Artwork Graciously Provided by the Incredibe Steven Luna

Part Fourteen, or Stage Hands' Lament

  Welcome back to Silent Hill, nefarious brigands and beneficent nobles alike! I am the physical manifestation of your destiny, Jonathan Charles Bruce, with the physical manifestation of my casual indifference, Travis Grady, and we are continuing our trip through the Artaud Theater! When last we left the marionette murdering mayhem master, he was running down through the east wing of the building to get back to the mirror in the men’s changing room. Will he accomplish this harrowing ordeal? Or will he fall, forever dooming Creepy Girl’s plans to… uh… whatever it is that she’s trying to do?

  He makes it. And then he crosses over to the mirror world. And then he runs up to where the door with the flanking indentations is. The room is now guarded by 3 grounded Ariels, which, as previously established, are much more dangerous fiends than their ceiling hanging counterparts. As such, Travis uses his boomstick to make it very clear that he doesn’t truck with no goddamn puppets—especially when they’re not wearing pants.

  Setting the totem in the indentation causes the door to unlock. Side note: the left side is typically associated with evil, which is probably why the moon totem goes into the left indentation. We also derive the term “sinister” (middle English for underhanded or evil) from the Latin and Old French terms for “left” or “left-handed”, which is kind of neat.

  I have yet to have anyone get it whenever someone tells me they’re left handed and I respond “How sinister.” Someday, however, someone will validate me.

  The mirror world second floor is still crappy, even more so because I still can’t gain access to the catwalks. Instead, I wander down the hall to get into the backstage proper. I am ambushed by a pair of Ariels that are quite competent and make it quite difficult to actually repulse them. In my desperation, I discover that the IV stand actually has a semi-useful feature—its length and wide swing means I do hit multiple enemies per swipe. Nevertheless, it still shatters before the things die and I must rely on other, infinitely less stupid weapons.

  Before we start exploring rooms, let’s run to the end of the hall and see what’s… oh, hey, there’s a hunting rifle here resting on a totem pole. Um… okay.

  Why do you keep on insisting on hiding your guns, Climax? It is entirely plausible that the only weapons a player can get if they’re scared of exploring are melee weapons and the shotgun. Everything else appears to be optional. While, yes, it encourages exploration, it also unduly punishes first time players who may be constantly critical on supplies and unwilling to see if the hall contains a health drink or a sex puppet intent on kicking them in the chin.

  When I enter the costume room on this floor, I stumble upon a lovely mirror that takes me back to vanilla Silent Hill. On the other side, there’s another katana just lying around, which I guess means there must have been a Feudal Japan version of MacBeth that the troupe did. You know, that could have been pretty cool—but then I remember the costume designer, and he would probably put all the actors in yellow face and then I just get sad.

  There’s also a note in here from what I assume to be the very same dumbass costume designer. Apparently, something bad happened to the actor who played Prospero (Tony, if you’ll recall). I guess as a result, the costume designer has been dreaming about someone/something called THE BUTCHER, and has even seen him/it his motel. He claims that it looks just like “that monster, the executioner!”

  So… Stabby Man’s real name is the Butcher? I guess that’s plausible. He does carry a massive cleaver and we first saw him in the butcher’s shop. So, sure. What’s this gibberish about a monster called the executioner, though? Should that mean something to us? I suppose it should, but right now, it’s precisely wank.

  Also, does this mean that the Butcher has access to our reality? I’m assuming the costume designer, as useless as he is, would be rightly freaked out if he was teleported to an abandoned foggy town reality. Since he makes no mention of the nightmare world or anything of the like, I can only realistically assume that if he’s seen the Butcher in the real world that Silent Hill’s monstrous denizens do whatever the hell they want whenever they want.

  I guess, more to the point though, I’d like to know what happened to Tony. Did Creepy Girl make him pop like a balloon, a la the nurse? Was he split open, neck to crotch, like the taffyman? Did a sandbag fall on him? If I were to make a spurious guess, just based on this note, the costume designer killed Tony—accidentally or purposefully—and is now being stalked by the Butcher (who looks like an “executioner”) for the crime. I mean, we’ve only really seen the Butcher kill monsters, and executioners don’t just get to flay whoever they want.

  This is now my official guess—the shitty costume designer killed Tony and the Butcher doesn’t put up with that shit. Said costume designer is now split “almost in half”, probably trying to figure out which organ will be the most pen-like for whatever spooooooky message he intends on leaving behind.

  Well, now I’m in a good mood! I close the note up, and there’s a weird noise that sounds… kind of… like a knife maybe? I think it was supposed to be scary and thematically appropriate with the tone of the note, but nothing happened. There was just a noise. Now, if I closed the note and Travis was standing in a puddle of blood, that would have worked.

  There’s a health drink next to where the note was. I’m forced to conclude now that the health drinks are powerful hallucinogens, and are probably solely responsible for Silent Hill’s denizens being jerks (Dr. Skeeves), spaced-out idiots (Creepy Woman), mood-swingin’ morons (Lisa), or emotionless husks (Travis).

  Out in the hallway, I have to floor an Ariel, whereupon I discover that they have the creepiest “grounded but not dead” animations of all the monsters. Most just kind of writhe or twitch, but these things flop around like a nude human-shaped fish. It’s super unsettling, and I’m glad Travis puts a stop to it with extreme prejudice.

  In the hallway, I do find a new healing item—the ampoule. Since this seems shockingly late in the game for such a thing, I am pretty sure I missed one earlier. But that’s neither here nor there. An ampoule is an item that typically recovers full/most vitality in pretty much every Silent Hill it turns up in. In Origins, it also restores your endurance as well, meaning that Travis won’t be winded. So it’s a supped-up med-kit coupled with an energy drink.

  Or it’s just cocaine.

  Realistically, though, ampoules are glass vials that contain a certain amount of medical liquid, ready for injection. I… I didn’t pick up a syringe, and I don’t know what’s in it so… Travis is just willing to apparently drink some random liquid out of a drug vial he stumbled on in a dark theater full of sex puppets. Um… am I the only one who thinks that maybe he should just stick to the medical kits? No?

  Stealing other people’s needed medicine aside, I try poking around more up here, but the only door that doesn’t lead to our eventual catwalk puzzle is the one that puts me in Orchestra Storage, next to the Scenery Workshop.

  Hold up, let’s be super realistic in this game about Creepy Girls potentially causing actor’s heads to explode with their minds. First, orchestra storage? Where do they go? There’s no indication on stage that there’s an orchestra pit. Even if the proscenium is removable (which it doesn’t look like it is, at all), now you’ve generated a hazard for the people in the storage room on stage right and the curtain control on stage left because both rooms have doors that will dump them straight into a fall into the pit.

  Do they play on stage? Like, in direct line of sight with the actors? Do they play behind them and hope that the actors can be heard above the racket they’re generating? Do they play up in the balcony? Or do you squeeze them all in the lighting booth box?

  I suppose this may just be for music recitals or whatever, but this actually brings up another significant problem—putting this stuff on the second floor is hugely impractical. Look at the map—the scenery workshop, where they build and maintain flats and props and other assets of the production, and the orchestra storage are both on the second floor without direct or quick access to the stage. There aren’t stairs backstage, nor is there an elevator.

  How the bloody hell is this supposed to work? Are deliveries of heavy materials brought into the front, taken through the lobby, up the east stairwell, lugged up a second flight of stairs, and dragged to the scenery workshop, only to be dragged down two flights of stairs, across the eastern halls, and finally to the stage? Do you have any idea how heavy and unwieldy flats are? Yes, they’re just a frame and canvas, but holy hell they are a massive pain in the ass to get from point A to point B in anything less than a human lifetime. That’s why most flats are bolted to the stage and most plays take place in one goddamn room.

  And, sure, there are catwalks, suggesting that you could lower the scenery to the stage. But the doors that lead to the catwalks are just regular sized doors and… well, we’ll get to that.

  Long story short, this is probably one of the worst laid out theaters I have ever seen, and I worked in a high school where we didn’t have wings and we had to build our own pit. Theater of cruelty indeed.

  Leaving the poor stage crew to their own devices, I wander to the catwalks to complete the puzzle I solved last time. The biggest problem was that I wasn’t paying attention to the bulbs I was putting into the lighting and had to take two out and switch them around. It wasn’t particularly difficult. But once everything was just so, I threw the switch for the stage lights. Immediately after doing so, there is an unsettling roar from below Travis. I’m guessing that I just woke up Caliban.

  More important than the scary noise, though, is that this managed to fix the problem that was preventing me from being able to raise the curtain earlier. As you’ll remember from two updates ago, the lights have to be perfect for the breaker to actually function appropriately. So thanks to the wonders of shoddy wiring, we now have our way to the stage!

  So, I know I covered this flippantly already, but this stage is actually really well laid out. The note in the beginning gives us our ultimate destination—Caliban’s cave. We walk across the stage where—if you think about it—is only one of two places for Caliban’s cave to be. The only other would be if the actor playing Caliban had it in a hidden stash somewhere. The curtain control room has a note that tells us how to raise the curtain, which gives us the second to last goal—raising the curtain.

  Architectural stupidity aside, the Artaud Theater feels like a very strong level, and all it took was letting the player in on what the ultimate goal was. The ‘why’ of it all is actually less important than just giving us something to do. What do I mean by that? Well, in the level-that-must-not-be-named, the ‘why’ of Travis running around—chasing Dr. Kauffman—is given to the player, but it doesn’t actually provide us direction. It is only when we stumble on the female isolation ward that it becomes clear what we need to do to finish the level. As such, the thing just feels like its longer and more of a trial than what it is.

  I’m almost done with the Artaud and I’ve actually spent far more time critically examining the decisions of fictional people than gameplay, because the gameplay is actually good, with a clear end point in sight. I don’t even care that Travis is here for only the murkiest of reasons—he found a fucking ticket on a coffee table in an asylum waiting room.

  Go team Climax! Kind of!

  Well, I suppose it’s time to scamper down to the stage and prepare to put two in Caliban’s dome so I can steal his magical paperweight of plot relevance. Roughly half of that will occur in the next episode, The Most Unrealistic ThingS About this Game are the Theater’s Sets.

     

  

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