Notably absent yet absolutely vital, Silent Hill Townfall's women are everywhere and nowhere. That's how it felt for me at first, creeping through the misty streets of St. Amelia. A woman's soft voice speaks to me through time and space – or rather, through protagonist Simon's handheld CRTV – but she's not a tangible presence here.
Townfall feels significantly Gothic in that regard, and not just because of all this fog. Women in Gothic horror typically fall under one of three things: damsels in distress (Lucy in Dracula), femme fatales (Carmilla in, well, Carmilla), or nowhere to be seen for a very long time (Frankenstein, pretty much). As I play through the horror game's first hour and a half, I'm prepared for Townfall's women to be grouped into that last category; framing devices, intended to buoy the male hero's journey toward redemption. But after completing Part 2: Zoe, Screen Burn's depiction of women cuts far deeper than the tragic beauty of doomed, transient females.
Quiet might
Women are both the antidote and the scapegoat of Silent Hill Townfall's predicament. I see that no clearer than in Zoe Ellis, the nurse speaking to Simon through the CRTV in hushed, desperate tones, imploring him to "come back" and "set her free". It's a very Silent Hill 2 set-up... until it isn't.
Zoe's role as a nurse is not made obvious until clues direct me to St. Amelia's abandoned clinic, where, upon rifling through her belongings, I'm thrown into a flashback. Controlling Zoe instead of Simon, the weary nurse flicks through her pager. She's been summoned to a house on Church Avenue to tend to a sick old man, one of her regular patients whom she'd failed to show up for after being overwhelmed by a sharply increased workload.
Set in mid-'90s Scotland, themes of sexism in the medical hierarchy take root. Zoe Ellis is a nurse, not a physician. Despite taking on so much extra work above her station and title, she will never be seen as their equal. Doctors are learned, educated men, while women are the village caregivers.
It's an ancient and inescapable occupational hazard that earns no thanks, no sympathy, and no margin for error. If Zoe cannot tend the sick as a woman, let alone a nurse, she has gone against what is categorically expected of women's work in a suffering society and will be branded a failure on both accounts. Even if the failure was not hers at all; Nurse Ellis is no Nurse Ratched.
As I head out into St. Amelia, the character perspective shift is immediately apparent. Pacing through these same streets as Simon often leaves me annoyed, frustrated by the slow-burn terrors that fuel Townfall's hide-and-seek format and its intermittent bursts of combat. I might be an outlier there. Our Silent Hill Townfall review praises how genuinely terrifying our Managing Guides Editor found it, but I only feel the fear when I play as Zoe. With just a pager and an address to go to, the world suddenly feels truly dangerous.
By the time I arrive at Mr Stewart's home, Zoe is getting concerned. Her breath shudders and shakes, not quite Grace Ashcroft in Resident Evil Requiem but not far off, as she examines the seemingly empty home. I can feel the dread through my controller; she can't lose another one, not again.
This is the crux of Zoe Ellis' plight as Townfall's real protagonist. Women have to foot the bill for both emotional and physical labor in times of strife, expected to hold the cure and the bucket at the same time. She's been sent here to do a doctor's work, only to get a message on her beeper that she is "too late" to save her patient after all.
Burdened with borrowed guilt, her next instructions direct her to get back in touch with the hospital. But not before we catch a harrowing glimpse of the manifestations of her own impossible anguish.
It's terminal
Women have to foot the bill for both emotional and physical labor in times of strife
Unlike Simon's hammer-headed demons who stumble through the fog, wrists bound behind their backs, Zoe is haunted by people. Naked, vulnerable people – bloated and scarred, yet far more humanoid than those Simon fends off. Even in her nightmares, Zoe's compassion for her fellow man shines through. She can't see people as demons. She cares for them too deeply.
While Simon has weapons and (limited) opportunities to defend his physical being, Zoe does not. I instead take advantage of throwables, like discarded beer bottles, to distract or stun these nightmares as I dodge through the fog as fast as possible. If spotted by an enemy, cannula needles on long lengths of tubing erupt from reopened surgical wounds, lunging like venomous snakes to bite her repeatedly; symbols of a failed medical system, lashing out at its overlooked, overworked, less-prestigious workers, shielding those in power.
It comes to a head as Zoe picks up the phone in a telephone box and must suffer Dr. Glenn's vicious berating. It's her fault Mr Stewart is dead. It's her fault everyone is dead.
Zoe's role in Silent Hill Townfall, then, amounts to far more than a helpful voice on a screen. She carries the weight of the town's guilt on her work-weary shoulders, tormented by the inability to achieve the impossible. Yet, like the heroes of the best Silent Hill games, her determination carries her forward. She is not giving up. She still wants to try and save St. Amelia, and perhaps herself in the process.
Townfall's secret female protagonist is a feminist icon in her own right, and a very different one to that of Silent Hill f. Where Hinako's journey is rife with brutal combat, symbolizing one woman's battle against her own psyche and the expectations lumped upon her sex by society, Zoe's battles are internal. She cannot fight for her life bodily, so she must do it the only way she knows how: sheer strength of will. It creates a beautiful, if upsetting, opposition between her physical and mental constitution – far more meaningful than Simon's bumbling plank-swinging – and ultimately proves that Townfall's women are the ones doing the heavy lifting here.
Maybe Zoe wasn't intended to be Screen Burn's ultimate tragic hero. But by subverting the expectations of a Gothic heroine and sneaking her into the supporting cast, I learn far more about what makes Townfall so ubiquitously Silent Hill through Zoe's short, narrative-driven segments than I do in any other part of the game. If that's not heroic, I don't know what is.
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