Wait, I need to tell you that you're an asshole!
Look. If you're going to write for Silent Hill, can you PLEASE not treat us like we're fucking morons? We don't need a binary choice system.
I mean honestly. Back on the PSX, the game flat-out put you on the track toward the worst ending possible. Period. If you went from start to finish, you got the worst ending; and that makes a lot of sense. You did nothing to affect the plot. You charged head-first toward beating the game without taking a moment to try to understand what had happened to the town. If you took a moment to read the book in the Hospital, you realize the red liquid on the ground may be useful later. It fell upon you to collect it and use it. You weren't handed a context choice, you hand wasn't held to make a plot-critical choice. You either collected and used the item at the right moment, or you didn't.
Even though this game gave you the item, YOU still had to remember to use it.
Same goes for the "Motorcycle Puzzle", which leads to Kauffman taking a critical item from you to use later in the game. The good ending requires you to put effort into it, and the best ending requires you to explore and solve the puzzles of the town. Your direct actions affect the ending. Did you make an effort, an impact to the characters within the story? No? Then here's your Bad ending. But hell, even the Bad ending is pretty awesome, implying the entire game was nothing more than a dying man's last deranged thoughts; perhaps a plot he himself was going to write and publish, had he not died.
Doesn't even need to say a word, and has depth to it as a consequence of actions.
But Homecoming and Downpour just hand you these button-press choices. Downpour is a little more clear about what your actions will do, so it's not nearly as annoying as Homecoming was. No, Downpour did not commit a blithering blunder by allowing the very real possibility of the JOKE ENDING BEING ATTAINABLE FROM THE WORD GO. If you choose not to kill Alex's mother or forgive his father, but save the Sheriff (relatively speaking) with a medkit, you get the UFO ending. WHY? Every single Silent Hill game made it so you had to beat the game once to unlock an item to get the joke endings; a tradition upheld again by Downpour (and done well enough, no less). So for the binary choice ending, Downpour gets a better pass than Homecoming.
But the problem with the choice system here is, while it is clear-cut how Murphy will act in the scenario, it's relatively inconsistent with his character in other cutscenes. Early on, you meet another prisoner wailing on what you'd initially perceive as a defenseless woman; and instead of ignoring this violent act, Murphy goes to stop him from wailing on her. This, coming from the guy who started the game with the choice to let a corrections officer doing her job fall.
Murphy will even contradict himself later when it comes to that choice: if you chose to let the officer fall to her death, can Murphy really say he "never hurt anyone who didn't deserve it"? Obviously Cunningham is doing her job as an officer, and Murphy acts stubborn when it comes to being let go. This contradicts her character as well: he left her to die, so why does she show him clemency later? Why doesn't he leave when instructed immediately, and instead shows a hint of compassion for her?
Disregarding even THAT, you could theoretically go the entire game being "Good Guy Murphy" and at the end, decide to kill Cunningham. This nets you the "Full Circle" ending, which implies that Murphy is stuck in a loop like many of the more recent denizens of Silent Hill.
As for me...I still got blogs to type out.
...which is a nifty ending, honestly. You can choose to help Cunningham, console J.P., be a generally merciful guy, but the final choice to turn heel and kill Cunningham cements you into a loop? I never quite understood why that was the case when I first watched it. They did, to their credit, make sure that Frank Coleridge is killed as well...which leads to the implication that Murphy's denial of the scenario in which he really did kill Frank. It's fitting considering the circumstances to get it, but Murphy's character always felt like he was a good guy, if a little flawed.
Too bad every bad ending you can get is subverted by one flashback shown in the game, as Murphy is dangling from the hand of the clock-tower: Coleridge saying "Murphy....Run!". That is NOT how a mental block works. It could've had a very simple fix had they made the bad endings result in Murphy doing a heel-turn and committing to killing Coleridge after he said that line. Otherwise, he wouldn't have had that line in his head. His guilt should stem more from the fact that his actions for revenge led to the death of one of a friendly innocent corrections officer, and less for the revenge itself (though it still exists as the double-bogeyman element; while his actions were reprehensible, he acknowledges it won't bring his son back).
Despite this flashback not being a problem in the good endings, I still have a problem with Ending B "Truth and Justice" due to the fact that Murphy's actions are NOT influencing him, but Cunningham. If Murphy (the player) made good choices and kept good karma in regards to the enemies, Cunningham ends up forgiving Murphy in Ending A. But if you made good choices but earned bad karma by killing enemies, then your actions influence her to take revenge. How does that make sense? Moreover, why does Murphy echo the sentiment of JP before he went to go commit suicide? Why, if he made good choices for people yet acted violently against very clear threats against his life, does he feel the need to commit suicide?
When you did this back in Silent Hill 3, it made a lot more sense since they were your own actions influencing what happened, same for Silent Hill 4. If you made certain choices, you influenced the ending appropriately. Be too kill-crazy? Become possessed. Fail to protect Eileen or take care of the hauntings? Make her impossible to save, or doom the apartment to a cursed state even if you save Eileen. The consequences of your actions have to make sense.
Let's show you how it's done.
In Silent Hill 2, this mechanic was entirely subtle...because the game read your actions. Checking certain items, your usage of healing and taking damage, how well you protected Maria, if you read certain items littered around the town...it wasn't choice-based, and it was directly affected by YOU. And how you acted as James Sunderland directly influenced your ending. There was no "Press A or B and make a moral choice", there was "what did you do?" Did you listen to the whole conversation? Did you visit and protect Maria? Did you even CARE?
The developers did. Three endings, all consistent within the psyche of James, influenced by the player. It's that little bit of genius that I appreciate, that piece of storytelling I find that we lack a way to convey properly. Games like The Wolf Among Us, Fallout, Mass Effect and so forth can be well-written games, but I never quite appreciated the "pick-and-choose" way of doing it; it leads to the ability to jump back and forth schizophrenically, leaving your character leaning toward binary good or evil at best...and plain inconsistent at worst. But Silent Hill 2 managed it; they managed to find a way to have a consistent character influenced by you. Rather than a blank slate, or a character forced to say one thing and do another, it kept James' ending consistent with his, or rather your, choices.
Getting back on track, Silent Hill 2 made sense when James wanted to commit suicide. When you read certain items, when you examined certain items, being reckless...when James "acted" like he wanted to die, it made sense. Murphy is consistently trying to survive; why NOW the "someplace I gotta be" line? Even Coleridge spells out his history as "no priors [convictions] and a clean psych." Which, in fact, is the problem of Murphy Pendleton: his character has no real reasons to be in Silent Hill.
He's not cruel, and his one instance of murder was justified mentally by the victim being a pedophile. He has next to no guilt over that man's death whatsoever; it doesn't show up in the enemies, and he'll even recount a similar attitude due to J.P.'s negligence leading to the deaths of children if you choose to taunt him. James' psychological torture came out of a need; a need for absolution, forgiveness, or replacement. Enemies symbolize this, being bound to his guilt and in agony, repressed sexuality and an entity that hounds him and punishes him. The prominent enemy in Downpour are the Screamers, and they have no less than FIVE different speculations in the wiki: sirens from a prison, a murder victim, Cunningham's reaction to her father's death, Pendleton's wife, or Sanchez's psyche.
The Weeping Bats? An invisible enemy that, again, according to the wiki:
"Murphy's wish to hide from the authorities or to escape from his fate in jail."
"It has also been thought that this monster represents the authority of law enforcement and government officials."
"They also seem to represent prison gangs to an extent, as they are quite persistent when it comes to guarding Monocle Man during the train ride almost as if Monocle Man was their gang leader."
"The Weeping Bats may represent the parents of the children killed in the Devil's Pit Train crash. The Bats only attack Murphy after he knows the truth about John Sater, and appear most frequently on the train ride."
"Part of the Weeping Bat's symbolism is solitary confinement. It is likely for this reason that they were made to be reclusive, bat-inspired creatures."
Do you get the feeling that people are REALLY stretching for good symbolic meanings of these enemies? The Lying Figures from SH2 were simple enough to understand: they writhe in agony, they appear to be constrained, trapped. Take that for what you will, and you can easily apply it to all 3 characters of interest; for James, that could've been his guilt, for Angela, being unable to let go of terrible memories...for Eddie, trapped in a prison of his own flesh that he can't help. BAM. Universal and clear-cut. The Abstract Daddy makes sense to show up near the end of the game since that's when Angela's psyche is breaking down more and more, and is clearly defined for her and relates to James on some levels. The enemy design in Downpour is SO ass-backwards, and that's ironic since Homecoming's enemy design was done CORRECTLY. A little uninspired at times, but the heart of Silent Hill craftsmanship is there in a few.
Sure it's basic...but it looks like it'd be in Silent Hill.
Why Downpour? Why are you letting me defend Homecoming? I should hate Homecoming. But I look at you and you keep driving me to hate you MORE for some reason.
I just spent this entire post ranting about the choice system, the enemies and Murphy Pendleton...and I'm STILL not even done. But after writing all this up, it's pretty surprising how well Silent Hill 2 implemented an ending system that was completely subtle. If only more games could do that.
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