Silent Hill 2

We face the demons of our own creation. Wandering. And wallowing. Eventually we will all find ourselves at our own version of Silent Hill, and how we each walk away from it, if at all, is our choice.

(Before you start reading this review please keep in mind that I am not from America and my English can be ruff.) Silent Hill 2 is a game about James Sunderland who gets a letter from his dead wife Mary Shepherd-Sunderland. On the letter the letter it explains how she wants James to come see her in Silent Hill in their "special place". As James travels through the thick fog of Silent Hill he faces monsters created from within his psyche. The deeper we (the players) dives into the dark themes of this game the more we see that the characters introduced within the story all have a dark past and a reason for them to be in Silent Hill.
*This next part will be Spoiler heavy and will have my own bias opinion*
This game has a special place in my heart, as I have played and beaten this game in various stages of my life. The themes of this game are hard to grasp especially for todays standards. Silent Hill 2 will tackle themes of sexual assault, rape, denial of once death, crime and punishment. This game came out in 2001, during the time when games like Metal Gear Sold 2, Devil May Cry, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 came out. For a game to cover topics like sexual assault, was never heard about or even talked about, this made this game so different and difficult to talk about. Rather than playing as a super human fighting demons like a badass, we wore playing as James, a human with the same qualities as every other person.
I have played a lot of games, have consumed a lot of movie media but nothing have ever stuck my heart and effected my daily life like Silent Hill 2. There are nights that I will be walking back from the gym and I will be listing to the incredible soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka. Every time I do this I think about where I am in life, and where I see my self in the future, there is no other media that has left me with such affect to where I just think so clearly and feel at such peace with my own self and everything around me. And as I read through different reviews I see the same effect on other people talking about how they have fallen in love with this title and the story with it's soundtrack. This is do to the incredible direction and craftiness done by Masashi Tsuboyama, with showing his incredible skills in creating a psychological story with using inspirations from other media.
For my last statement, I will say this, if you are reading this and never played or experienced this game, watch "two best friends play" on youtube play Silent Hill 2, not only are they fumy, they give some of the best commentary I have found for this game. They talk about all the different themes, symbolisms, background for this game. With that said this game is a masterpiece.

I could write a pages long paper on this game, and in all likelihood will, but for now I will say this. Through a persons life there’s only a handful of pieces of media that truly affect and change a person. And silent hill 2 is one of those works of art for me.

Goddamn man, I just beat this fucking game, and this is probably the best game I've played in my entire life. You know those games where you play them and you feel like you just hit a life milestone? Not in some corny, melodramatic way, but in like a 'holy shit, I just experienced that'. That's how I felt when I beat this.

I've been a fan of the Silent Hill franchise since before I ever touched the series. I heard the soundtrack to this game, and it was so affecting on me that for an art class I was taking in college, I redesigned the cover art and booklet for the album. I didn't really know shit about the game, but I got the vibe from the soundtrack and I knew what Pyramid Head was. The soundtrack only gets better when you fit it into the context of the game, even though it was completely brilliant on its own. After falling in love with its soundtrack, knowing its acclaim through older relatives, my friends, the gaming community in general, and this website, I figured I needed to check it out. And holy fucking shit, it absolutely and completely lives up to the hype.

If I sound a bit too vulgar and erratic, I just finished this game, and I'm just completely floored by how brilliant it is. There's so much up in the air, so much mystery to it, even after you beat it. The gameplay is so goddamn tense and anxious, and the level design is utterly brilliant. Without giving too much away, this game dwells on a lot of topics such as reality, death, emotionality, and psychology. But it dresses all of these themes up as characters, sound effects, level design, bosses, and even the gameplay. You feel so vulnerable and scared the whole time because of how regular the protagonist, James Sutherland, moves by comparison to the hellish creatures he has to fight. They contort themselves, thrust themselves at you, squirm and crawl in inhuman, surreal ways. The characters James interacts with add so much to the game too. And the atmosphere, holy fucking shit the atmosphere. I have never played a game more atmospheric in my entire life. It is genuinely more engrossing and terrifying than any horror movie I've ever seen. Not a second of camp, not a second of being overdone or ludicrious. It is perfectly disturbing, Satanic, surreal, and ominous the whole time. The soundtrack, which I loved immensely, adds so much to this too. The music is as otherworldly, demented, dark, and surreal as the game is. It's so mindblowingly tense, dark, mysterious, paranoid, and psychotic that for me, I had to put the game down so I didn't start getting too freaked out. But I could only do that in increments, because it was just that fun.

I won't go into how rich and metathematic the symbolism is, because that's the best part of the game and you really should experience that for yourself. However, when I finished the game, taking into account all the messages and themes the elements of the game were symbolic of and trying to convey, I was honestly floored. It's really on a par with surrealist films in that regard. It's not cheesy or half-assed like some video games that vie to have 'messages' convey, it really nails it home without piling it on thick. But when you sit with it long enough, you can't help but be stunned. Luckily, sitting with it long enough means just playing through the game intently, which if you want to not have to keep restarting (it is survival horror after all), you'll have to be doing anyway.

For anyone who may be interested in playing this I absolutely recommend it. And if you get to it, buckle up, because you are in for a hell of a ride.

Silent Hill 2 is the first game I decided to write a proper review for. I don't mean that in the sense that I've not written reviews before – I'm probably one of very few people to run up against the Steam character count in use cases other than making ASCII art – but rather, I decided to start taking notes as I played SH2.

Yes, that's pretentious. But also, I value the process of writing a review as an exercise in collecting my thoughts and reflecting on a game, and in the past I've felt like I've omitted key aspects of my perspective on a game simply by not remembering them at the time of writing.

SH2 isn't my introduction to the survival horror genre, but I'm also not a grizzled veteran. I suspect that some points I'll mention below are now obvious design approaches for survival horror. I also suspect that they might be less obvious without the influence of SH2.

Enough waffling. James Sunderland visits the town of Silent Hill, having received a letter from his deceased wife Mary. He is invited to find her at their 'special place'.

Mary loved Silent Hill. It brought her rare tranquillity.

Exploring Silent Hill, it's tough to see why. From the failed businesses to the overflowing bins; the burned out cars to the monsters biting at James' ankles, I would readily accept that Silent Hill was based on James' namesake. The town is immediately shrouded in fog. My suspicion is that this was driven by technological limitations alongside a coherent design direction – it being much easier to get an early PS2 title with relatively expansive levels to play smoothly when the maximum render distance is about 5 feet from the player.

Regardless, this is remarkably effective in creating unease. There is little ambiguity that this is a horror game, and the horror of the player's own imagination is inevitably a lot more effective than any actual monstrosity which could be rendered in the game engine. Indeed, in the early passages, I am more affected by the skittering, insect-like iteration of the faceless monster one encounters early on. They can run away fast. This means they can come back.

Throughout my initial exploration of the town of Silent Hill, it occurred to me that it was an exceptional tutorial. I won't dwell on the point of tank controls. I had no experience with tank controls prior to SH2. I learned them quickly. It being a 2001 title, it occurred to me that it may well have been designed with a control scheme before an analog stick was a core part of gaming controller structure, and tank controls work quite a lot better than modern controls when using a d-pad.

Regarding the rest of the tutorialisation, I was taught basic game mechanics – how to spot interactable objects (it's mild highlighting, not yellow paint); how to engage in combat; and crucially, that engaging in combat may well be a poor option. It didn't feel like a tutorial: I had a city to explore, and I was finding my dead wife in the park. I died. That was good. While in a horror game, death operates often as a release of tension and, counter-intuitively, often reduces the terror the player feels, introducing the player to failure states and telling them what to avoid is fundamental to displaying the context of their interaction with the game.

As with any survival horror title, puzzles are a strong focus. There are very good puzzles, and not-so-good puzzles.

The poor puzzles generally relate to item use – and the historical context suggests that substantial influence was likely drawn from Sierra-influenced point-and-click adventures here. An early example – you dislodge an item from a rubbish chute by throwing a crate of orange juice after it. Throwing a heavy item perhaps makes sense, but the juice is found in quite an unusual place to find a crate of juice, and thus one would assume that its key characteristic is that of being juice, rather than being liquid and therefore heavy. Later on, the player fashions a makeshift handle for a broken trapdoor by melting wax around a horseshoe and fitting it in a slot in the trapdoor. This is at least coherent, but the lack of prompting makes this kind of puzzle solely for those of extremely niche tastes.

In contrast, written puzzles are consistently great. While mostly brute-forceable, should the player wish, the wording is sufficient for the player to infer a correct solution without trial and error approaches. The clues are written poetically and are a joy to read, while requiring serious thought to interpret; and while I played on normal difficulty, from reviewing online content after my completion, I love the fact that there are entirely different puzzles for different difficulties.

I referred briefly to the atmosphere created by information control earlier. The player is given two tools to assist them: a radio which emits static when a monster is nearby, and a flashlight. From my first play session, I took a note that I was relying heavily on these features and that I was scared, as a player, rather than vicariously, to lose them.

The radio interacts strongly with music design. A mental hospital is perhaps now a played-out horror location (though I personally was too young to have a decent grasp on whether this was the case in 2001), but upon entering the town asylum, the soundtrack shifts from pregnant silence to a dark industrial/ambient mix. This leads to it being hard at points to tell what is music and what is environmental sound from which information should be derived. This is good. It limits the player's information and forces them to engage with the possibility that they are interpreting the information they receive incorrectly. Perhaps the player fits better in the asylum than the inhabitants they read about.

Sadly, I was somewhat disappointed with the denouement of this control of information. In the late game, the player moves from having every tool (light, sound, weapons) at their disposal to having all removed at once. Of course, this creates an initial feeling of helplessness, but it unavoidably cannot be sustained for longer than a short passage: the player is immediately robbed of most of the tools which previously gave them a sense of agency. It's less 'what's the solution?', and more 'what's the point?'. Fortunately, this passage is but a few minutes, but it forgoes a massive, massive opportunity to design a culmination in which the player needs to adjust to lacking a single key tool on which they have become reliant.

Character design is excellent. At every stage I care about the outcome of NPC stories, and have questions I would like them to answer. There are a very few points where points become somewhat belaboured (to avoid spoiling a late game plot, the renewed relevance of Angela's knife could do with a single line of explanation being omitted, and it being spelt out to the player felt unrealistic and extremely jarring). However, it's quite easy to forgive this when you already care. Further, the primary 'antagonist' (I use this in a loose sense), Maria, somehow manages to provoke more emotions in me than a single video game character ever has. She's creepy, perhaps a bit needy, but at the same time, I want to protect her. She's simultaneously sexy with an aura of danger to her. I was, in contrast, very satisfied with how her story ended.

I will note but two further minor criticisms. First, Nathan Avenue is far, far too fucking long. The pacing of the rest of the game is so good, but on the occasions I needed to traverse that road, it felt like an extended period with nothing happening.

Second, the treatment of suicide as a theme, for me, was a little flippant. I'm willing to extend some latitude to a 2001 game, as even in the two decades since, a far greater cultural sensitivity to mental health has developed, but it is well worth being aware of when going into SH2 for those who may be vulnerable.

On the whole, SH2 is rightly considered as a classic. It both introduced and perfected survival horror concepts from information restriction to appropriate sound design. It shows its age in some ways – and I'm cautiously optimistic for the remake in the coming year – but it remains well worth playing.

8/10

Com um enredo simples, Silent Hill 2 faz o que de melhor uma narrativa de terror psicológico pode fazer: constrói simbolismos fascinantes que refletem a psique dos personagens, questionando o que é real e o que é pesadelo num emaranhado de salas e corredores sinistros e inquietantes. A busca de James Sunderland por sua falecida esposa é das narrativas de “descida ao inferno” mais memoráveis que eu acompanhei. E os artifícios usados para provocar horror ao jogador são igualmente impressionantes, especialmente o design dos inimigos e a trilha-sonora. 23 anos depois de seu lançamento, Silent Hill 2 ainda é um jogo que nos trava de medo e exige um respiro de 10 minutinhos aqui e ali.

Tudo o que tange a narrativa desse jogo é praticamente impecável, e destaca o contraste que há na falta de polimento das mecânicas e puzzles. Jogando na dificuldade média, Silent Hill 2 rapidamente se prova sem grandes desafios, ao passo em que quase nada que faz enquanto jogo é tão interessante quanto os aspectos narrativos da obra. O combate é ridiculamente simples, os puzzles, em geral, são um tanto óbvios e a exploração é bastante linear, com exceção do hospital e do hotel, que tem um fiozinho de backtracking. Mas também não acho que Silent Hill 2 precisava ser outra coisa para ser um jogo melhor. Bastava mais esmero para tornar seus elementos de jogabilidade mais satisfatórios.