"What do you think of when you think of a woman in pain? There are no tidy universalisms here, but for many of us, even most of us, pain is private and domestic. You could think of a mother shouldering burdens alone while her husband is at work. The father in the waiting room while the mother screams with strangers. A woman going to the doctor about an ache, only for him to tell her to lose weight and deny the problem is even happening."
"All these things are simple clichés--tropes stolen from life and television. When Silent Hill f conjures a woman's private pain, it is with cutting specificity. In one of the most grisly moments of body horror in video games this year (or ever, really), protagonist Hinako turns into an emblem of her own sorrow, her own compliance, her own screaming rage."
Silent Hill f alternates a fog-bound real world with an otherworld that appears whenever Hinako falls unconscious. The otherworld is marked by Shinto monuments and dream mansions suspended over water and literalizes Hinako's private sorrow through body-horror. Hinako faces a promised marriage arranged by her parents to settle a family debt, and that arrangement strips away her friendships, family ties, and sense of self. The game's first ending reveals the playable girl as a representation of a younger Hinako betrayed by an older self. The narrative links domestic rites and medical dismissal to psychological and corporeal disintegration.
Read at GameSpot
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