TOKYO – Representatives at Japanese multinational video game developer Konami have revealed that the town of Silent Hill, featured in the eponymous series of popular horror games, became haunted and abandoned because its public schools stopped enforcing mandatory, teacher-led prayer, sources report.

“Few people know this is the real reason Silent Hill is a desolate, evil place filled with murderous phantoms and deformed monsters,” Konami President and CEO Hideki Hayakawa told reporters. “About two years before the setting of the first game, the Silent Hills Public School Board made the unfortunate decision to prohibit compulsory prayer at the onset of every school day, and in a very short amount of time the entire town had become an abandoned hellscape occupied almost exclusively by living personifications of guilt and grief. This rapid transformation from idyllic suburban paradise to nucleus of macabre and iniquity shows the shocking descent that civil societies undergo when they cast our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ out of their public institutions.”

Gamer Greg Hallis was surprised by the revelation.

“I’m a huge Silent Hill fan, but are you telling me I’ve been playing bullshit right-wing propaganda for decades without realizing it?” Hallis lamented. “Normally, you can tell a piece of media is Christian by how unabashedly shitty it is, but not with these games. I mean, Silent Hill 2 might be the best survival horror game of all time. This just really puts a damper on my ability to enjoy the media going forward. How am I supposed to get any delight from the rush of running from Pyramid Head knowing that he apparently only exists because the game’s developers think Christianity should be forced down the throat of every student at the expense of the taxpayers?”

Video game expert Octavia Vernland has seen this before.

“It’s actually quite common for horror video game plotlines to have hidden, far-right influences,” Vernland noted. “For example, the accident at Umbrella Corporation that infected Raccoon City in the Resident Evil franchise occurred shortly after they made a supposed ‘DEI hire’ to head their Quality Control division, and the Huddle from Inside was canonically created when sadistic doctors manipulated stem cells drained from fetuses who were still alive and able to feel pain after they had been aborted. It’s probably best for gamers to just ignore any underlying messages and just enjoy the gameplay itself.”

At press time, Hayakawa had also revealed that the Bubble Head Nurses became evil shortly after Silent Hill had adopted a universal healthcare system.