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Silent Hill is truly a series built primarily around psychology, and the usage of implicit horror -the stuff we don't realize is terrifying until later-. One thing every game in the series has utilized effectively, is exposing the player to controversial and/or disturbing content. The application is evident in the first game, where a young girl (whom is the main focus of the game), Alessa, is: raped by her father, told by her mother that she deserved it, beaten severely, burned until unrecognizable (but still alive), tied up in a straight jacket, kept barely alive in an abandoned hospital for ten years, and eventually sacrificed by her mother to a demon. The use of controversial stimuli can also be seen in many of the creature designs. All of this serves only to make you feel superbly uncomfortable and worried.
Shattered Memories managed to create a very immersive game-play. This was due to the game periodically halting in order to ask you a few psychoanalytical questions, in an attempt to tailor the game-play, cosmetics, and symbolism to fit your own personal nightmare. This was incredibly cool, especially because all of the other games are built around the nightmares of whatever characters happen to be in that game. This was the first time something like this had been tried in a horror game, and it worked!
Possibly the most confusing and difficult to grasp thing about the series is not that the town of Silent Hill is alive in some sense, but rather that the town exists in many layers. There's the Real World, which is just an average american town with people going about their normal lives. The Fog World is where lost souls end up, and where the town can use the most of its power; the people that end up wandering this world are confronted by manifestations of their repressed sexual tensions, their sins, their guilt, and their fears. These manifestations cruel in nature and grotesque to behold, are brought forth by the mystical properties of Silent Hill itself. The last official world is the Other World, in which the town is barren and mostly in waste. This world is sometimes considered to be "Hell" in the SH universe. Besides the main three worlds there are numerous, extra, temporary planes of existence, such as the multiple levels of dreams and awareness' explored in a few of the games. Having all of these worlds to juggle and make sense of can be daunting, and is intended to make you unsure of what exactly is going on, leaving you unprepared.
Coming back to Shattered Memories, every once in a while, the game-play will cut out, and you will be sitting in a room, across from your therapist. During one of these instances, your therapist brings up the subject of the monsters you've been killing, and asks about your enjoyment from killing all of them (This moment is well into the game, far enough that you've killed hundreds of these monsters). In response you simply say "well, I've only killed monsters". Which is true enough, plus there's the fact that they were trying to kill you first. But when your therapist replies to your last statement with "They look like monsters to you...", it comes as a huge shock. What if the things you've been killing aren't monsters, what if they're people and you're just insane (not unlikely in SH), slaughtering hundreds of innocent people. This could really affect your mind, milling this guilt trip over in your head, unsure whether or not to keep killing these "monsters", yet any hesitation not to could spell death.
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