This game is a game of almosts.

The opening to this game and the impression you get of it before you play it are entirely separated from your thoughts on it when you finish it. You effectively go into this game expecting a large island murder mystery game where you encounter strange folks and solve puzzles. Each of those things is correct, but they are individual. There is a large island you traverse. There is a murder. There are mysteries. There are strange folk. And there are puzzles.

This game at times feels like one of those bull riding machines you see at the fair. The kind where the the entire goal is to stay on as long as you can. Whenever you get into the groove with this game, you get tossed right off.

You beat this game and 'almost' say it was fun. You witness the story and 'almost' get it. You wake up and this time you 'almost' get to the hotel lobby.

I've seen people explain this game not being fun as 'intended' as some sort of parody of classic adventure games. I've not read every single Suda interview, but as far as I could parse this wasn't the case. But I also understand why some people would say this. At times, it feels like this game is trying to suck on purpose. For some sort of ulterior reason like story or thematically. But then other times, it just feels like a bad game.

My favorite part of this game was running along the beach listening to 'Rhapsody In Blue'. Not the puzzles, not the jokes, not the story. Just running.

Edit: I like this game now. No idea why.

I recently got two friends to play through this game. One loved Suda games and visual novels, the other hated Suda's writing and visual novels. One thing we all have in common is that voicing our opinions on this game is hard.

Finding something to say about something you love is actually quite an undertaking. It's easy to love something without explaining why. It's even easier to hate. It all comes down to being able to formulate your thoughts in a cohesive manner, which believe it or not, is actually pretty fuckin' hard. I actually have a really bad habit of not collecting my thoughts before they get brought up. "Why'd you like this part of the game?" "I dunno, I just liked it." "Yeah, but it's poorly designed." "It didn't bother me cause I liked everything around it."

Hating is easy cause it's a strong and simple emotion and it can be used to zero in on any particular thing. Love is more of an 'all over' kinda feeling. It's not channeled into a singular point, it's 'all over'.

'The character portraits are inconsistent' - Yeah
'The pacing is awful' - Yeah
'The story is constantly fighting the way it's presented' - Yeah
'Plot details are hard to follow' - Yeah
'So, it's bad, right?' - No, I love it actually. A lot.

Next time you watch someone review a game they hate and hear them give detailed explanations on what parts they individually hate, watch them review a game they adore. They'll get into specifics, but at the end of the day they all say the same thing. "I just love it, and I can't fully articulate why."

Well, they won't literally say that, but an approximation... Sometimes.

"Like how you feel when a cool breeze flows by. It's a pleasant feeling."

The story of this game didn't quite hit me at first. I enjoyed it and acknowledged how powerful it was, but it was only when I rewatched the final cutscenes on Youtube that it hit me like a pound of bricks. Especially that letter reading at the end, god. Many cite this game for having bad voice acting, but in a way it feels intentional as the voice acting stops being bad once you get to the serious stuff.

Really my only issues with the game are how not scary it is and how bad the difficulty is balanced. I was scared many times during the course of Silent Hill 1, but at no point during Silent Hill 2 was I ever actually scared by anything. And the Hard difficulty isn't even nearly as well balanced as the first game was. At times I would have a wealth of healing items and ammo, and then have to fight a 7 minute boss that stole 90% of it. The semi-final boss took me 30 minutes to beat because I had to refight it due to not having enough ammo for the final boss. I only ended up beating it due to the Great Knife cheese strat I learned. I like my survival horror games to be tough and hard so that I really feel the fight for survival, but this was just tedious. Silent Hill 1 was a lot more fair as all of the issues I had were due to my poor planning and mistakes.