Artwork Graciously Provided by the Incredibe Steven Luna

Part Twenty-Six, or My Rig, She's A-Callin'

  Finally, it has come to this… we have reached the climax. Travis has come a long way: he’s psychically physically murdered his psychological hang ups, punched monstrosities in their stupid ugly faces, stomped on enough taffy wieners to secure the monstrous species’ extinction, assembled a paperweight out of smaller paperweights, and worked to foil an evil cult’s plan as he collected in excess of 425 pounds of crap. It’s been a wild (if slightly goofy and kind of dumb) ride, and it’s time to end this the only way we know how: by shooting things until they don’t move no more.

  Since we’re going into the battle with the final boss, no mere in-game cutscene will do; this requires the abject artwork of a pre-rendered cutscene:

I want to know what's in Dr. Skeeves's hand, but then again, I'm perfectly content not knowing.

  Huh. Okay. Couple of things:

  1) I was holding the Redeemer, but Travis walks in with the shotgun. Since that is literally the only gun in the game you are required to pick up, I guess it makes sense. I wouldn’t ask that they create a billion versions of this for the sake of game/cutscene consistency, namely because watching Travis walk into the final fight holding a toaster or television would come across less as “I’m a badass” and more “I’m moving furniture for the cult!”

    1, subsection A) Climax, you knew the shotgun was the only item people would collect; 10 points from Gryffindor for being stingy with videogame firearms.

  2) As utterly loathsome as Dr. Skeeves is, the voice actor nails his condescending evilness right there and it’s pretty awesome.

  3) Travis may want to see a real, non-Silent Hill doctor after this, just based on the pure number of times he’s passed the fuck out. Sure, they were all controlled by others, but at this point I wouldn’t be shocked if he had a tumor in the shape of a giant middle finger growing in his brain.

  4) According to Dahlia, the Flauros is a cage to a demon and it focuses thought and it’s really hot… wait, that wasn’t Dahlia.

  5) ALESSA HAS A FUCKING VOICE ACTRESS AND THIS IS HER ONLY FUCKING APPEARANCE!? WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK, CLIMAX!?

  6) DEMON OUTTA NOWHERE!

  Okay, the last boss, while coherent, is still really underwhelming in its design. It’s just kind of a generic demony type thing, and I’m not sure how I really feel about it. I mean, if it was birthed from Travis’s hallucination, like the cutscene kind of implies, I suppose it would align with his ideas of what a “demon” would look like. But after all the twisted lumps of gooey flesh and all that, just a big red roaring monster is kind of a letdown.

  That being said, this thing is an ungainly powerhouse that will wreck Travis’s shit if you let it. If Travis spends too much time in a 150-degree-ish arc in front of the beast, it will swat at him with its mighty claw. This hurts when it connects, so it’s best to not be the recipient of the world’s meanest slap. Also, it can tear open its chestical and belch out a stream of plasma that can hit Travis multiple times. I’m pretty sure that getting nailed with this at close range and anything less than full health can easily kill you.

  So, you may think that keeping your distance is the solution, but you would be wrong, ya idiot. First, it’s not just the shotgun that becomes ineffective at any distance larger than ten feet or so—I’m pretty sure the only gun whose bullets don’t slam to the earth beyond that point is the hunting rifle. Second, the third and final attack the demon (Flauros Demon? Sure, why not?) does is causing randomized flaming chunks of the ceiling to crash down about the arena, with their main intent being Travis’s skull. The attack seems to be centered on where Travis is at the start of the Flauros’s meteo animation, and the rifle’s (well, any weapon’s, really) slowish draw and un-draw speed will net our heroic trucker several new indentations in his brain.

  The only way to really avoid that attack successfully is to run as far as you can away from your previous position, and even then, you’ll still probably get nicked by an errant fireball. Staying in one place will almost always get you nailed once, and then two or three follow up flames will wreck your day in short order. That’s actually the biggest danger with the attack—one Travis is hit, he will stagger, often bumbling directly into a fireball or pausing long enough to attract the attention of several others falling from the sky.

  So how do you win? Equip the Redeemer, run behind the bastard, and start plugging away at its back/arm pit. When it turns to face you, scamper to the other side and keep banging away. When it rears back for its fireball attack, run. Down an energy drink if you have to, but run in one direction and keep going. You can try to dodge the attacks by watching where the floor glows, but it’s the smarter bet to just pick one direction and hope for the best. Attack over, run headlong toward the monster—this will hopefully cause it to do its magical chest-beam thinger, and you can take the warm-up time to dance around behind the beast and repeat the process.

  Do note that you will run out of Redeemer ammo before the monster dies. Yes, the most powerful gun in the game isn’t enough to drop the final boss with the ammo the game provides you, which is actually kind of nice. It makes the boss actually seem tough, although it’s an artificial tough (once you figure out how to beat his AI, he’s just a bullet sponge). At this point, switch to whatever you want to finish the job.

  I decided to unload some of my melee weapons on it.

  After thirty .44 cal bullets, two televisions, a typewriter, two first aid kits, a health drink, and an energy drink, the Flauros Demon fell to a set of iron weights I stole from the Artaud Theater.

  I know, I know. I wish it had been one of the televisions, too.

  We are deposited in another pre-rendered cutscene, so enjoy the shit out of that:

Ha! Our plan went perfectly! I think!

  I thoroughly love how Travis and the Flauros Demon stop trying to kill each other when Travis pulls out the Flauros Device. It gets all spinny and shiny and stuff, and both Trav and el diablo are just “Let’s see where this is going.” I have to imagine that the moment the golden barbed wire wraps around the Demon, it’s just thinking “HOW DID I NOT SEE THIS COMING!?”

  Alternate thought: “No! Golden magic barbed wire! My only weakness!”

  Alternate gag: When the demon is broken up and pulled into the Flauros, make a "slrrrrrrrrrrp" noise. It's surprisingly fitting.

  And naturally, Travis passes right the fuck out. Let’s see, there was once in the beginning, then once per stage, then these two instances… seven times. In what I’m assuming is less than twenty-four hours. Not that time means a fucking thing in these goddamn games, really. But I still maintain Travis’s first stop after all this is a clinic well outside of Silent Hill’s boundaries that will hopefully not ask too many questions.

  Somehow, the Flauros also generates a free baby above Alessa’s charred not-corpse. So… um… that was our end game? I guess? To… build a baby out of the one that Dahlia burned alive? Anyone else feel kind of weird about this? Just me? Okay.

  We also get another cinematic!

Let us not go to Silent Hill. 'Tis a silly place.

  So, I guess Travis is perfectly content to let Alessa’s psychic projection take care of the baby or something. I mean, sure. Not like he could, you know, drop the child off at an orphanage or take care of it himself. I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational explanation for it. Like maybe the cult has national reach and they’d find it OH WAIT I SAID “RATIONAL” AND THIS IS SOME PODUNK CULT, NOT FUCKING COBRA FROM G.I. JOE. I can sort of understand Travis not taking it, just because he’s probably marked for death or something.

  Wait… anyone else notice that Travis’s rig is actually pointed toward Silent Hill? Like, is he just gonna drive back through the town that’s been actively hostile toward him for the last day? It was pretty clear that the cultists weren’t constrained to the mirror world, so I don’t think that it would be the best idea to go driving through there, buddy.

  And where the hell are the remains of Alessa’s house? And why doesn’t there actually appear to have been a fire anywhere in the town? And where the flying fuck are those mountains we passed by at the beginning of the game? Or the “Welcome to Silent Hill” sign? And why did his rig start when he left his lights on all night?

  My answers, in order: Alessa’s house is a creature of chaos and will change location on its Konami’s whims; showing the location of the fire would have definitively shown where the house is supposed to be in relation to the town and thus was never shown, lest nerds like me point it out and have something else to complain about; mountains are well-known to bloom only at night, so they retreat into the earth during the day; the sign was torn down by city planners for being “too ominous”; Alessa changed his truck’s battery through plot magic.

  So, the pre-credits radio transmission which I’m pretty sure was supposed to be a post-credits sequence reveals that 1) a yuppie couple finds the baby on the side of the road and adopts it, deciding to call the girl Cheryl, and 2) the cult will torture Alessa’s soul until Cheryl (who is apparently ½ Alessa’s soul) hears her soul-twin’s cries and tries to save her, thus setting up our sequel/original game. So there’s that, I suppose.

  And that, friends and companions, is the end of Silent Hill: Origins. There is some extra content that will be popping up in the next couple of shorter updates—alternate endings, my playing statistics, comparing my names to the “official” names of the monsters—but the story has been written, the die cast, and Travis gets to walk away from his experience in Silent Hill a better man.

  Join me tomorrow for another installment of Traipsing Through Silent Hill!

     

  

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