The other day, we were treated to the reveal of three new Silent Hill games. There was the long-anticipated Silent Hill 2 Remake of course, coming to us courtesy of Bloober Team. There was the spin-off Silent Hill: Townfall, which is being made by indie developer No Code, who delivered the excellent puzzly-text-based horror anthology, Stories Untold. Finally, and perhaps most excitingly of all, there’s Silent Hill F, which will take place in 1960s Japan, with the symbolism-laden trailer focusing on a young woman stumbling through a street that’s seemingly being overwhelmed by some kind of malignant floral matter.
All the trailers looked excellent, teasing three very distinct-looking games that in their own ways evoke something that Silent Hill had been missing for years before its hiatus in 2012; the trailers were clever, thoughtful, and free of the idiotic excesses that games like Silent Hill: Homecoming and Silent Hill: Downpour were laden with (the fact that trailers for both had the old ‘people screaming inside a big car tumbling along a road’ trope tells you all you need to know).
The trailers for the new batch of Silent Hill are, like the games of old, smart, subtle, and - crucially - free from the gruff tough guys that made up most of the latter-day Silent Hill protagonists. There was Travis the Trucker from Silent Hill: Origins, Homecoming’s Alex Shepherd - a Special Forces trooper returning from duty (or so you believe for much of the game), as well as Downpour’s escaped convict Murphy Pendleton (who, in case you thought it was a case of Shawshank Redemption-style mistaken identity, stabs someone to death in the prison showers right at the start of the game just to show you what a tough bastard he is). With all respect to Norman Reedus, who was going to be the frontman for Kojima’s cancelled 2015 game Silent Hills, he very much seemed like he would’ve been a high-profile continuation of that trend.
It was a bad time for the series, when it seemed that the various western studios who all these games were outsourced to by Konami thought that what made Silent Hill 2 so special was its upset male protagonist who could bash monsters in with a piece of wood. Led by these boneheaded heroes, latter-day Silent Hill games upped the bashing and the bland depictions of tormented masculinity, while forgetting much of what made the earlier series good.
All these dudes were representative of Silent Hill’s identity crisis before the series went on its (probably much-needed) hiatus. Now, I’ll be the first person to say that not all those latter-day Silent Hills were bad games - they were just a long way off the brilliance of Team Silent’s outings. The biggest problem with the post-Team Silent games (with an honourable exclusion for the underrated Shattered Memories) was that they succumbed to gaming’s trend at the time towards action and combat, even though that was never the series’ forte. And in a classic case of late 2000s thinking, what better protagonists for combat-oriented horror games than truckers, convicts, and assorted hard men?
I still can’t help but chuckle at how ‘fight first, think later’ some of those guys were. There’s no better indication of that than the first supernatural combat encounter you had in Downpour, where in a cutscene Pendleton immediately starts beating the shit out of a man who managed to get the upper hand on one of the early monsters you fight in the game. As he’s doing so, the monster kills the man you were already beating on, then turns on you, and the fact that you just got this dude killed for no reason (even as he says ‘you’ve got it all wrong’) never gets reflected upon by our merciless bad-boy anti-hero. Not much later in the game, you have an iffy choice between consoling a suicidal man or taunting him, but even before you do that it seems that everything you say to him is just wrong, misguided, and rooted in a toxic outlook.
Of course, there is one sad middle-aged man who is returning for the new generation of Silent HIll, and that’s James Sunderland, the Silent Hill 2 protagonist who it has to be said is looking particularly sad-puppy-faced in the trailer for the remake. But Sunderland was different to what came later. He was meek, unheroic, even somewhat feminine in his stature. He didn’t need to have a profession or background that just screamed ‘trauma’ (he was in fact a clerk), because the story that unfolds throughout Silent Hill 2 shows that there’s plenty of trauma that can happen to those living perfectly mundane lives. Sunderland drifted through Silent Hill in a dreamlike state of repressed guilt and denial, rather than scowling at everything he saw, or grabbing his head and screaming because ‘Ahhh, the traumas are too much!’ Unlike those that came later, Sunderland was a subtle character in a world that elegantly teetered between reality and symbolism.
In a way, bringing back Sunderland - the original ‘sad everyman’ of Silent Hill - represents something of a reset for Silent Hill’s troubled relationship with troubled men, because he was the one where the series really got it right. Based on what’s been teased of the next generation of Silent Hill, 10 years and a whole gaming generation’s break could be just what Konami needed to remember that there’s so much more to Silent Hill than troubled angry men.