Why is this so unnerving?

Why is this so unnerving?

because you're a pussy

exactly that.

fear of the unknown

He had a hole inside him ever since he lost his wife but silent hill helped ease his mind and thus the hole is gone. His feeling of relief manifested itself as a message on the wall.

because its like the town itself is spitting our error messages at you, it creates the sense of a constructed reality that's falling apart at the seams with you inside it

Just imagine a janitor wrote that so the landlord could see. Badaboom badabing you're no longer scared

The second message is scarier

It basically became a meme. It doesn't really have any real meaning in the game. It is one of those things that is simply a spooky Silent Hill kind of thing.

Because it is my peanus weenus :D

This one is far less scary than the first one.
The first one is vague, but not flowery. It's weirdly specific yet not addressing anything you can immediately recognize, weirdly casual, and that is what makes it so unnerving. You feel like you should know what it means, but you don't.

The second message makes sense, and disclose a pretty important part of the story, but that makes it easier to frame, and thus make it less scary.

It makes you feel trapped inside

This is just joker-tier edgy and you are the gayest person alive

No it isn't. It's not subtle at all

HURR HURR YOU GOING TO HELL BUT UR WIFE ISN'T WONDER WHY

>A window is only a window when you put glass over an empty hole.
You don't really think the emptiness goes away, do you?
And don't tell me, you think the glass will PROTECT you from the emptiness?

You can't undo what you did, James. Nobody can.

Bulletproof glass would work probably.

This one is not scary. I mean the first one is not scary either, but it's mysterious and cryptic and if you played SH1, you would just assume that in the otherworld version of the city, there would be an actual hole there.

I'm still not sure which between SH 1-3 is the scariest. They all seem to have their great moments.

This is unironically the single worst story-related thing in SH2 and I can't believe they didn't remove it. It's western-tier blatancy.

>It's western-tier blatancy.

Fuck off, weeb. The Japs are the ones that almost completely and utterly lack any subtlety. Even the SH games, the great examples of subtle Jap gaming, have more than their fair share of plain old exposition dumps.

We're talking in the context of Silent Hill. Stop posting.

Can't tell if this is bait. If you don't know about Neely's bar at the start of the game, you're likely going to find the note in the caravan. Seeing this when you don't know what to expect is just as cryptic as the other message. Why should he kill himself? Why would he be heading to a different place? In any case, there's nothing edgy or poorly written about it.

I'm sorry, did I hurt your MUH INTELLECTUAL PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR feelings?

You can leave the thread now.

Dude, I did not know much about the story and still very easily understood the message.

"If you want to meet your wife, you better kill yourself." = she is dead.
"You might be heading into a different place" = you are going to hell, because you did something really bad.

It's incredibly obvious. This guy is right - at least about it being the weakest part of the narrative.

I don't think you understand the words "subtlety" and "exposition".

I do agree that Japs don't exactly value subtlety in most of their fiction - especially not pop-culture one. But amounts of exposition aren't the problem here, it's the blatancy of the message. And SH2 has no other scene that would so painfully directly spell shit out for you. Everything else is left to be inferred until you reach the hotel. This, on the other hand, can't be considered foreshadowing or inferrence, it flat out spells to you what happened to your wife and that you are guilty of something terrible.

>Why should he kill himself? Why would he be heading to a different place?

Are you serious? He should kill himself to see Mary because she is dead. He's going to a different place because he did something bad, he's going to hell. They may as well have just written "You killed Mary".

This post says everything i wanted to say. The message literally tells you that Mary is in heaven and therefore death.

I find them both incredibly eerie.

Regarding the second, the scary bit isn't the content of the message but the fact that something is addressing James himself. Worse yet is that it has an understanding of the circumstances even the audience doesn't know of. The creepy bit is that it's a schizophrenic voice encouraging you to not only kill yourself, but that it knows better than you do of the fate that awaits you after your demise except that unlike voices in your head this "voice" very clearly is not a hallucination as it's written right there on the wall - there's no mistaking that it's very real and very possibly knows things it shouldn't.

The hole statement is the creepiness of the unknown; the second message is creepiness of something that knows more than it should.

>complaining about western horror

Yeah, because asian horror game/movie #4858852 that is entirely composed of 'scary asian girl with scary face pops out of the dark' sure is better.

It would be a bit better without the second half of that message

>Regarding the second, the scary bit isn't the content of the message but the fact that something is addressing James himself
That is actually my biggest complaint about that moment. I think the fact that they address James directly cheap. It's an over-used trope. I liked how the world IS designed for him, but the game isn't clear about that until basically the Staircase of Fire scene.

The "the evil entity is following you and knows about you" trope is just not all that interesting to me, and seriously over-used. I liked Pyramid Head as villain precisely because he felt like he is basically isn't even interested in James. Giving the city a DIRECT VOICE that speaks directly to James like this felt like a cheezy and cheap thing that really lowers it down to generic horror, rather than the eerie tone the rest of the game has.

>the second message is creepiness of something that knows more than it should

This is already established with the opening scene of the game and the letter. So they are treading water then, big fucking deal.

Okay, I just realized where you're coming from and why you feel "the evil that knows you" is horrible. It's like the scenes in shitty horror movies where "Satan" threatens the protagonists by spelling something in blood in the mirror like, "YOU ARE GOING TO DIE". And I agree that it's a tired trope because it is a flagrant and inelegant use of personification in regards to the town.

In reflection I admit that the line and execution is certainly cheesy and needlessly edgy.

I'll admit I just enjoyed being reminded the town had some weird means of interacting with the world. I agree with what you two have said but I can't stop liking it.

Holy brain damage, you guys really shouldn't reproduce. We already know Mary is dead - James tells us at the start of the fucking game. What we don't know is that he killed her. It might be a thought, but there's no way of knowing for sure. It could just as likely be that he did something else. Literally nothing wrong with the message, you're just mouth breathers.

Considering the fucking letter, it's clearly the point of the game to make you wonder if she is really dead or not, for fuck sake. What is up with retards and SH2 threads?

>It could just as likely be that he did something else.

No, it couldn't be because the game never shuts up about his wife for the exact reason that it's all about that. They're not going to spring an unrelated hit and run from his teenage years or something out of nowhere on us. It's a big fucking flashing neon sign that says "James did something very bad to his wife who is now dead." It doesn't take a genius to join the dots.

Saying that James is going to hell gives the entire plot away.

The problem i have with it is that it directly references James.