In films job interviews go either one of two ways. Either there’s a montage where the person has overcome some sort of event and now powers through. This wins the interviewers over and there it is, they’re smiling nodding at each other with silent words and its done. The job interview is over and the person walks out with a smile on their face knowing they’ve got the job. OR, the opposite. The interviewee says or does the wrong thing, mentions something they shouldn’t or makes the wrong kind of joke and it doesn’t work out as planned. When I go through situations I very often do refer to moments or scenes from films and compare. However what films don’t show you are those awkward moments and I don’t mean the obviously funny ones. In films or on tele its always that scene when there’s a silence, the audience laughs and the protagonist comes out of the scene looking like one of us, someone normal. But no in my opinion and from experience I think the real awkward moments in life are the ones when if you could watch your life back like a film you wouldn’t want to laugh, you’d want to cringe or scream and wish you could re-write it. Going back on this, this is how very much of the job interviews I go for end up. I mumble, I laughed, I sniff, I talk when I shouldn’t and say nothing when I should. I shrug my shoulders when I should say a clever answer and I make remarks that I find funny but that they don’t get. Its those tiny moments when these things happen, that I cant stop, that are the real awkward moments. The word awkward is define as ‘lacking social grace or manners’ so cannot be used in a sentence such as “that awkward moment when someone fatter than you gives you dieting advice” which I recently saw on a Twitter account. This generation, particularly everyone I know including me, who I like to think I know a lot, care way too much about how we should be. Films have a part to play in this, I mean like I said if they filmed as all day by day would we want to watch? We watch Big Brother and Celebrity Big Brother because we know it’s not real. These people also want to be perceived in a certain way that’s not completely them. I mean everyone does it. I don’t believe anyone could say they don’t behave differently when talking from one person to anyone. To your mum you want to seem like you know what your doing in life and you’re the sensible one of your friends compared to all the others who you talk about. But to your best mate you want to be funny and cool and like you don’t care about what everyone else is doing. Anyway I’m going off track. I told my good friend Emily that I wanted this blog entry to be a bit more upbeat but of course its started to integrate into the gritty stuff, I need to work out why that keeps happening. Talking of Emily she once told me something, ages ago, that stuck with me about the word ‘awkward’. I was sitting on a bench with her down Billericay High Street one Saturday night eating Chinese chips discussing why I hated it that I felt much of the stuff that comes out of my mouth is cringe worthy and using the word ‘awkward’ a lot when she said that she felt that your not in awkward situation if you don’t make it that way. In theory that I make these situations awkward myself and yeah I think she’s right. So the next job interview I go for I’m going to try to not be that ‘awkward’ one because I do hate it. I’m going to try to straighten my spine and not care what they think of me, which of course is easier said than done but doesn’t hurt to try.

I’ve been indoors way too much lately, you’d think that gives you too much time to think but true fully it gives you too much mind numbing television to watch that switches your mind off. I mean the biggest questions on my mind the past couple of weeks is whether ’60 minute makeover’ is actually done in sixty minutes and why that lady off Hollyoaks has stopped presenting it. This is the reason for the job interviews and why I need to get out more. I am currently writing this blog surrounded by Lemsip tablets and throat lozenges as I’ve been ill for about the last two months but I have been able to watch some good tele. Now like the last blog I’m going start recommending television programs, films or books that this month I’ve loved and want to tell everyone about. This march I’ve been reading and watching ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ which is a BBC Four program based on the sci-fi/horror/thriller novel, written by Douglas Adams, of the same name. To recommend the book I would say you would have to have an open mind on science fiction and love a bit of a whodunit story. Both the television program and the book were very good and I would say to catch up on BBC iPlayer if you can. This month I also had to say good-bye to ‘Being Human’ that if you watch will know is very good. Watch it if you can because seriously I’m starting to compare it to ‘Doctor Who’ which means I must love it very much. Talking of ‘Doctor Who’ watch the new series 7 trailer. The new series looks like its going to be very good, as usual, and we have to say goodbye to my favorite companions Rory and Amy Pond and get to say hello to the new one.

That’s the blog for this month!

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I feel awfully divided about this, almost like a beaten housewife who deep down still adores her thug of a husband. I feel like I should be commending this for bringing back some of the tropes and traditions that made the old days so great and memorable but at the same time I feel like I should be despising it for not doing anything massively new and just trying to be ‘game for fans’ rather than its own unique adventure. The weaboo Konami-loving fanboy in me is yanking at my nerve endings to adorn this with praise and eat the very ground that it walks upon but the chained-up, world-weary, bags-under-his-eyes cynic in me is snarling at my limbic system to hate how nothing has changed and how the treasures of the past will never be restored no matter how hard we wish for it. My heart is telling me to love Silent Hill: Downpour for rekindling some of the old flames that dazzled me over to the series but my brain is telling me to send it back to the plague-ridden underbelly of the gaming world where it belongs for botching virtually everything else.

The Good:

1.       Goodbye Alex Shepherd, goodbye Silent Hill film franchise, goodbye Silent Hill cult, nobody will miss you!

Before I decided to whip out the razor blade and pop out the jugular for an experiment in friction burns, I could tell that Downpour did at least make an effort to win me over in the story department. The game tells the story of Murphy Pendleton (yeah I know, I thought it sounded silly too), a prisoner convicted for unknown crimes who stumbles upon the loveable fog-enveloped, monster-infested hell hole of Silent Hill after the bus transferring him to a maximum security institute violently crashes on a dilapidated country road outside the town. With the other prisoners and police officers nowhere to be seen in the wreckage, Murphy makes a break for it The Fugitive-style only to run straight into the psychological horror tentacles of Silent Hill, forcing him to come to terms with his crimes and his tormented past. Where Downpour fundamentally succeeds compared to its predecessor Homecoming is that it works to create its own entirely unique story without having to borrow plotlines or themes from earlier games, much like what Silent Hill 2 did for the first game. And for the most part, Downpour does succeed in producing its own distinctive style and semantic that helps to ground the game with its own ideas as opposed to railroading it to a particular formula as Silent Hill 3 had been in order to correlate to the first game; Murphy himself is an inquisitive and much more human character who actually reacts to the monsters and other horrors he encounters on his journey and actively shows frustration and anger at what the town is trying to do to him. This improves on previous protagonists who would occasionally show fear or confusion in the opening segments but would later on seem to stop caring about the horrific things they see and do when any other person like you or me would constantly be crapping themselves in white-eyed terror everywhere they go in Silent Hill.

The plot itself is also laced with much more mystery and intrigue than Homecoming, keeping you guessing as to what will happen next from start to finish and making the big twist at the end all the more powerful because it’s so hard to actually see coming. Such common tropes of the series as the devil-worshipping cult, the story behind Alessa Gillespie and the actions of previous protagonists are also completely omitted in favour of creating an entirely unique character-based story that simply uses Silent Hill as a malevolent conductor of events a la Silent Hill 2. The themes of crime, punishment and revenge are also implemented fairly well with some competent use of symbolism, cryptic documents and moral decisions that equally emphasise both sides of Murphy’s psychological dilemma, allowing you to sympathise with his trauma but at the same time despise him for what he’s done. The abundance of alternate endings determined by the choices you make throughout the game also helps to significantly expand upon this, causing the resolution to Murphy’s adventure to be a reflection of your own personal ethics. While it doesn’t reach the bar set by Silent Hill 2 in this regard, it’s the closest the series has ever come to it and thus Downpour‘s style should definitely be used as a guideline for later developers should the franchise continue.

2.       Play it your way!

What surprised me the most about Downpour was the expanded sense of freedom and choice that it has brought to the series, especially when it comes to exploration and combat. Downpour boasts the widest variety of melee weapons of the entire franchise, allowing you to go toe to toe with Silent Hill’s resident nasties with anything from pickaxes, fire axes, planks of wood, fire extinguishers, rakes, sledgehammers, chairs, crowbars and even bits of concrete. While the game tries to balance this out-of-place arsenal of mean-looking implements by causing them to break after overuse, it’s hard to deny that the huge array of choice that the game provides allows some semblance of role-playing; do you imagine Murphy as being a quick and agile knife fighter? A hard-hitting heavy hammer honcho? A resourceful street fighter who improvises with bricks, masonry and other debris? A cautious and precise sharpshooter? However you wish to pummel your enemies, Downpour allows you to do so and doesn’t skip out on the expenses. The Homecoming system of implementing obstacles that can only be overcome with a specific weapon such as an axe cutting down wooden barricades is also expanded upon with other weapons besides axes being able to cut down barricades, hooked weapons being able to pull down ladders and blunt weapons being able to break off locks. Like Murphy’s aforementioned vocal nature concerning the horrors of Silent Hill, this helps to create a more realistic vibe to the series as opposed to previous games which would confront you with a combination-locked door that can only be opened through solving a puzzle and yet make your twelve-tonne Great Knife somehow unable to just slice off the lock like tissue paper.

3.       Looks like Akira Yamaoka’s found a worthy successor!

One of the key selling points of the Silent Hill franchise has always been the emotionally charged and heavily atmospheric soundtrack which helps to add tear-jerking substance to a tragic scene such as a person’s death, a sense of mystery and contemplation to the dialogue scenes between the main characters and crippling anxiety to the horror and build-up scenes. From Silent Hill 1 to Silent Hill: Shattered Memories this job was firmly in the hands of Akira Yamaoka, the lead soundtrack composer for the franchise who has achieved universal praise for his expertly crafted music that elevated the series’ emotional poignancy above many other games of its time. However, after the release of Shattered Memories, Yamaoka has been unfortunately absent from the series and shows little sign of ever returning.

Downpour on the other hand has at least made a decent effort in trying to recapture some of Akira Yamaoka’s brilliance whilst also combining it with new styles through Daniel Licht, an American composer famous for scoring the soundtrack for the TV show Dexter. At first I wasn’t quite convinced as creating music for television and film is very different from creating music for a video game; in televised media, the action occurs before the audience’ eyes and the music reflects the emotions of the characters and the semantic of the scene. With a video game, the music is meant to create a greater sense of emotional investment for the player, allowing ourselves to feel more involved with the events onscreen as we control them rather than simply illustrating how the characters are feeling. Despite this, Licht actually does a surprisingly good job with the huge expectations thrust upon him, creating some pretty eerie ambient moments during exploration scenes and using industrial sounds during some of the more surreal moments of the game in a style very reminiscent of Yamaoka’s work but adapting it with violins, drums and creepy chanting sounds to produce a great sense of bewilderment when confronted with the empty dilapidated streets of Silent Hill and adrenaline-fuelled primal fear when attacked by the monsters and entities of the town. It’ll never be as good or better than the soundtracks of previous instalments but just for what it is; music that can freeze you with anxiety during the quiet tense moments, help you identify with the protagonist’s plight as he contemplates everything he’s done and make you rush to safety like a terrified animal on the run from a predator, it should be commended.

The Bad:

1.       Is my Xbox dying? Why is this thing chugging so much? The graphics aren’t even that good anyway!

Some things that will strike you across the noggin like a baseball bat wrapped in a wet fish with a nail sticking out of the end immediately upon booting the game are the glaring technical issues that pretty much pervade the entirety of Downpour. I’m not just talking the usual bit of slowdown when there’s a lot of stuff going on or a rare glitch that makes you clip out of the map if you go out of your way to find it, I’m talking constant problems from start to finish that just never seem to let up. I can handle a slight drop in framerate here and there or some textures that take a while to load but what I will not tolerate in Downpour are the regular rendering issues that the game just always seems to experience even when there’s nothing really happening on the screen and this happens virtually every time you open a door and enter a new room as the game renders everything in real-time. I can understand that there are a lot of effects that the developers needed to throw into the game for the sake of atmosphere and that Vatra Games, being a relatively inexperienced and small company that’s still getting to grips with the task of actually making games, will inevitably face a few problems on release day but what bugs me is that this still happens even though Downpour’s graphics can actually be very bland, unexciting and outdated. While the character models are OK by today’s standards, everything else is just really subpar; the textures look like they’ve been borrowed from the PS2 Silent Hill games without adding anything new, some of the shadows and lighting in the outdoor areas look pretty shoddy and for a game that uses water as one of its main thematic and aesthetic focuses the water effects are actually abysmal. Pools of water don’t reflect anything above them and look like they’ve been ripped off from an Asylum film, the few moments in the game where Murphy actually has to wade through water rarely display any groundbreaking ripple effects and for a series that’s always tried to use innovative methods of creating a puzzle, Downpour only features a grand total of one puzzle where water is the main focus and even then it requires only the same amount of brainpower that one would use to put one foot in front of the other. Visually, Downpour is as uninventive as a Silent Hill game can get and the constant rendering issues will make you hate it even more.

Of course, it’s irrational to debase an entire game because of graphics alone and so long as there’s good gameplay and a good story, I can ignore even the most distracting of graphical quagmires. It’s just a shame that Downpour fumbles with the former whilst only delivering on the latter.

2.       Is this really Vatra’s idea of fun? I’ve never been so frustrated at a video game combat system since bloody Dark Souls. And that, my friends, is saying something…

For all of the competent craftsmanship that was put into the storyline of Silent Hill: Downpour, the game seems to suffer from Dear Esther syndrome in that it looks almost as if all that effort was made at the expense of the actual gameplay. Now I, like any Silent Hill fan, know full well that the series has always been purposefully designed to have clunky and awkward combat; that was part of what made it scary to begin with as the monsters seemed more threatening and oftentimes you’d be forced to avoid confrontations altogether for the sake of survival. With Downpour I got the impression that it had no idea where it wanted to go with this aspect and I feel that the game ultimately suffers for it. Unlike previous games which would use fixed camera angles often to obscure your whereabouts and thus make the sudden appearance of a monster more frightening, Downpour goes for the more contemporary over-the-shoulder perspective seen in Homecoming and Shattered Memories. Now I don’t mind the over-the-shoulder view; it allows you to see a lot of the graphical detail in the environment and makes for much easier control of the camera. However, when it comes to actually fighting monsters, Downpour suddenly chucks the over-the-shoulder camera out of the window and replaces it with a zoomed-out beat-em up style camera that shows you the positions of all of the nearby monsters almost as if we were suddenly playing Batman: Arkham Asylum (although in all honesty I’d much prefer to be playing that right now). And this happens every time a monster comes within striking distance whether you want it to or not so the transitions between tense over-the-shoulder exploration to blaringly out-of-place panoramic combat views can be incredibly jarring. Couldn’t they have just made it so that the combat camera is only used when you actually hit a monster, or better yet, make the entire game over-the-shoulder? It was one of the few things that worked in Homecoming; did an over-the-shoulder camera kill the families of Vatra Games’ staff?

The combat itself also feels unfinished and unrefined; while Downpour follows the standard fare of Silent Hill games where Murphy can use quick weak attacks or a slow strong attack with his melee weapon, it also implements the precision firearm aiming of Homecoming (another thing which I think wasn’t too bad an addition). This sounds good on paper but the execution is just downright sloppy. Most enemies in the game are constantly trying to block and dodge as if angry villagers were throwing an apocalyptic barrage of tomatoes at them and without the combo and targeting systems of Homecoming, around 75% of your melee swings will hit nothing but air or inflict no damage whatsoever. In addition, Downpour’s enemies have got to be some of the most annoying in the entire series as they take bucket-loads of hits to finally go down, swarm around you like wasps flanking a glass of Coke in a beer garden, lock you into horrible gory combos and boast a smorgasbord of attacks which can stun Murphy, forcing the player to frantically shake the analogue stick like a diabetic fumbling with his insulin and constantly block incoming blows like a paranoid comedian on open mic night. Downpour doesn’t even give you the standard Silent Hill luxury of being able to avoid most fights as several sections of the game actively force you to survive against entire swathes of baddies and won’t allow you to progress until you’ve killed them all. This, combined with the crappy combat and the fact that your weapons can break in the middle of a fight, makes these moments some of the most aneurism-inducing rage-fests in the entire game, probably in the entire series.

3.       You have played the other Silent Hill games before, right Vatra? Because these monsters just look like the same humanoid mutants from Resident Evil rather than any kind of symbolic manifestation of a tortured human psyche… try saying that three times fast!

Much like the soundtrack, another key element of the Silent Hill franchise has always been the incredibly macabre and psychologically symbolic designs for the various monsters that the protagonists need to battle on their journey of self-discovery in the Jungian nightmare of Silent Hill. In every game the monsters are intended to reflect the emotional anguish or tortured pasts of the main characters, providing subtle hints as to their fractured mental states, the things they fear the most and the destinies they must face at the conclusion of their horrific adventures. This has spawned such iconic creatures that have reached an almost mascot-level of praise among the fanbase as the Grey Children from Silent Hill 1, Valtiel from Silent Hill 3, the Twin Victims from Silent Hill 4 and the king of punishment and sexual repression himself, Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2. What made these creatures so interesting but terrifying at the same time was how they were born from the psyches of the characters, making the game feel like a Mankind vs. Itself scenario common in supernatural fiction. This is mostly true of Downpour but on a horrendously downsized scale.

The number of hostile monsters you regularly encounter throughout the game can be counted on one hand and their designs, much like the graphics, are just bland, uninspired and above all not even that scary. The cornerstone of Silent Hill’s survival horror has always been presenting the threat of aesthetically disturbing monsters and then throwing players into eerie and suspiciously empty environments to build up tension as you anticipate the appearance of some unspeakable abomination in the pitch black hallways behind you the moment you press a button or enter a new room. Because Downpour’s monsters don’t have the luxury of being designed by Konami who actually know what they’re doing, they end up looking like your generic muscle bound ogres or grubby screaming hags and the end result is severely underwhelming. Downpour is also pitifully remiss of boss monsters with there being only two of them, the second of which being the only one that looks like it actually had any real effort put into it and the first of which being disappointingly short despite its huge build up and significance to the plot. Thus, if you came to beseech Downpour for a new dive into the more horrific side of psychological symbolism through its manifestations, you’ll have to take a left turn on Freud Street because you’re going the completely wrong way.

4.       Hey cool, a new design for the Otherworld! I’m gonna spend as much time as I can examining all the intricate and artistic designs in order to paint a view of Murphy’s tortured psyc- or I’m just gonna blindly run through it for five minutes while a big red light tries to eat me… This is a Silent Hill game, right?

My favourite part of every Silent Hill instalment from the very beginning has definitely been the Otherworld sections; the truly bladder-weakening, muscle cramping, run-out-of-the-room-screaming horror moments of the game where Silent Hill is terrifyingly corrupted into an industrial hell full of blood, rust, corpses, scarier monsters, macabre imagery, massively unsettling set pieces and some great use of symbolism to portray the protagonist’s inner torment. I felt really immersed in the dank, depressing underbelly of James Sunderland’s Otherworld in Silent Hill 2, the incredibly oppressive and hateful nightmare of Heather Mason’s Otherworld in Silent Hill 3 and even the artistically surreal proportions of Walter Sullivan’s various Otherworlds in Silent Hill 4. Therefore, I was pretty psyched when I saw pre-release screenshots of Downpour’s Otherworld which featured much of the same visual brilliance of previous games. Sure, I heard that there were going to be chase sections in the same vein as Shattered Memories but I didn’t mind that all too much as they weren’t too bad in that game and were thankfully broken up by some really good plot development and bizarre situations within its Otherworld. But oh boy was I disappointed when I saw the true extent of Downpour’s Otherworld.

The main mechanic behind the transition between Silent Hill’s foggy world and its Otherworld in Downpour is the presence of water, for example the first Otherworld section has the player activate a sprinkler system in a kitchen in order to put out a gas fire. However, as the water pipes suddenly begin to rupture and explode, flooding the room up to Murphy’s waist, reality slowly peels away to reveal the industrial nightmare lying beneath it and the player must quickly drain the floodwater away before it reaches a surging electrical wire and fries our hero like a wig in a furnace. As more water bursts out of another pipe and breaks down the fire exit, a malicious red light suddenly erupts on the other side of the kitchen, engulfing and consuming everything it touches, and begins to chase Murphy, leading the player on the game’s first big chase scene. I wouldn’t have necessarily had a problem with this system if Downpour had simply made these chase sections only constitute a small percentage of the game’s Otherworld experience but no, Vatra Games felt so swollen with pride in their creation that they decided to pretty much base every single Otherworld transition around these chase scenes to the point that they become horrendously predictable and horrendously annoying. While Vatra does attempt to throw in some calm exploration segments within the Otherworld, they’re so insultingly simple that they’re usually over almost as quickly as they began and another bloody chase scene rears its ugly head round the corner acting as if you’d forgotten about it. And it’s a huge shame because you often see that quite a bit of attention has been put into making the Otherworld sections feel quite strange and threatening with rotating death blades, bizarre shimmering ceilings, tortured souls trapped in cages and barbed wire and a few interestingly weird environmental puzzles among other things. If only the game didn’t make it so that we just run past 95% of it in order to escape the carnivorous rear brake lights.

The Ugly:

1.       Side quests? Really? This is the sort of thing that modern games are constantly parodying!

One of the most important parts of any game that needs to suck you into its world in order to be invested in the plot is the ability for it to immerse you; to make you forget you’re even playing a game and actually feel like you’re in the shoes of the player protagonist seeing, hearing and experiencing everything they are. The Silent Hill series has often been a master of this through the use of its minimalistic user interface, its advanced motion capture and graphical technology and its lack of any distracting screen prompts that remind you of the cold, mechanical nature of the game world you’re interacting with. So what does Downpour to improve on this? Absolutely nothing and instead takes several leaping steps back. If the perpetual rendering issues, quick time events and constant reminding that the game is ‘Loading’ or ‘Saving’ weren’t enough to break the immersion, the game goes on to display an even greater lack of self-awareness with the inclusion of side quests, and not the cleverly disguised optional story paths that could be superficially referred to as side quests, but I mean that the game completely forgoes any attempt at subtlety and just outright calls them ‘side quests’. Of course, Silent Hill is no stranger to a few moments of non-linearity, a major example being that the good endings of the first game required the completion of optional story objectives, but those instances never bluntly revealed that these were side quests in any manner of speaking and often the only way to knew they even existed was to search extensively for them and thus the immersion was still in motion. And it’s not like Downpour’s side quests are even that interesting as most of them are fetch quests, treasure hunts and wave-upon-wave enemy gauntlets that we’ve seen and done a billion times over in any run-of-the-mill RPG. It’s not innovative, it’s not massively entertaining and worst of all it reminds me that I’m just playing another dull video game rather than experiencing a new Silent Hill adventure.

2.       Yes, Vatra Games, your game is part of the Silent Hill series, can you please stop ramming that fact down my throat?

I guess I’m probably nitpicking with this one, even more so than usual, but Downpour has this strange compulsion to randomly throw references to previous Silent Hill games at you without any real context or reason other than to please fans, almost as if it’s horribly insecure about its position within Silent Hill canon like an unpopular kid trying to take up smoking or get a stupid haircut ‘because all the cool people do it’. One notorious moment occurs early on in the game where you can turn on a jukebox in a deserted diner at which point it will play the intro music from the first Silent Hill game, and that’s just it. You don’t get an achievement or a comment from Murphy or any real reward other than the realisation that Vatra is pretty much shouting at you “hey! Look! Look! Look! Look! It’s the music from Silent Hill 1! That’s what you wanted, right? Are we cool now?”. With previous games, references like these usually made sense because they had context or they were subtle, such as one infamous scene in Silent Hill 3 where Heather refuses to fish for an item stuck in a blocked up toilet, poking fun at how James from Silent Hill 2 showed no hesitation in digging his hand through all that human waste at the slightest idea that there might be a key in there. Those moments were funny because they were an in-joke for devoted Silent Hill fans but they were self-aware enough not to be distracting. With Downpour’s references they’re just there; they have no bearing on anything and they have no reason to be there, the aforementioned example in particular since Silent Hill 1’s intro music never played in-game and thus should not actually exist in the Silent Hill universe. It’s like playing Resident Evil and then suddenly stumbling upon a character playing the actual Resident Evil game even though such a thing would cause its universe to implode from the implausibility. It’s not needed, it doesn’t make sense and it’s just distracting as hell

Final Verdict:

I expected so much more from Silent Hill: Downpour. While the intriguing and mystifying storyline kept me invested enough to tolerate most of its tedium and dross, the game offers little else when the plot isn’t enough to keep you coming back. The gameplay is dull and unrefined, the graphics are criminally sub-par for a game of this calibre and the moments where the game truly shines are few and far in between with nary little time to actually enjoy them to their fullest. I saw great potential in this game and I was willing to give the franchise another chance after the stumbling performance of Homecoming but all I got in return was a downpour of dire disappointment. If you’re a devoted Silent Hill fan looking for some closure then I’d probably advise you to watch the game’s cutscenes on YouTube just to see the effort that went into the plot. But if you came for the full Silent Hill experience then I’d say dig up your old pile of PS2 games and rescue Silent Hill 2 or 3 from the dungeons of the past. You’d save yourself a lot of money and a lot of boredom.

There’s often a lot of good-natured (well, not really but I try to be optimistic about this pit of angst) debate about whether video games can be classed as a form of art. On the defensive side one can say that yes they are; they allow people to interact with an imaginative world full of artistic images and compelling characters and can be a great way for telling a story and eliciting profound emotional responses. But on the fire and pitchforks side one can say that no they are not; they force people to try and comprehend complex mechanics and controls, evoke feelings of anger and frustration at how difficult they are or degrade the finer forms of art for the sake of cheap entertainment. I’m something of a strange case in that while I’m an avid gamer and will defend the industry when you get short-sighted plebeians or hyper-conservative politicians trying to make them out as some sort of creation of the abyss, I appreciate all forms of art equally and don’t value video gaming as some sort of godsend. And the latest indie Source game for the PC developed by thechineseroom, Dear Esther, isn’t about to change my mind anytime soon.

The Good

1.      At least the script is worth more than inky toilet paper

Dear Esther is unique in that it bills itself as an ‘interactive storytelling game’ which places a heavy emphasis on narration as its medium for the plot. It tells the tale of a man recently widowed in a car accident who travels to a desolate island in the Outer Hebrides to cope with his depression and emptiness. As the player traverses the landscape, they discover various signs, images and visions pertaining to the tragedy of the accident which paint a macabre and emotional portrait of the protagonist’s psyche. The narration is well-written with deep imagery, deep expression and what looks to be great deal of, dare I say it, effort. If you’re an English student and you’re knowledgeable of the inundation of deeper meanings that pervade such literature as Dear Esther’s narration then you will appreciate its talented craftsmanship.

2.      If there’s nothing else going for it at least it’s really easy on the eyes, and I mean as easy as a jigsaw puzzle with one piece… coated in marshmallows and cookie dough

Perhaps the greatest aspect of Dear Esther is the utterly beautiful graphics that it is able to pull off in order to create a powerfully artistic atmosphere, pushing the Source engine to all new kinds of limits. The island is incredibly well detailed with great water graphics capable of flowing and rippling, particle effects of wind and sand visibly pounding the cliffs and the protagonist’s face, eerily derelict ships and hamlets lost to the ravages of time, inky and swirling cloud formations with sunlight piercing through them like spears of amber and underwater caves sparkling with fluorescent crystals and stalagmites as glistening water serenely flows over them and… oh lord I’m starting to sound like a tourism board advert, that’s what Dear Esther does to you. Erm, yeah, the graphics are amazing, that much you need to know.

3.      The game should have a rock-off with Beethoven, Mozart and that stereotypical Chinese kid in your class who’s a god at piano and the game might still win

Complementing the already amazing visuals of Dear Esther is its flawlessly composed and emotional soundtrack, incorporating a sombre mix of piano and violin that really emulates the emptiness of the protagonist’s heart as he wades through the remnants of his old life. While the first few tracks of the game are your standard fare of depressing orchestra that is prevalent in almost any media that depicts a character with complex emotional problems (a la Silent Hill), the audio really ramps up in its quality towards the end as the protagonist finally comes to terms with his loss and prepares for the final conclusion to his ordeal (I hope that’s not a spoiler), culminating in some powerful and even tear-jerking music.

The Bad

1.      Alright, I’m just gonna explore this island a little bi- oh, I can’t move any faster than a tortoise-like walk, oh well, I suppose I’m not in any ru- oh, I can’t jump either, and now that I’m on the subject I can’t pick up this debris… What CAN I do?!

Dear Esther makes the awful, awful mistake of billing itself as a ‘game’. Hey, thechineseroom? Last time I checked games allowed you to interact with the game environment and, ya know, actually be able to do stuff that affects the outcome of events within the game. Dear Esther doesn’t really let you do anything that resembles actual gameplay; all you really can do is just hold down on the W key and move the mouse around to look at the pretty graphics. But Dear Esther screws this up even more by forcing the player to only pace the island at a criminally slow speed which prevents you from reaching said graphics without being an infuriating exercise in patience, almost as if the developers were scared you’d complete it too fast. The graphics also taunt you in a way because of this; Dear Esther shows you how amazing the island looks and how fun it would be to see all of it but it doesn’t let you see it! And don’t even think about trying to navigate those rocks blocking your path or reaching that ledge calling out for you like a harmonica player because you can’t jump either. All in all, this really removes the ‘interactive’ from the ‘interactive storytelling’ element. While the storytelling from a narrative perspective is pretty good, the point of a game is to converge a plot and an interactive environment in order to make the interactive storytelling experience complete; Dear Esther feels like the developers ran out of steam somewhere along the line and slapped the eminent ‘interactive story’ sticker on the front like cheap cellotape covering an irreparable puncture in an inflatable child’s toy.

2.      Hey cool, I completed it . . . yeah . . . . . . . yeaaah . . .*uninstall*

While I might claim to be a proponent of storytelling and interactivity as the key components of a great game, I actually find that the one thing that keeps a game afloat in terms of quality is how often and how long you’ll be going back to the game to relive the experience. This is why games like Mass Effect, Fallout and Deus Ex have such lasting appeal because of the huge amount of new stuff you can still discover and new paths to take in story events when you decide to do a second playthrough. Dear Esther completely misses its chance and ends up becoming probably the least satisfying and wholesome experience in terms of its lifespan. Because the game is so short at around an hour or two and the entire thing consists of walking to point A to point B with virtually no room to explore and frolic around in the gorgeous environments, there’s absolutely no way to play the game differently a second time; it’s the utter definition of linearity. In my opinion, I felt that Dear Esther tried too hard to be an experience through the combination of impressive visuals and sound like 2001: A Space Odyssey. But where 2001 succeeds is the fact that it’s a film; you’re meant to just sit back and watch the experience roll by because that’s what a film is meant to make you do. But Dear Esther seems to have something of an identity crisis in that it forgets that it’s a video game and therefore tries to throw everything it can offer at you in one go without offering any experimentation or user input; the key components of a game! So trust me when I say that uninstalling Dear Esther from my computer as soon as I finished it was even more satisfying than the game itself.

3.      Horror is a two letter word to these guys…

I imagine the survival horror genre was barrel-rolling in its grave the day that thechineseroom billed Dear Esther as ‘horror game’. As a fan of the survival horror genre (may angels sing thee to thy rest), I felt insulted that the developers of Dear Esther got the absurd idea that what they offered was something that I would like. Let me make it clear, Dear Esther is not a horror game, it is not an adventure game, it isn’t even a game; games let you interact with the environment to create a positive emotional stimulus. The only stimulus I had when being ‘scared’ by Dear Esther’s ‘horror’ was the boredom reflex in my boredom gland (oh how I wish such an organ exists). I suppose Dear Esther at least tries to create some sort of intimidating semantic through the use of its soundtrack which occasionally leaps into an unexpected high-pitched violin streak when you’re about to enter a cave or a ransacked building but since nothing is ever actually out to get you in Dear Esther, the threat and therefore the fear is virtually non-existent. Games like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Silent Hill helped to build up horror and tension by establishing the existence of terrifying monsters but having quiet and atmospheric moments in the game where you’re haplessly wandering around a dark and oppressive environment and nothing appears for a long time; you’re constantly on edge, dreading the next dark corner or closed door out of the trepidation that some nameless horror from the abyss might make its presence known. But since Dear Esther features no nameless horrors from the abyss and the actual atmosphere of the game seems centred around building peace and tranquillity rather than fear and anxiety, I’m willing to sue thechineseroom for false advertising.

4.      I had to pay actual MONEY for this tripe?!

If Dear Esther was a free mod for the Source engine as many other independently developed Source games are, I might have excused all of its boredom-inducing horribleness because in the end you’d have nothing to lose. But Dear Esther is not that charitable and ends up becoming the equivalent of an electronic mugger leaping out of your Internet router and threatening you with pocket sand when it charges you £7 for its purchase. Now yes, I realise that in the grand scheme of things £7 is not a huge amount of money but you need to put things into perspective; for £7 you could probably go down the pub and buy a pint or two with some mates, allowing you to revel in good company and good drink. For £7 you could probably buy the ingredients for a healthy, wholesome meal which leaves you filled and satisfied. Hell, for £7 you could probably hire a cheap lady of the night in Newcastle for some rumble in the jungle. STIs and the feeling of dirtiness and self-loathing aside, I refuse to sacrifice those experiences for a pretentious and falsely advertised hour of thechineseroom’s denial of their lack of game design skill. Thankfully, a friend of mine bought the game for me as a birthday present. Now he’s part of my angry mob to bring down thechineseroom, coincidence?

The Ugly

1.      Really, Frictional Games? You’re gonna hand over development to these guys?! Only Capcom and Konami are allowed to pull off something this stupid!

This isn’t something wrong with Dear Esther itself but more of a gripe I have with its developers’ relationship with a certain other developer I have a shameless admiration for. I’m of course talking about Frictional Games’ recent decision to outsource the development of Amnesia: The Dark Descent’s sequel to thechineseroom. If we are to use Dear Esther as the poster child of thechineseroom’s talents as video game developers then I am expecting very bad things for Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. Sure, the graphics might be gorgeous and the soundtrack might be emotionally powerful but I’ll officially sever all ties with the human race and leave planet Earth when it turns out to be a boring, restrictive and horribly-slow narration simulation rather than the survival horror masterpiece it needs to be in order to live up to The Dark Descent’s legacy.

2.      Apparently there are ghosts in Dear Esther, if you can even find them. What’s the significance of them? Absolutely naught

I get the feeling that thechineseroom got a bit desperate towards the end of Dear Esther’s development and started throwing in anything they could in a ditch attempt to make it ‘scary’, one such thrown in cop-out being the inclusion of ghostly figures that can occasionally be seen around the island. I suppose they’re meant to represent the protagonist’s deceased wife or the various other long-dead inhabitants of the island but the problem is that they’re so hard to find and so inconspicuous that if you didn’t know that ghosts were in Dear Esther then you wouldn’t notice them at all. Some might see this as some sort of semblance of replayability; there are some hidden ghosts around here so that gives me an excuse to explore and try and find them, right? Wrong. Unfortunately, the piss-poor ‘exploration’ opportunities that Dear Esther offers as well as the other aforementioned bad parts cannot be alleviated by even the implied presence of the spirits of the dead.

Final Verdict

Do not buy Dear Esther. I repeat DO NOT buy Dear Esther. Never have I played a more boring and pretentious ‘game’ than Dear Esther. While the audio, the narration and the graphics might be really good and could instil some vestibules of emotional impact on you, the lack of anything actually resembling gameplay completely destroys their lasting appeal and makes you feel like a penniless fool for allowing thechineseroom to rob you. Want an experience better than Dear Esther that’ll cost you even less money? Get the audio book of The Road and take a walk down a field in Maldon. Trust me, you’ll thank me for it.

This is the first month when I have had the chance to sit back and realize my responsibilities. It’s hard when you leave school to suddenly feel you’re on your own without anything holding you where you stand. I mean when you’re at school your working towards a goal. From when you’re 4 years old till the day you leave school no one bats an eyelid at the fact your going to school everyday, having the weekends off, and learning about Napoleon’s history or the difference between a simile and metaphor. The second you leave its like you realize your standing at the end of a long corridor of people and now they’re all turned to stare at you expectantly. Until Christmas I worked as much as I could, wherever I could, earning as much as I could and that was my goal. A new year and I feel as if I’m floating around in space. However the other day I had something of an epiphany. Well I had an idea. This is my time in my life where I don’t have an idea what I’m doing. I was talking to my dad and he recently said he didn’t have any idea where his life was going until he met my mum and suddenly it was like he sat up and realized he had to get his life together. This is my time. Everyone in their lives deserves a time where they can just float around and work out what they really want to do. Whether it be when you finish sixth form, leave university or lose your job. When you talk to your parents you’ll find everyone has a time in their life when they have no idea where they’re going until they work it out and when you’re on that path its plain sailing all the way. That was my epiphany; I’m currently in that situation. You have to saver these moments because it does all go so fast, when you fine that job, when you get married, have children, it happens too quickly so although I do feel some panic over where my life is heading, I’m also relaxed knowing that my life will take a different direction when I’m ready. I believe in feeling comfortable in your own efforts and self-belief that you know something will come up whether it is tomorrow or next week. When you look back on an older persons life you will see a time when they didn’t have it all figured out and this is my time.

Another aspect of my life I wanted to discuss this month is friendship. It’s always been such an important part in my life and I think in everyone’s life in a way. When you’re at school it’s so important to have the right friends at that time. Now I’m looking into the future I’m also looking into the friendships I’ll have through my life when I’ll need them. Friends have always been a huge part of my life, I’ve always felt I’ve needed them, whether they were good for me or not and felt I needed them to help me. I went out to Southend last night and drove so was completely sober the whole night and I had the best fun I’ve had in a while. I realized at this point in life, when its so easy to go through things with your head in your hands, its good to have friends you can let that all go with. I mean I hardly talk to my best friends about work or about their universities and that just shows how much you can let go when you see them and not have to think about all the big questions in life.

I claimed in my last blog I would also talk about another love of mine. Its going to look out of place in this blog which is becoming quite laden with heavy life lessons but if anyone is reading this I would like to recommend some television programs and films which I think are unbelievable and need to be recognized by more people (even though I’ve got more friends onto these programs recently which is a goal completed in life). Firstly I’ll begin with the BBC Stephen Moffat, Mark Gatiss creation ‘Sherlock’. If you have a DVD player and a free day I would suggest you buy the first and second series to watch back. They’re incredible. Even for a new Sherlock Holmes fan that hasn’t read the books the episodes are extremely clever, well written and keep you guessing until the answers are right in front of you. It’s amazing and thus I would very much suggest you watch it. I recently made (forced) my friend David to watch it one night and he loved it so much he showed it to all his family and bought the boxsets. So yes watch it, its very good. Next ‘Being Human’. This is probably a bit more of an acquired taste compared to ‘Sherlock’, which can probably be watched by all. The premise is simply of a Vampire, a Werewolf and a Ghost living together in the same house. However the writers of this show take this premise and make it funny and dramatic in each episode. You really care about the characters and what happens to them. It’s not as known as it should be although it’s very loved by its watchers. So I would love to find the show some more viewers and have someone to talk about the show with. Right now films. I was sat the other day bored, as usual lately, and I rented off iTunes ‘Bridesmaids’ and ‘Drive’. Both were very good in their own ways so you should watch either one if you get the chance. I have been a very tough critic of films recently but I loved these two so if you get a chance grab a copy and let me know what you think.

Right so I’ve come to the end of the hardest blog I’ve had to write so far. Hopefully next month’s will be easier but I hope you enjoyed ‘the ramblings of a bored person’. That’s going to be the name of my autobiography.

Twitter: @notkeef

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In the lessons that I am now able to use to write these articles for whoever actually reads these ramblings the site manager often asks the editor to write an updated version of the editor’s letter. Let it be known that it is a rare day that I finish an article in these lessons. Most of the writing is done during the night when I fail to sleep. But out of the sheer boredom that overcomes me, I will hazard an attempt at an Elmashian letter to the world. Here goes nothing (much):

Occasionally, you may notice an edit to this website’s layout. This happens when we think of a new way to lay the site out, “what if we got rid of the bar at the top with the 3 latest articles? That would be a good idea.” As much as two classes worth of 6^th formers who really didn’t want to have a standard general studies lesson try to make this a ‘cool’ place to visit, we all secretly understand that this is an impossible goal. Oh well, so are world peace and the chances of (insert name of team you dislike name here) winning the (year after you read this) championship, doesn’t stop people trying.

If you want to attempt to have your input, and you are not a member of the 60 or so people who are told to do so, you can just email in at speak_up@hotmail.co.uk . See, we made it a Hotmail address because that is what the ‘cool kids’ use. We aren’t out of touch, we swear. Or you could comment on the posts. We prevent any chances of internet trolls with their comments of “fake and gay” and “this post is fail” by having comments require approval. But I’m yet to hear of a comment not getting through.

Oh yeah, we also have a twitter account. @SpeakUp_Billers. Which you can use to stalk us in a socially acceptable manner. All you will likely get is a tweet when an article is uploaded, leaving you to think “ooh, the new Smith Archives is up. Hey a new film review. Aww, not another Nothing Much.”

So given you’ve taken the time to read this (mock) editors letter (mock as in pretend and as in mocking), maybe you’d like to read other articles. I’m guessing that given you are still here, it means that you’ve been told to go on here for some lesson, so please continue to another article and try to gain some semblance of enjoyment from it. So…yeah…knock yourself out. Not literally, we don’t want to be responsible for injury inflicted upon the self.

If you choose to contribute, we only ask that you aid the effort to not be lame, so post about things that interest you, or may interest others, not just the latest speaker that spoke to your year, or rambling thoughts from the top of your head.

James Elmash.

If I had to put my finger on one thing I truly hated. I mean something I hated more than anything else in the world. More than corruption, than torture, than crime. It would be those people who ask for your solutions to a problem after you rant. The people who ask what your solution is to the problem you are pointing out. These are people who, as far as I am concerned, should go away. My exact sentiment shouldn’t be written here as this is a school run site. To these people, my more constructive advice would be to try to ask that of somebody when they scream.

See a scream isn’t just what I made the title most of time. A lot of the time it’s just a rant. Much of the time it’s a wordy rambling mess of incoherent thoughts that is just conveying that somebody is angry or hurt or doesn’t understand how others can hold such wrong views and yet think they are right. Sometimes, you just use language because it’s more subtle than just yelling. For instance, there is considerably less impact when just yelling than if you say things in a normal tone of voice that cut deeper.

Once, I followed my own advice. And you know what, it wasn’t a mistake. The basic set up was a Facebook post a girl made. It was one of those really petty vague statuses. This one read “I’m so ugly”. So I made the comment “you spelled attention seeking whore wrongly”. This got me a wave of hate-mail and people typing in caps lock. Eventually, the girl who made the status, and many others I have mocked online, asked me why. She accused me of being a jerk (which I am), and various insults which shall not be repeated here due to the family nature of this site. My reply was that “I find your statuses funny. I try to make your statuses as funny to the rest of the world as they are to me.”

I was promptly blocked.

See this is what I mean. You can’t argue with an insult like the ones she gave me. It is just a display of anger. Not a rational decision or something. It’s a scream. Oh and before anybody accuses me of cyber bullying, I say just one thing to you. If cyber bullying is the same as real bullying, then watching pornography is the same as actually having sex. Online you have the power to block access, and control what you post. You can log out. You can even delete accounts and flag content. It isn’t hard to control your online identity if you choose to. Anyway, I’m deviating.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that just because you think something is wrong, it doesn’t mean you should have the solution. Many people know that the banking system is messed up. I doubt many people know how to run a bank. Let the people find the problem, and then let people in the know address it.

If you say that this post seems to have an end, you won’t know how to end it, but I will.

James Elmash.