felis_ultharus (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
felis_ultharus) wrote2008-10-24 07:48 am
felis_ultharus) wrote2008-10-24 07:48 am
Entry tags:
(no subject)
I've been getting a lot done -- with my writing and other things. I've got a rough draft of the short story I'm sending out next week already put together, and now begins a rigorous editing process.
It's a good thing real life has been going well, because my entertainment has taken a turn for the disturbing. See, I don't like to switch novels or switch video games when I'm in the middle of one, and I made the mistake of reading Oryx and Crake at the same time as playing the horror game Silent hill 4.
Oryx and Crake really is the most frightening kind of "what if" -- not the "what if the bomb is dropped?" or "what if we opened a portal to another dimension," but just "what if we simply just keep doing what we're doing." At first it seemed pretty lacklustre, but now it's become pure Atwood, and I have to keep stopping to digest the more brutal passages before I move on to the next.
She's brilliant though. I'd like to splice her vision and psychological understanding with Heather O'Neill's style. The resulting writer would be able to re-write all of creation with her words.
And Silent Hill 4 is most disturbing of the series of that series of video games. Not because of walls that bleed angry spirits, or the post-apocalyptic empty urban landscapes, or the undefined fleshy things that slither through those landscapes. It's because the only place of safety in it is a locked, sentient room which gradually becomes more and more hostile to you the more the game progresses -- its air becomes toxic, and the room decays, and the atmosphere itself injures you.
The idea of having no place of safety, and no home to return to, is scarier to me than all the gore-encrusted prisons and hospitals that are a mainstay of the series. I honestly don't know if I can finish this game.
It's a good thing real life has been going well, because my entertainment has taken a turn for the disturbing. See, I don't like to switch novels or switch video games when I'm in the middle of one, and I made the mistake of reading Oryx and Crake at the same time as playing the horror game Silent hill 4.
Oryx and Crake really is the most frightening kind of "what if" -- not the "what if the bomb is dropped?" or "what if we opened a portal to another dimension," but just "what if we simply just keep doing what we're doing." At first it seemed pretty lacklustre, but now it's become pure Atwood, and I have to keep stopping to digest the more brutal passages before I move on to the next.
She's brilliant though. I'd like to splice her vision and psychological understanding with Heather O'Neill's style. The resulting writer would be able to re-write all of creation with her words.
And Silent Hill 4 is most disturbing of the series of that series of video games. Not because of walls that bleed angry spirits, or the post-apocalyptic empty urban landscapes, or the undefined fleshy things that slither through those landscapes. It's because the only place of safety in it is a locked, sentient room which gradually becomes more and more hostile to you the more the game progresses -- its air becomes toxic, and the room decays, and the atmosphere itself injures you.
The idea of having no place of safety, and no home to return to, is scarier to me than all the gore-encrusted prisons and hospitals that are a mainstay of the series. I honestly don't know if I can finish this game.
no subject
no subject
The odd ones are epic, deal with a nasty, Christian-breakaway cult that's trying to bring a very scary version of Christ into the world using unwilling Virgin Marys. The even ones are more about the psyche of the characters.
The storytelling is flawless in the first four, though I keep hearing it jumped the shark at five. The combat is deliberately painful because it similates what an ordinary joe (or in the third game, ordinary jane) would do if given a steel pipe and asks to bludgeon an unholy atrocity into the ground with it. No ninja moves.
The horror is mostly atmospheric. You can go hours without meeting a monster. Yet it keeps you on edge, much more than horror in any other genre. It's more effective than any horror movie I've seen or book I've read.
There are also multiple endings, based on very subtle things. For instance, in one game your character can commit suicide, based on how many times he looks at a knife in his possession, and how the long he takes to heal himself (the longer the gap between healings, the more the game assumes he's suicidal).
no subject
no subject