Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs Discussion Topic Part 3

[DavidS]

Silent Hill is a very good horror game, even scarier than Amnesia and there are the hardest puzzles I ever saw in a game. Really awesome and I always enjoy to stuck and search for help in the internet. Puzzles are even more important than pure horror, that's why I find Penumbra better than Amnesia.

I don`t want to get into the discussion about immersion, but it sure is important to note that the puzzles in Silent Hill (apart from sometimes having their own difficulty settings) are also often cloesly tied to the protagonists subconcious or the environmental circumstances (The town as an almost sentient being... wich then is again tied to the protagonists subconcious. This even works for NPCs like in SH2. I always love to think that the fat kid and the suicidal girl are there to set a psychological contrast to James). In a way these made them engaging and interesting as the way to the solution was almost an act of self reflection and so delicately incorporated into the setting that often the player only gets some sort of "gut feeling": Sometimes you didn`t even want to solve a puzzle as this could reveal something nasty about your surroundings and yourself (at least I sometimes felt that way... good lord, if I had the money and team... SH games are what made horror games interesting for me in the first place. ...wich of course makes me biased to an extend ^^ ).

What I am saying is: SH (especially 2 and 3) could allow itself to have sometimes difficult and obscure puzzles because within the context of the story and setting, they made sense (to some extend... nothing is perfect and in the end it is also personal preferences that matter).