Love Letter to Downpour: Into
This post will be broken up into multiple parts to prevent it from becoming stupidly and unread-ably long. Full write-up here.
My love novella letter to Downpour that no one will read
TL;DR I simp for Murphy and speak out of my ass despite having obsessively studied this game.
At first blush, Downpour appears to be a story about a man with unresolved trauma and grief over the death of his son–at least it was for me, but maybe I wasn’t paying as close attention as I should have–but rather it is a story of a man who is traumatized by his own actions and is running in fear from the monster that he was attempting to become. Murphy was your average family man (your brother, brother-in-law, husband) that morphed into something he never really wanted to be but only became to justify his existence in prison; the player experiences the attack on Napier but Sewell hints that Murphy may have gone after others on his own accord (“...do what you do best…”).
The player starts the game with a nightmare sequence where Murphy enters the elevator from a dusky space descending down into a dark shaft to meet a Wishmaster looking motherfucker the devil on his shoulder leading Murphy to the showers where he will wait for his target; static in the loud speakers by the showers alludes to Sewell being less than a straight shooter concerned about doling out justice for a murdered boy.
The attack on Napier and Murphy’s design is meant to leave the player uneasy with Murphy; his saber predatory eyes, the scar on his right cheek, his scowl, sharp jawline, and the ease and ferocity against Napier lend you to believe that Murphy is an evil man well deserving the Hell of Silent Hill. But no, it’s a nightmare of himself. No matter how much time had passed or how many others he may have punished, the screams and fear from Napier haunt him. No matter how morally justified he may have been in the eyes of many people, Napier was still another human being whose life he (almost) took, and that gutted him. [A little aside on the scar placement: the right side has been linked in literature as the good/godly/moral side, so a scar on the right indicates a marred moral character.]
Hydrophobia
I would be remiss if I did not touch upon the recurrent theme throughout the game–and by extension the series–of water: showerheads at full blast, raining bus ride, lake recovery; all preceded chaotic and traumatic events in the life as we witness of Murphy C. Pendleton. Water is a conduit to the spirit realm and inner self with Toluca Lake being the scrying bowel of our deepest fears and regrets; the rain being a perversion of the showers that are meant to cleanse oneself but rather brings out the ferocity in monsters.
