I don’t normally treat “spooky season” as a reason to do anything other than eating my own weight in pumpkin spice-flavored snacks, so it’s not common for me to bust out the horror games this time of year.

That said, there is a new Silent Hill game, and I preordered it, and I was NOT going to do the thing where you preorder games and play the intro when it comes out and then put it aside “for later” and it’s been marked down to 20 bucks or less multiple times by the time you finally see any of the game past the tutorial.

Not that I’ve done this.  But, uh, a friend has.  On several occasions.  This friend is so silly, and so bad with money! Let’s take a moment to laugh at my friend.

So now that we’ve established that, while I didn’t technically pick it out of the Steam library BECAUSE it was a horror game and this is horror season, it’s certainly thematic.

Also it’s a really good experience.  I know there was a lot of drama around having a Silent Hill game that is not set in, well, Silent Hill, but even if this just had the branding slapped on it to move more copies it still delivers everything I want out of a Silent Hill game.

I did have the WEIRDEST damn sensation several times playing it, though.  See, for a good chunk of the game you are wandering through a very rural 1960s Japanese town, and if you ignore the faceless flesh monstrosities and the rot that is slowly consuming everything it’s actually a very pleasant little town.  Like, I would 100% visit this place.  Take pictures home to show the friends and family.  That would be a slide show for the ages.  “Here’s the little corner store that is still selling 100% hand-made dagashi, never mind the mysterious fleshy lumps, and here’s a rice field that has gone through 12 generations of farmers, and if you look in the background you’ll see that there is a scarecrow wearing a school uniform, holding a knife and covered in blood…”

Overall, a bit of a disturbing experience but still recommended.

The ending recommends a second play through now that you know The Big Twist, and I think it’s justified… but I have another thing taking my time before I get back to that.

Specifically, this:

I don’t know why Shift Up decided to do a Nikke/Resident Evil crossover.  I’m not entirely sure it makes sense.  Nikke is pretty much about robot butts, and Resident Evil is not normally considered a sexy game.

HOWEVER.

Previously, I have gone into their crossover events not knowing much about the other characters in the event, and the storylines have fallen a little flat as a result.  But, I looked up the Resident Evil characters featured in this and discovered that they are all from the first RE two games.   So catching up on the series enough to know a little about the characters seemed easy enough.

It’s not that I’ve never played a Resident Evil game, mind you!  In fact, I’ve owned the first Resident Evil for several platforms, going all the way back to the “Director’s Cut DualShock Version” for the PS1.  It’s just that, well, I’ve never really gotten very far in the game.

OK, cards on the table, I’ve never made it to the first item box.  Mostly I’ve just wandered around the first couple of rooms of the mansion, completely lost because of the camera angles and fighting the controls, and I get eaten by birds or something and rage quit.

But it turns out that the PC remaster of the GameCube remake of the original game features a “very easy” mode which effectively neuters all of the enemies and throws ammo and save ribbons at you, meaning that you are not so much fighting the zombies as much as you are fighting the camera and the controls and the godawful inventory system and that stupid one way door near the east wing item box and the miserable miserable experience of needing to backtrack to the last item box because you didn’t bring the correct quest item to rub against the correct shiny spot on the screen and…

…ahem.

Let me just say, if you made it through this game at its intended difficulty level, you have my respect.  That goes double if you made it through the game in any of the American releases, where they bumped up the difficulty to screw over the rental market.   There is a good game here, but man it demands a level of patience that I absolutely did not have in the late 1990s and probably could not command even nearly 30 years later..

Taking a look through the achievements for the game, it looks like there are achievements for completing the game in three hours or less, and for doing it without saving, and for limiting yourself to melee combat, and…

…and I will never be seeing any of these achievements.  Ever.

Anyway, next up is Resident Evil 2 Remake.  Technically, I’ve played a little of this because it was free on Amazon Luna for a month and I put a few hours into it.  I don’t know if I can download my Luna save and apply it to the Steam version, and I’d be completely lost even if I did, so I’ll be starting from scratch.  The game actually lends itself pretty well to that, though, with its two protagonist system.  I can pick Claire this time, instead of Leon, and it should be at least a slightly different experience – and Claire is in the Nikke crossover, so that works out as well.