Usually whe🔯n you go back to a game after a long time away, it's frustrating. Oh, the run button isn't the left stick, it's the X button for some reason, and I have to keep tapping it continually or I’ll start walking. Oh no, square is attack and I just killed my horse.ꦑ Oh, dearie me, A isn't jump, it deletes your save, why would they do that?!
Okay, the last one’s just for dramatic effect, but returning to a game after a hiatus can feel like starting from scratch. I remember 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horizon Zero Dawn, which had a pretty complicated control scheme, being 💜particularly hard to get back into after a stint focusing on other games. But, really, any game can be a bit of a challenge if the time away has been long enough.
Silent Hill 2 Is Best When The Conไtro♌ls Are Worst
Enemy surprise attacksﷺ help make Silent Hill 2 scary.
So, this week I went back to Silent Hill 2 — which I ha⛦dn’t pl🦂ayed since mid-December— expecting to struggle. But I actually found that the time off had made the game better, not worse.
Horror Benefits From Time Away
When you play a horror game consistently, you get used to its little tricks. You start to become numb to the sound effects it uses to put you on edge, stop seeing enemies that aren't there in the shadows. Horror games create a mood through a web of barely perceptible choices and the more aware you are of those choices, the less scary they tend to be. Like comedy, understanding what makes horror work can be a bit like dissecting a frog🦩. You learn how it works, but it dies on the table.
But when you take a break from a horror game, the distance makes t꧋hose details unfamiliar once again. To continue the comparison with comedy, both mediums are sustained by surprise. In comedy, a joke subverts our expectations and we laugh. Horror, on the macro and micro levels, is also built on subversion. We expect children to be innocent, dolls to be harmless, and houses to be a refuge, and when they’re the opposite, it creates fear. Jump scares, too, are built on sudden surprise.
The Element Of Surprise In Silent Hill 2
The more familiar something becomes, though, th🃏e less capacity it has to surprise. It’s the reason a comedy is less𓂃 funny if you watch it again soon after. You know the jokes, so they can’t surprise you.
In returning to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill 2, I’m getting surprised all over again. The weird headless monsters that hide in shadowy corners. The warped and warbly radio static that plays when you get near to an enemy. The footstep-like sounds that make you sweep the camera behind you only to find nothing at all. A🍒ll of these horrors had been blunted by prolonged exposure when I last played Silent Hill 2 on, per my save file, December 12. But then I went to my parents’ house for the second half of the month, didn’t play the game at all, and forgot about so many of its frightening details. Now, returning, the game feels as🌜 scary as it did when I first started it.
In a way, Silent Hill 2 — and horror remakes in general — are drafting off the same phenomenon. The original Silent Hill 2 launched in 2001, so Bloober Team’s remake has the element of surprise on its side. As the game’s original audience a♐ged, new players who had never experienced the original took thei🔥r place. For them, time has turned a familiar game into a brand new experience. And for those older gamers who were there then and played the remake now? 23 years is plenty of time to forget some details. Hell, even a month away is long enough to make Silent Hill 2 feel new all over again.
2024’s Best Ga🤪mes Blended The Past🔥 And Present Of Survival Horror
Silent Hill 2 and Crow Co♉untry look t🍬o the past in very different ways.
