sincere | Silent Hill Downpour: DAY ONE

The opening menu is super atmospheric. There's just rain, and creepy noise, and occasional background screams, and then it slowly builds up to actual music.

The opening menu fades into the opening video!!

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sincere - 2012-03-14 04:50 (UTC) - Expand

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rainfall - 2012-03-14 05:59 (UTC) - Expand

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sincere - 2012-03-14 04:50 (UTC) - Expand

Game difficulty: easy.
Puzzle difficulty: normal.

The loading screen helpfully says, "If you run out of ammo, you can use your gun as a melee weapon."

Then it says, "Are you sure you're alone?"

Okay, Murphy is in jail. The guard leads him to a room and somewhat creepily calls him cupcake and says "I left a present for you on the bench."

In the shower room.

Then the guy is like "If you turn on all the showers we guards can't see anything you do. Get my meaning?"

...shhhhower rape?

All right, turning on all the showers. On the bench is a pipe and a knife. We pick up one and then the other one is no longer pickuppable.

Then a huge guy enters and is like, "Wait, what? I'm an isolated prisoner, I'm not supposed to see other people ever. Where are the guards?"

There's just... Murphy, holding a weapon... and a set-up...

Uh-oh.

Murphy says, "You don't remember me, huh? We used to be neighbors."

The guy starts shrieking and running and begging for guards to come.

Murphy, e.g. you, beats him with the pipe for a while, then stabs him with the knife for a while, then beats him with fists for a while, then... kills him I guess.

It's grotesque and painful. And effective.

rainfall: WELL, I FEEL SICK WITH MYSELF :D

rainfall: I assume Murphy has serious reason to hate this guy

rainfall: but he's so pathetic.

rainfall: So. It's a very effective opening scene.

rainfall: It's positively nasty of them to not let us know, even now, why we murdered that guy. Assuming it really happened.

rainfall: So much cupcake'd

So now we're on a march out of the prison. The other prisoners holler at us as we go. Now we're freeeee.

rainfall: lol unreadable subtitle font.

rainfall: I mean it's fine. But it's a ridiculous font to use for subtitles. X3

We get on a bus! A tough lady cop is escorting us home.

rainfall: She has it in for us

rainfall: It must be the murder 8D

omg the music is gooorgeous right now.

rainfall: Definitely not Akira Yamaoka, but fitting all the same.

Murphy is dreaming restlessly about a little boy -- a crashed bicycle -- police --

He wakes up, and the other prisoners start asking him significantly if he "really did it," if the rumors are true. The lady cop tells them to shut it, some bickering and loud noises start, the driver looks away from a road for just a second...

AHHHH ONE OF SILENT HILL'S ABRUPT ROAD ENDINGS AHHHH

The bus goes very sharply over a cliff.

TITLE SCREEN!

rainfall: So far so good. The sequence outside Silent Hill was -- interesting and horrible. 8D

rainfall: Creative.

So we're alone when we get up. Murphy finds the bus, in horrible condition, and then continues on.

rainfall doesn't linger to investigate it.

We find a body being eaten by crows. Murphy observes this death didn't happen in the crash. YOU GET, FLASHLIGHT! He's a more active flashlight-user if he holds it, but he can also clip it to his belt to free up a hand.

Hey Murphy told me to move. :( He said he had to get some distance from the bus.

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sincere - 2012-03-14 06:05 (UTC) - Expand

On the shore of a creepy, foggy lake. You can wade up to hipdeep in water before Murphy observes he can't make it, he can't even see the other side.

Back into the creepy forest!

rainfall: It almost feels like exploring a real woods, because you can take a lot of different paths to get to the same place

rainfall: I can walk up this hill any way, between any two trees...

There's a wide, varied path that you could believe as a forest, instead of just one obvious corridor.

I am impressed that you correctly interrupted my scattered comments. X3 I really liked that little wooded area. c:

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sincere - 2012-03-14 06:04 (UTC) - Expand

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rainfall - 2012-03-14 06:04 (UTC) - Expand

rainfall: The last loading screen tip said just "STOP DOING THAT", all in caps.

I like that.

This is the fourth time

rainfall has plummeted off this log over a ravine. The balancing mechanic is... obviously challenging.

...When you're using the wrong stick, as

rainfall cleverly observes on her fifth try!

sob it was like

"Tilt left and right not to fall"

so for some reason counter to all videogaming logic ever I thought it wanted me to use the RIGHT STICK when falling to the right and... yeah.

Uh-oh! Lady cop found us! And she's angry. She is not amused that we managed to lose our handcuffs somehow in the crash.

She tries to strafe over the wall of a chasm to get over to us and is not having a lot of luck, and then falls.

You get the option of helping her or leaving her, and we choose to HELP HER OF COURSE, but she still falls.

We climb up the rock wall and end up on a very foggy road...

Some running takes us away from a Silent Hill Broken Road Into Nothingness (TM) and to an abandoned gas station. +1 map, +1 wrench!

rainfall: We are riffing on past music. This radio is playing "Promise" from Silent Hill 2.

The game instructs us to throw a brick at a crow, because Murphy is a classy guy.

We climb onto the roof of the gas station and there's a creepy wheelchair on its side, with one wheel slowly blowing in the wind, making horrible rusty noises...

rainfall: The one thing you need to know about Silent Hill is that there is no place you can't find disused medical equipment.

Also, a walkie-talkie! Scooore.

We have reached Devil's Pit Aerial Tram.

Now with wheelchair access! and the wheelchair figure on the signs defaced!

Something has left a trail dug deep in the ground. Let's follow it!

One thing is sure: there are plenty of rocks to use as weapons if you run out of wrench.

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sincere - 2012-03-14 05:27 (UTC) - Expand

It's a good thing there's lots of wrench and pipe and nailbat and rock to go around, since you can only carry one weapon at a time.