 with vast sheets of sound that suggest air raid sirens, background radiation, or the quiet hum of a dialysis machine.
Let’s now talk about video games because they actually mean something. For us to say that video games are “fun” is no longer enough. Isolation, madness, disease and the dulling aneurysms of violence. The loss of everything we love. Some may find it incongruent to see these anxieties portrayed in video games. Let’s get past “fun”. Game design and technology are now so sophisticated that the vocabulary of games is well beyond the simple pleasures of visual-neuro-motor stimulation. Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird is not a “fun” book to read but that doesn’t mean that it’s not worth reading. For Silent Hill 3 to be so completely suffused with a feeling of loss is a small step forward for the state of the art. Designers are finally able to kick free from the limitations of “game play”. The darkest rivers of our own souls may become the new playground.
…suffocating, I run outside and collapse next to an air conditioning unit. The thing clatters and vibrates with a hideous intensity. Sheets of electricity slough off of its heaving sides, shimmering in the darkness. I try to concentrate but my thoughts are blowing away like leaves in the howling wind. I can’t gather them fast enough and I am overcome by the buzzing, rattling machine. The world recedes into a maze of infinite hallways lit by flickering fluorescent lights. I am lost in a building that is filled with a tremendous, roaring silence. Glinting, obsidian machines are running in the basement. Fueled by karma, they turn and grind endlessly. Finally, they burn out on the last embers of the Kali-yuga.
Many years later my father would lay in a hospital bed, dying of cancer. I wonder if he could hear those same engines? I hope he wasn’t afraid. My grief is tainted by my own selfish fear of death. I try not to think of these things as I hit the reset button once more.
Sony Playstation 2
Konami
2003
game review by J.B. Fleming, written on 12/12/03
This is an expanded version of my review of Silent Hill 3 originally published in Cemetery Dance magazine, issue # 47, 2003. The much shorter Cemetery Dance version can be found here.
