The atmosphere in this starting segment is important as it introduces the player to Silent Hill's Dark World, or the nightmare space the player will occupy for the back half of the game. When the player regains control of Harry, several small creatures with knives emerge from the darkness and stab him to death, jolting him awake. Harry comes across a body crucified to an I-beam, and as the camera tilts up, voltage runs through the corpse as it begins to violently convulse. The walls are rusted and brown-red, made of grating and wrought iron. Player character Harry is navigating a hallway that grows increasingly dark until he finally pulls his flashlight out, mildly illuminating his surroundings. The first Silent Hill (Team Silent, 1999) starts with a nightmare, which serves as foreshadowing for some of the awful things to come. Like Rule of Rose, we can learn a lot from how Silent Hill conceptualizes nightmare aesthetics, and how that's made apparent through its level design. Games like Rule of Rose take many cues from the Silent Hill series, which functionally laid out a blueprint for how to do 3D psychological horror that we're still referencing. What we’re playing is not literal, but rather represents what a given experience felt like, as opposed to cleanly showing the player what “objectively” happened in Jennifer’s life. Very little that happens in the game is “real” as the player experiences it, but rather a fantasy built from memories stacked on top of each other and contorted into something recognizable but heightened and disjointed. At its core, the game is about abuse, and how abuse colors the way we see the world. The level that follows sees Jennifer going through the motions of that story, towards its disastrous conclusion that you and she both know is coming. At the beginning of each chapter, the player is given a small scrap of a picture book to read, which always has a disturbing or cruel resolution. Structurally, it’s a series of vignettes, each taking the form of a children’s story that’s been bent out of shape. Rule of Rose follows Jennifer, a 19 year old girl returning to an orphanage where she spent some time early in her life. Rule of Rose, however, lives deep within unreality and makes that known to the player by rejecting physical logic, embracing a freedom with its levels not afforded to many similar games. When they're more obtrusive and less contextualized, these level design choices can sap a game of its verisimilitude (ala, the frequent employment of invisible walls). The paper over that door couldn't be crossed because Jennifer's mind wouldn't let her,and this modality is present in just about every aspect of the game's design. However, it's rare that I see a horror game truly capture the subtler aspects of nightmares, such as actual helplessness, stagnation, an inability to move forward, or to move on. They often contain things we associate with bad dreams: monsters, dark rooms, and disorienting audiovisual design. It's common to say that a horror game feels like a nightmare. This relatively innocuous challenge makes material the feeling of having progress blocked by something that, realistically, is easily surmountable. It’s a silly way of framing a pretty standard lock and key puzzle and that’s entirely the point. A room that I needed to enter was blocked by four thin strips of paper, each requiring a different item to remove. There’s a moment towards the end of Rule of Rose (Punchline, 2006) where I got what it was doing.
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