Strolling back into Silent Hill has me feeling as if the town is a microcosmic distillation of this year’s everyday.

Yesterday’s post was one of a meandering sort, not to say it didn’t turn out okay, more so just a self-aware aside I felt like sharing. I keep oscillating back and forth between wanting to write about my playthrough of the Silent Hill 2 Remake (SH2R), and moving on to greener pastures. I’m still playing SH2R, mind you, but the articles I was writing detailing the event certainly didn’t seem to be striking a chord with general audiences, based on my reckoning. Coming off of “Silksong September”, and the awesome breadth of content that followed suit; a consistent quality across the board with a smorgasbord of great article ideas involving a popular new release was always going to be a losing battle. I admit as much reflecting on that process…though knowing something is going to hurt doesn’t necessarily make it sting less, the shock value is just drained from the event, making the snap back rebound process easier to cope with.

To add further irony to all of this, the 1 year anniversary of the Silent Hill 2 Remake was yesterday, which was the only day I didn’t put any time into the title so far this month. Such fantastically ideal timing, (obviously), and you think if I had any sense in the matter, I would have likely focused my run through of the game to better coincide with the celebratory recognition of the event, possibly being the moment I punctuated the playthrough itself with a proper wrap up of sorts. That would likely be the traditionalist way to go about it, a type of existence I’ve always struggled to conform to.

Adding further irony to this missed opportunity, I sort of set myself up yesterday with a heavily suggested focus on chewing the fat about Resident Evil 4 on some level, which would definitely be a smart maneuver to follow up on, as it is a fan favorite throughout most of the gaming realm. This notion is aside from but not disconnected to the idea that I’ve basically been wanting to write about RE4 proper since I ended up doing my Resident Evil 3 Remake run-through this time last year as a last minute shift of priorities. This may seem like fluffy backstory that I don’t always lean into, but I occasionally do get feedback from random folk about what they would like to see me write more about, and their insistence is usually within the realm of either my process or more about me personally, so here is my actionable response incarnate to those notes.

To connect my current thought with yesterday’s post, the connective tissue certainly being in reference to taking myself to task, in ratifying my theory about the Je ne sais quoi of survival horror I posited, in stress testing my idea in regards to one of the key magical ingredients that helps create the flavor profile of the entire genre. I of course speak to the idea of “the thing that is not there”, I.E.- the thing absent, which may lead you to beg the obvious question:, “But how can one provide evidence for something that doesn’t exist?” And a fair point I would say you’ve successfully deduced in that moment.

Of course, when phrased in such a queer manner (albeit it a fun one), such a thing is impossible. In a slight reach for the truth, one can show an absence of things when using a presence of surrounding other things…in that way, one could use breaks in measures in a song to show where no notes exist in-between the ones that do, in that way, such an “evidence of the absence of something” technically does work in a weird, reverse engineering sort of manner, which I think ties into one of my scruples with Resident Evil 4, and in reference to my theory about survival horror with the the theory involving absence. To condense all of that, and then truncate the line of thought into a bite sized format, we can basically say “Look at all of the ways Resident Evil 4 isn’t scary, to see which ways that previous Resident Evils were in fact scary”, and I think you could start to grasp or identify some truth inherent in the observation.

Before continuing, I am going to take this moment to just reiterate the simple fact that I love Resident Evil 4, I’ve replayed it a million times, and have regularly gone to bat for the game in defending the viewpoint it was an absolute game changer in how it affected the industry. With that air cleared, and out of the way, I feel more comfortable saying that in no way, shape, or form does any of the games successes mentioned help to solidify the title as a good survival horror game. You can look at the title and identify elements of the genre existing within it, but to say the game is anything less than what is essentially a predominately driven action romp would be a genuine delusion or purposeful obfuscation of the truth.

There are a lot of reasons for why this is, but I was just struck with a notion that it honestly might be a safety concern as to why this is. As in- Resident Evil 4 goes out of its way to make you feel so empowered, there is never a concern as to how one could ever not be safe in the process, an obvious paradox in the realm of survival horror. Since you’re always essentially at an extraordinary advantage, the moment to moment is not really about survival, it’s about being a public menace in a Spanish village. Leon S. Kennedy represents a one man army, and just like other action video game heroes of Leon’s pedigree that would follow, ala Nathan Drake, he is armed to the teeth to take on antagonistic forces en-masse, which by days end, nets him a kill count well over a thousand. I think in the same antithetical way a platformer without jumping would fail its own conceptualization as a member of the genre by not having jumping involved, you can’t really have a survival horror game without horrifying survival being the driving force of the title.

Which does go to show you that linguistic norms do go a long way in framing an experience, cause if Capcom decided to call RE4 in the run up to its launch as a “third person shooter” or even an action adventure game, which it is more of either of those than straight up survival horror as a matter of fact, they still would have been shooting themselves in their own feet, cause the gaming masses would have raged at the core identity of the series being perceived as one that was abandoned for demographics chasing, or how the essence of what the series represented was being altered due to changing standards…which is essentially what ended up happening with the game. The shift in focus ended up working of course, and laying the seminal groundwork for the seismic shift in how survival horror would (ironically) be defined, but a shift non the less.

With all of that said (though more may yet be said about it), this is what leads me to ultimately land on the notion that Resident Evil 4 failed its own genre…the ultimate irony being that, in exceptionally misunderstanding the assignment, and as a byproduct of guilt by association with the rest of the series standard up until that point, the failure to its genre ended up knocking down the walls of limitation of what was seen as standardized elements of survival-horror, and ended up reinventing the entire thing almost overnight…for better or worse.

There’s plenty more expositional grandstanding to be had on this topic, and lots of worthy inquisition involving the premise to continue to explore, but I’ve learned it’s best to leave things right at the fever pitch of when the going is getting good. Perhaps we’ll pick it up again tomorrow.

-Pashford