Silent Hill 2

I've never been a huge fan with this one enough to say I think it's about even with Silent Hill 4 as far as the PS2 entries go, though I realize how much of a contrarian stance that is.

I truly want to like it, but something about the cast I just never got that sense of attachment to or got captivated by, especially with the lead character where James is about as bland as raw tofu. Not that any Silent Hill protagonist is anything above being kinda blah besides Heather in SH3, but when the whole narrative is around a character you just aren't captivated by it's hard to get drawn into that experience.

I'm also not a huge fan of the location design and areas you do get to explore in your romp through the southern part of the titular Silent Hill. Every area kind of bleeds together with a palette of grays and browns and a little grubbiness here and there that is just so uninteresting and unappealing to me that I can't really appreciate the really good design choices otherwise such as with the lake hotel area which, to SH2's credit, absolutely has the most interesting design going on.

That said though, the soundtrack is very excellent and helps push the experience up so much for me. Even if a track just sounds like someone's unbalanced washing machine, combined with the very claustrophobic and poorly lit hallways of the apartment complex or just in the town streets it does a really good job of delivering the spooks of what you can't see just around the corner. The voice work is also excellent, though it has that amateurishness and delightfully stilted direction early 00s games were known for.

Overall giving it another look after not having touched it since high school I think Silent Hill 2 is one of those games where you either will empathize with its cast of characters and absolutely be sucked into the experience of one man's journey through a seemingly abandoned northeast American town, or you'll find it as a sort of lackluster but still worthwhile psychological horror experience. I absolutely can't call it a bad game other than the kind of god awful combat, but don't fall into the hype that surrounds SH2 these days and you'll have a good time regardless of what you end up thinking.

Silent Hill 2 is a game with a strong cult following and really good reputation and being Glitchwave's #1 game, I expected something really amazing. Well unfortunately it's really not, and it's been a really disappointing experience for me. The game does do certain things well, but so many of its elements are dated.

For example you start the game and the default control is 3D controls which make no sense at all in these modern times, I couldn't control my character at all. Thankfully the 2D controls option make a little more sense (moving forward when you are pressing so), but the game has constantly changing camera angles which confuses you on which direction you are going. Once you've get used to that, you are quickly introduced with another of the games worst aspect: the melee combat. Once you face your first enemy, you do have this awful combat system where you need to hold the aim button before you can strike. And your first weapon (the wooden plank) takes 7 hits to kill your basic enemy. It's very slow and sluggish and there isn't much strategy to it, it's hard to dodge enemies and there is no benefit to killing them... so you quickly realize that you are better off avoiding combat if you can. The gun combat is a little better, but it's pretty much just auto-aimed all the time and you just need to shoot at the correct range and you'll be ok. Every single enemy is killed the same way (except the few boss fights), it's got overall very poor combat. But the game isn't really all about that.

Silent Hill 2 while a survival horror game, it feels more like an adventure game. The exploration of areas, figuring out puzzles, using items on the right things, these are all elements of adventure games. It's just sprinkled with this mediocre action game on top of it. The mapping system is probably my favorite element of the game, whenever you hit a locked door or blocked are it's marked on your map so you know where you have been and it helps you progress forward. The puzzles were unappealing to me, they can be quite hard to figure out at times and not very fun to resolve. You will need to get specific items to progress and they can easily be missed as they are hidden in the background, I've had to resolve to a walkthrough a couple of times to "unblock" myself. Overall the gameplay wasn't really good or fun.

The best things about the game are mostly non-gameplay related: The atmospheric soundtrack, the dark atmosphere and the Lynchian-type of story. You are walking in fog and darkness most of the time, it does get the eerie part rather well when paired with the music. The story is weird and doesn't make much sense for most of the game, there's tons of elements of surrealism which is cool and one of my main motivations to continue playing was to see where the story will be taken to. While this part was good, I don't think a video game can be good without supporting strong gameplay which is really the core of the game and was lacking for me. Even the boss battles were incredible mediocre and uninspired, the game felt dated and there's just too many annoyances all around. I do respect it for pushing forward the artistic narrative in video games, I can see how its story elements influenced games like Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us but these games are infinitely superior in the gameplay aspect.

All in all very poor choice for a "all-time defining" video game, even at top 100 of all time feels very generous. Just wasn't one for me, I would not recommend it.