#commentary 4

1:02:50: Apartment 209 with the famous creepy whisper! It’s been preserved from the original game! People have been trying to decode it for 23 years! I am here to ruin everything for you. One redditor sounded it out as "See my dead wife, now come home do some laundry into this evening, take 2 crimes up to some saints." Replies promptly revealed that it’s a sound file (circa 1999, the right time for a game released in 2001) from an audio library: "VB01_66_01 Whisper_Random." Team Silent probably chose it because you can kind of hear "dead wife” in a sort of aural pareidolia, but: yes, it’s gibberish. 

At some point, I'll post an equivalent clip from Silent Hill f. Because I just bought it. God help us all.

I made a huge point of this in an email to Ian... then forgot to find this room on the final commentary about Blue Creek Apartments. I'm to a point where I'm looking out for anything with the number three and how that might relate to the trio of James, Eddie, and Angela--and then I find this tiny room with nothing but three shining red leather chairs, a sheet-covered wheelchair, and a box of ammo to draw your attention. It looks like some sort of unnerving meeting to me: one person in a wheelchair is confronting the three people in the red chairs, or vice versa. Eventually, I came to read it as James, Eddie, and Angela each having (at least) one person they physically harmed, an action that is the source of their feelings of guilt, and they each have to confront what they've done. Alternately, Ian suggested that the wheelchair might be a reference to Alessa in the first Silent Hill. As with a lot of things in the SH2 remake, the sheer ambiguity invites multiple simultaneous interpretations.

27:30: So there's a book titled The New Damnation that you see on a few different shelves in Blue Creek; initially I thought, yeah, that checks out. Then I decided to actually google that phrase; turns out it's the title of a Varials song, which includes the lyrics,  On and on, again and again, anxiety circles me What am I to do? Plagued by a never-ending cycle What's the point of defying when you always fall in line? What's the purpose of trying with the clock up against me? We've discussed the idea of cycles and repetition (and reincarnation, which I asked Ian about on his stream) so often that I'm pretty much going to do a sidebar blog post on it, but suffice it to say, Bloober Team found a song that mentions all of that as well as a clock, the theme of this level's main puzzle.

Watch Ian discuss the music here