I originally had another piece written for today, but last night I began writing what was meant to be a small aside that crescendo’ed into a giant piece. Due to laziness I managed to justify putting up a work that only had one draft and no modifications. For this, I am sorry.

The general idea is how music can help establish an emotional response inside us, but first the games need to be focusing on more complex emotions themselves.

I beat Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the second time tonight, and even though I already knew about the big revelation it managed to generate an emotional impact. Granted this is my first full foray into the Silent Hill franchise (*gasp* how dare I claim to be a games critic and not have played this series before?!), so any previous conceptions and expectations that others may have had were simply not there. The ending twist felt proper to me, and even this second time there was a sort of sadness there.

It took me some time to realize that my mood was not only being manipulated by the events taking place, but more importantly by the music. Without the melancholy piano keys and strings playing in the background there would simply be less of an impact. In fact, there could be none at all.

You can read the entire mess of thoughts over on GameKrib.