‘What do you want your character to look like?’ ‘Where do you want to go next?’ ‘Which ending do you want?’ I cannot only play games that are like this. I need something that is about somebody else, and that tries to transmit the experience of somebody else, and that puts me in a role where I am narratively, psychologically, and perceptually subordinate to somebody else. I appreciate that the pursuit of the creation of agency is of almost religious significance to the conventional role of the game designer, and to the concept of the game. But when the internet, my television, my phone, and a thousand other autonomously curated ‘platforms’ already make me think and feel like a solipsist whether I want to or not, I’ve got to have something, sometimes, that takes me out of my head—that introduces at least a few conciliatory drops of nourishment to the remnant of my empathy centre, and invites me to look into another assembly of images besides my own algorithm-and-buying-history-made reflection. 

This is part of the reason why I adore Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. The emotional and psychosexual innards of James Sunderland and Heather Mason, and the effect to which those innards are exploded outwards, have already been forensically examined, not least of all in this publication over the years (see "Nurse With Wound 1", "Restful Dreams," "There Was A Soul Here," "Nurse With Wound 2"). But while extrapolating on their specific aesthetic or mechanical symbols might nowadays seem played out, more than ever, it feels like it bears reiterating and noting the extent to which Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 are rooted in subjectivity. While this has always been exceptionally rare in videogames, it now seems, somehow, even rarer. Most games that I play, it’s like ‘what do YOU want? What do YOU want? What do YOU want?’, like every facet of their conception and construction is dedicated to gratifying the hypothetical me. And without wanting to get too petulant—because there is also a dreadful, knotted hypocrisy in all of this, whereby, as I complain that there are too many games about ‘me’, I am by paradoxical implication also saying that I want more games that reflect my own tastes, and therefore me—but without wanting to get too petulant, I do find it hard to love games that are centred so completely on ‘I’, because I don’t have a personality that is composed exclusively of id.

By this measure, it’s possible that I would consider Silent Hill: Townfall a failure. Its trio of playable characters are not so much thinly drawn as they are entirely imperceptible; non-fungible. Although they talk, sometimes a lot, they also, somehow, satisfy the specifications of the archetypal silent protagonist. I imagine an HEV suit, rearranged into the shape of two gigantic lips and a tongue. The personalities of these characters exist at a pitch below the range of human ears. Perhaps other kinds of mammals would get more from Townfall’s cutscenes.

But although Townfall does not impress upon me, or guide me into, or create the possibility that I might empathise with the subjective experiences of its own characters, as I’m playing it, I nevertheless feel aware of—and like I am being asked to reflect upon—subjectivity in terms that are more than abstract. The absence of these characters’ personalities creates a hole in Townfall for me to occupy as protagonist. But when I mentally step into that role, rather than feeling that the game is supplicating itself to the sovereign me, the effect is more subtle and two-way. I think of Silent Hill F: Fox Mask leading Hinako through the oneiric realm that is simultaneously an expression of her inner self, but governed and directed by him. Such is the work of the town of Silent Hill in general, most vividly illustrated in Silent Hill 2, when James dreams his own internal world into physical existence and then the town takes command of it as a kind of choreographer, spirit guide, ringmaster, self-help guru and dominatrix all in one. This becomes my experience with Townfall, which feels like a reality constructed from my own memories, reflections and experiences, but somehow—despite being made from me, and for me—not under my control; like it is controlling me towards the accomplishment of an aim of its own.

Reductive maybe, but Townfall makes me think subjectivity in games can be divided into three types. First is that open-plain, ‘the world is yours’, Tutankhamunic boy king kind of subjectivity, where everything that the game is is in service of the facilitation of you, the player’s, wanton acts of self expression. Second is the James Sunderlandian/Heather Masonian ‘through someone else’s eyes’ kind, where the game’s mechanical opportunities and sensory experiences have the aggregated effect of revealing the atomised character—where systems that might typically be designed for intuitiveness of use or universal comprehensibility, and by that virtue inherit a kind of objectivity (the camera system, the combat system, the healing system, the menus), are tuned instead towards a specific, non-entirely-utilitarian effect. Not being able to walk and shoot at the same time in old Resident Evil is an example. The player might want to, or feel that they intuitively should be able to, but rather than try to replicate how this particular body might move in reality, the game artificialises the depiction to a degree that emphasises a subjective state of vulnerability. 

And then the third kind—the kind that I think Townfall belongs to—is where you’re not given a specific character to try and inhabit, but also, even if the game is letting you ‘be you’, it doesn’t conflate that experience (as is the case with type one) with feelings of enjoyment, power, or freedom. As I was playing Townfall, I thought a lot about myself and my own life, and it feels like the game was designed to provoke that to happen. But also, it felt like the thoughts I might have had about myself were being led in a specific direction, like a strange meeting of my own subjective experiences and the game’s guiding, pulling, and reconfiguring of them based on an agenda of its own. You’d perhaps call it therapeutic, not in a massage oil, whalesong, reed diffuser sense of the word, but more literally: a coming to bear of my own esoteric feelings and experiences, and then also a second party who is directing the recounting of those feelings and experiences towards a specific end.

This isn’t ‘oh, it’s set in the '90s in Britain and I grew up in the '90s in Britain, and the horrors of the game made me think about the horrors of my own childhood’. That’s not entirely what I mean. It’s more like this: the iconography and minutiae of Townfall create a very strong, realist evocation of that particular period in Britain, but at the same time, there are also great strokes of abstraction and expressionism. It’s a game that is simultaneously ultra real (even in this era where artistic quality is measured commensurate to the number of individual skin pores that are discernible on the forearm of FemaleNPC4, there are not many games that look as truly ‘real’ as Townfall) and ultra unreal. You enter the house by slicing open a lump of flesh bolted to the door; once inside, you defragment a Compaq ProLinea. As is often the case in Silent Hill, Silent Hill: Townfall creates a mix of the aesthetics of both memory and mania. It’s reality as perceived by—or through—somebody whose relationship with reality has broken down.

Except the reality in this case is a highly plausible facsimile of my own, and the ‘somebody’ who I am supposed to be perceiving it through is so thinly defined that they may as well not be there. And so, in combination, the game starts to feel like a grotesque, a malformation, a Black Painting of my own memories—a heightening, to editorial extent, not of things that have happened to the characters but that I’ve seen myself. ‘Here is a house from mid '90s Britain. Here is a house from mid '90s Britain but manipulated and abstracted.’ And normally at this point in a Silent Hill game there would be a protagonist, and their experiences could contextualise and lend interpretation to that manipulation and abstraction. There would be this unusual kind of psychological safety, where—although what I’m seeing is maybe frightening and terrible—it’s not meant for me: it’s meant for that character.

But there isn’t a character here, and so it’s inevitably left to me to reflect on my experiences of a house in mid '90s Britain and the ways that the memories of it might be manipulated and abstracted by me. I think about the times that I’ve lied to people about my relationship with my mother, or made up stories about things I did with my step brothers, or said how my sister and me used to be close and do this and do that, to disguise the fact that I ultimately have no real attachment in that time or memory of it at all, and that it’s a void. Townfall becomes this kind of Venn diagram where iconography from my childhood overlaps with a sense of something being absent—and being unguided—and then also, finally, a feeling like you have to make stuff up in your own head to fill in the gaps. I look at the BT phoneboxes, the floppy disks, the little pocket TV, all that stuff, and I have nostalgia for that era. But then the other parts of Townfall make me realise this is nostalgia for a time that was horrifying or didn’t exist.

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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Bluesky handle is @edwardsmithwriter.