it is very instructive to play both silent hill and resident evil videogames because they are very similar except for how silent hill is good and resident evil is stupid. it helps you figure out what is stupid in a video game and what is good
for example, in silent hill games, you are confronted with many weird baroque puzzles you have to solve to proceed, because that is the dark and creepy and confrontational nature of the world you are in. in resident evil games, you are confronted with weird baroque puzzles you have to solve because apparently, separate from and unrelated to the ongoing zombie apocalypse, the raccoon city designers designed the subway station map so that if you insert a red jewel into the correct diamond shaped recess, a drawer opens that contains a live hand grenade
In the novelizations of the original two Resident Evil games, which came out before the series left Raccoon City or Umbrella corp, the author's own justification for all this was that the puzzles were commissioned by the same paranoid rich CEO who gave bored company engineers and scientists limitless budget and creative control to protect his evil secrets as obtusely as possible. So basically a delusional billionaire gathered a bunch of amoral computer nerds and told them "while you're farming artisinal lizard demons for the army, I need you to make it as confusing and difficult as you possibly can for anyone to get in and out of my office alive" and I guess their autism lit up like a blazing star with a free ticket to design a real world lucasarts adventure game. This is implied later in the book to be exactly the reason why none of them made it out alive.
