Silent Hill 2 playlog pt. 4
Aug. 3rd, 2012 05:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
indigozealNot much to report.
I had reached a dead-end in the apartment complex, the only apparent avenue of exploration being a safe in one of the apartments. See, in this section, you're presented with a conspicuous locked door pinned with a note that claims the key is in one of the other apartments, and I thought this safe might be a good bet for its hiding place. I figured out the cryptic note with the combination - written in a combination of Roman and Arabic numerals - but the safe contained only bullets. 4 boxes' worth of bullets, but sadly no magical key to progress. Then I realized that one of the keys I had previously pocketed had not disappeared from my inventory upon use like all the other keys and discovered that it also unlocked another door leading out into the courtyard and a couple more rooms. Despite encountering a new character, however, I found myself once again at a dead end.
After a monotonous once-over of the rooms I'd previously visited to see if I'd missed anything, I found that there was a whole new apartment whose existence I had inexplicably overlooked - the status of its door was noted on the map, which happens only if you've tried opening said door previously, yet it was denoted as "locked" when it wasn't at all. I went in, but even though I encountered the strange girl from the opening within, I again found no key and no apparent means to progress.
(Aforementioned Strange Girl, by the way, is genuinely mentally ill and seems to shift between personalities, so maybe they did mean for her to sound developmentally-disabled in parts of her introduction, when she had adopted her regressed, childlike personality.)
I did pick up a couple of coins along the way that seemed to fit into this puzzle desk - only three, though, and there were five slots in the desk. I was utterly out of options, though. The order by which you were supposed to insert the coins was related through a poem, in the vein of the piano puzzle in the school last game. I did eventually glean from the poem that two of the slots were supposed to be left unoccupied by virtue of their occupants being "hidden and unseen" - therefore, I did have all the tools I needed to open the desk. The rest really didn't make any sense, though (there's only one female in the poem's cast of characters, but the female is supposed to be one of the Unseen and you have a coin printed with a female figure to place, etc. etc.), so I just force-hacked the sucker. Hey, I figured out half of the riddle, and I didn't resort to a guide; good enough.
This finally yielded the magical apartment key, which in turned housed yet another key to a stairwell and an apparent Pyramid Head boss fight. Unfortunately, nothing James does can put an apparent dent in the sucker, due to him having, you know, a giant metal head, and in the close quarters for the fight, James really can't maneuver well enough to avoid being hit a fair deal, even with the ridiculous wind-up time Head needs for his giant Buster Sword. And yeah, I thought about shooting him from behind while he was swinging; that doesn't work, either - particularly when James is just as likely to shoot at thin air rather than at the huge target trying to shove a sword down his throat. I'd been given a bloody knife by the girl from the opening previously (for "safekeeping" - she was afraid she'd hurt herself if she held onto it, even though I think it'd be chancier to be running around Silent Hill with no means of self-defense), and, recalling how unintuitive item use short-circuited the first game's fight with Cybil, tried using it on Pyramid Head. (He is, after all, represented as a Fury-like spirit of vengeance in a newspaper article you find earlier in the game, where a convicted child-killer rants about his presence before meeting a bloody death.) No effect, though. Perhaps I should use it on the mannequin before the fight, whose body remains conspicuously in the room. (Trying to attack said body with regular weapons does no good.)
Two story things: 1) While they're aiming high here, the voice acting issues are even more pronounced when you're trying to do serious psychological drama than when you're trying to do a B-movie. The visuals in front of the mirror in the reunion with Opening Girl are down, but there's no unity in tone, and it's not initially clear that the writers mean for her characterization to be all over the map. 2) The cowering Eddie looks awfully like an out-of-shape James; does he represent James's denial? Every word out of his mouth is some sort of excuse - I didn't kill that dead body in the kitchen; I didn't even know the guy; I don't even belong in this town; I know I should leave town for my own safety, but whatever.
.
I had reached a dead-end in the apartment complex, the only apparent avenue of exploration being a safe in one of the apartments. See, in this section, you're presented with a conspicuous locked door pinned with a note that claims the key is in one of the other apartments, and I thought this safe might be a good bet for its hiding place. I figured out the cryptic note with the combination - written in a combination of Roman and Arabic numerals - but the safe contained only bullets. 4 boxes' worth of bullets, but sadly no magical key to progress. Then I realized that one of the keys I had previously pocketed had not disappeared from my inventory upon use like all the other keys and discovered that it also unlocked another door leading out into the courtyard and a couple more rooms. Despite encountering a new character, however, I found myself once again at a dead end.
After a monotonous once-over of the rooms I'd previously visited to see if I'd missed anything, I found that there was a whole new apartment whose existence I had inexplicably overlooked - the status of its door was noted on the map, which happens only if you've tried opening said door previously, yet it was denoted as "locked" when it wasn't at all. I went in, but even though I encountered the strange girl from the opening within, I again found no key and no apparent means to progress.
(Aforementioned Strange Girl, by the way, is genuinely mentally ill and seems to shift between personalities, so maybe they did mean for her to sound developmentally-disabled in parts of her introduction, when she had adopted her regressed, childlike personality.)
I did pick up a couple of coins along the way that seemed to fit into this puzzle desk - only three, though, and there were five slots in the desk. I was utterly out of options, though. The order by which you were supposed to insert the coins was related through a poem, in the vein of the piano puzzle in the school last game. I did eventually glean from the poem that two of the slots were supposed to be left unoccupied by virtue of their occupants being "hidden and unseen" - therefore, I did have all the tools I needed to open the desk. The rest really didn't make any sense, though (there's only one female in the poem's cast of characters, but the female is supposed to be one of the Unseen and you have a coin printed with a female figure to place, etc. etc.), so I just force-hacked the sucker. Hey, I figured out half of the riddle, and I didn't resort to a guide; good enough.
This finally yielded the magical apartment key, which in turned housed yet another key to a stairwell and an apparent Pyramid Head boss fight. Unfortunately, nothing James does can put an apparent dent in the sucker, due to him having, you know, a giant metal head, and in the close quarters for the fight, James really can't maneuver well enough to avoid being hit a fair deal, even with the ridiculous wind-up time Head needs for his giant Buster Sword. And yeah, I thought about shooting him from behind while he was swinging; that doesn't work, either - particularly when James is just as likely to shoot at thin air rather than at the huge target trying to shove a sword down his throat. I'd been given a bloody knife by the girl from the opening previously (for "safekeeping" - she was afraid she'd hurt herself if she held onto it, even though I think it'd be chancier to be running around Silent Hill with no means of self-defense), and, recalling how unintuitive item use short-circuited the first game's fight with Cybil, tried using it on Pyramid Head. (He is, after all, represented as a Fury-like spirit of vengeance in a newspaper article you find earlier in the game, where a convicted child-killer rants about his presence before meeting a bloody death.) No effect, though. Perhaps I should use it on the mannequin before the fight, whose body remains conspicuously in the room. (Trying to attack said body with regular weapons does no good.)
Two story things: 1) While they're aiming high here, the voice acting issues are even more pronounced when you're trying to do serious psychological drama than when you're trying to do a B-movie. The visuals in front of the mirror in the reunion with Opening Girl are down, but there's no unity in tone, and it's not initially clear that the writers mean for her characterization to be all over the map. 2) The cowering Eddie looks awfully like an out-of-shape James; does he represent James's denial? Every word out of his mouth is some sort of excuse - I didn't kill that dead body in the kitchen; I didn't even know the guy; I don't even belong in this town; I know I should leave town for my own safety, but whatever.
.
