Well, "Silent Hill" wound up hitting a lot of tropes, especially "J-Horror" tropes, at a time when they were less well known to geekdom at large. Transplanting asian horror to a western setting was an interesting idea and came accross as being more groundbreaking than it was.Karadalis said:
My major concern is the title and imagery makes me think this will be another "Psychological Horror" game where it's all in your mind or a projection of your mind. Going with the whole "Cry Of Fear" or "Silent Hill" thing which has been done to death. At this point I prefer more literal "It is what it is, and is happening all on it's own" horror. Battles within the protaganist's own mind, or something basically causing their Delirium Traumas to physically manifest (Silent Hill) are cool and all, but enough is enough.
I will also say that while I suppose it's normal to think of Pyramid Head when seeing someone with head encasement, that is actually a horror stereotype long predating him and his "helmet". Old Asylums used to restrain inmates in head cages and enclosures to prevent biting and provided restraints. What's more as you might know from various horror movies and the "F@cked up but true" stories that inspired them, there was a long standing belief in psychology that if a severe trauma could drive someone insane, it could also make an insane person sane. As a result trapping people permanantly in the dark and shutting off all their senses but touch via head restraints, or later hooking an image projector/plate to the sole visual plate and showing disturbing, insane images to a restrained person via their headbox were usable techniques. To be honest there is actually some truth to the practice (as much as many might want to deny it) as simple human survival instincts can cause people to radically alter their behaviors, torture, both physical and psychological being a part of mental deprogramming techniques for that reason. Of course today we have far more humane and reliable methods of doing such things, largely coming from that research, since we now have a better idea of what chemicals do what, etc... and can treat with medication and such rather than trying to force the body to do it on it's own which is more likely than not just going to make a problem worse.
In other forms of torture, and BDSM play, head encasement also can play a key role. After all what you can do to someone with their head compartmentalized can be quite staggering. One fairly typical "game" is to basically restrain someone prone in head encasement with one side open and then sit on the open end to smother the person. Such "smother boxes" are a common BDSM toy and sometimes involve restraints (for the hands) on the side. This same basic toy also has a heavy use in scat play and golden showers, as the box can act as makeshit toilet for someone to sit on and then do their business right onto a partner's face, etc... the horrorific potential of doing this to someone who is unwilling and/or not into that is pretty obvious.
Then of course there is the whole bit with inserting rats or other angry, starving, animals into compartmentalized spots. "Game Of Thrones" used a variation on this not too long ago as a method of torture/interrogation/execution. To be honest one of the "safer" places to do that is the head because the skull provides a lot of protection to the brain and is one of the harder bones to get through. If you say put a starving rat into a head cage with someone it would eat the flesh off their head/face but probably wouldn't kill them for a pretty substantial amount of time, if at all. Compared to say having the rat eat it's way through the torso. The Chinese had one paticular torture contraption based around this theory referred to as "The Seven Gates Of Heaven" which seperated the body into seven regions which could be devoursed seperatly. Generally starting with the feet and/or head first and then moving down to the more lethal middle regions of the body. The longer the person holds out the more gates you open, with the irony in the name being that if you do it right people are begging for you to open the final gates and let them go to heaven. According to rumor The Chinese still use this without acknowledging this, and it was also apparently pretty popular with Pol Pot's "Khymer Rouge".
The point I'm making here is simply that head encasement (or body localized body encasement in general) has a long history of truely F@cked up and horrorific crap, so it's something you can generally associate with horror. Chances are anyone who wants to force your head unwillingly into a box doesn't have your best interests in mind and wants to make you suffer pretty badly.
Barbed Wire, also known to some as "The Devil's Rope" likewise has a long standing history of being used for some rather screwed up stuff, while not it's original intent, the bottom line is that it's metal and thus hard to break, and using it the restraints themselves can cause pain/damage.... etc....
All told he seems to be hitting the stereotypes, we'll see what happens. I half expect this will turn out to be another game where they really don't show anything or spell it out, and rather just use the imagery to get people to fill in the blanks in their own mind, and what I posted here will probably be worse than what you'll actually see done in the game.
I'm enough of a jaded horror fan where I will be keeping an eye on it, but my hopes won't get very high until I learn more about it.