This review contains spoilers

After playing this I can 100% see why this is commonly referred to as one of the best horror games, and one of the best games, of all time. Silent Hill 2 absolutely blew me away with how it basically took every aspect of the first game and improved it tremendously in a way that felt beyond how much improvements sequels normally make. There is just so much put into this game it's insane and I definitely see why it's withstood the test of time to be considered one of the all time greats. Going to be going into massive spoilers with this so here's your warning on that. On a similar note this does get into heavier topics towards the end so be warned if you're not in a good mindset for that sort of thing.

Silent Hill 2 is a game about James Sunderland as he travels to the town of Silent Hill to answer a letter that was sent to him by his ex wife, who has been dead for 3 years by the time he reaches the small Maine town. He then proceeds to fight his way through hordes of horrific monsters as he attempts to find his wife. He also comes in contact with a variety of different people all with their own troubles and problems as they also traverse the town around James.

Something that I want to talk about first that the first game also had going for it is it's atmosphere. Playing this game is the most unnerved and tense I've felt in a horror game in a long time and I'm more than a little surprised by that since generally this kind of thing doesn't get to me. Even Silent Hill 1, which I praised extensively for it's incredible atmosphere, doesn't hold a candle to Silent Hill 2's attempts at reminding you it's a horror game. Whether its the oppressive fog that hangs over the town, the messages that will randomly appear in some places reminding James that something knows what he did, or the constant whining of the radio as an enemy approaches this game excels in making the player feel scared. Which honestly is one of the highest praises I can give a horror game since as I mentioned earlier I don't exactly get scared by games. I think a big part of what went towards this atmosphere working as well as it did was the gameplay.

Silent Hill 2's gameplay is basically an upgraded and refined version of 1's combat that still manages to maintain the general slowness and clunkiness that helps to make a horror game feel like a horror game without making it feel unfun. The game has a kind of refined clunkiness to it where the gameplay isn't fluid but it doesn't feel out of place with how the tone of the game is. I know these controls might still be a problem for some but personally I love how they add to the experience of the game. The general combat feels a bit slower at the start due to your starting weapon being a bit weak but this feeling quickly goes away with how quickly you get access to a gun and a stronger melee weapon. Just like the first game ammo for your guns are abundant but it doesn’t bug me as much this time around (we’ll discuss why later) and the general act of shooting and using the weapons you’ve been given feel a lot better to control and use that the first game.

One neat thing the game does is it makes the enemies react to you in ways that you wouldn't expect from this type of game. My favorite example is what happens if you get your hands on Pyramid Head's weapon. If you go the right way at a certain point you can gain Pyramid head’s cleaver to use as a weapon. It's the most powerful weapon in the game, which unlike the emergency axe from Silent Hill 1 actually has a balancing factor to this in that it's really slow to use and drags along the ground behind you. However the best aspect of this weapon is how enemies react to it if you turn off your flashlight. If you turn off your light and just walk around with it the sound of it scraping against the ground terrifies the non Pyramid Head enemies and makes them flee you, thinking you're Pyramid Head. It's a really cool small thing that just makes me love how much care and detail went into planning and making this game.

Speaking of enemies, while the enemy variety is lesser in this game since most enemies are humanoid in nature minus the bosses and monsters based off the bosses I didn't really mind this much honestly. First of all it meant no more flying enemies which I was very thankful about not having around since I didn't realize how annoying those were in Silent Hill one with them constantly appearing out of the fog and attacking you randomly until they weren't there doing that. As for with everything else them being mostly humanoid works a lot better thematically with the game than if we had a lot of dog based enemies or giant bat things so I didn't mind them all being variations of humans personally.

One gameplay aspect (technically) that I thought was pretty interesting was them deciding to separate the puzzles and the actual gameplay when it came to difficulty settings for this game. Allowing players who want to focus more on the puzzles while putting gameplay in the trunk have that option and vice versa. I'm a really big fan of this change because dear god some of the puzzles in Silent Hill 1 were impossible to parse and allowing players to choose the difficulty of how tough these puzzles is this game was a relief because it allowed me to not have to put up with something like the final puzzle of Silent Hill 1 again. Speaking of puzzles I definitely enjoyed them a lot more this time around, none of them overstayed their welcome and all felt possible to get on your own without outsider info, which is nice since stuff like the piano puzzle from the first game really dragged down Silent Hill 1 for me.

Something that really stuck out to me about Silent Hill 2 was its sound design. A lot of the sound effects and general ambient noise really added to the oppressive and unsettling atmosphere that I mentioned earlier. This is probably one of the strongest parts of the game in that every sound effect and bit of music just really helps to sell this tension that the game is trying to create. Which makes it even funnier when its contrasted by the voice acting. Now don't get me wrong, I love the voice acting in this game; but its not great. A lot of line deliveries feel stilted or have a very clear feeling of the actor just simply reading words off a page over acting. That being said, I am more than okay with this. I love cheesy kinda bad voice acting like what's in this game and even if it wasn't the best it did sell the characters for me to a degree and I enjoyed it regardless of any measure of quality the line deliveries had. The layer of cheese this voice acting adds to the game is a welcome one, and makes the game's story have brief moments of amusement in what is generally a very bleak narrative.

The story of of Silent Hill 2 is honestly up there now as one of my favorites in gaming I think. Seeing James traverse this horrific town while slowly remembering how things went in his past, dealing with the other people who have been brought to this town to atone for their sins, all of it just really hits me in just the right way and I love it. The town basically creating Maria as a version of his wife Mary for him to just lose again and again because of the fact that, as we learn at the end of the game, he killed her and repressed that memory is really interesting to me and really explores the mental guilt James feels over his actions without quite remembering his actions. The game basically functions as a big character study of James and I love media that takes this approach.

Personally I also think I enjoy this take on the concept of the town more than I do of the concept of the town in Silent Hill 1. Silent Hill 2 presents us with the idea that the town exists to make people confront their sins and atone for the evil they committed. I like this approach of the town as an entity that draws people in and forces them to face themselves more than it just happening to be a random weird town with a cult that the main character kinda just stumbled upon. Don't get me wrong I still loved Silent Hill 1's approach and story, but man do I just really vibe with the concept that this game sets up and I hope its carried on into the next few games. One of my favorite things that happens with this concept is how we see it handled with the other three actually alive characters that we find in the town. For example, there's a character named Laura who is a little girl that came to the town in search of Mary since they both knew each other in the hospital. Laura however, hasn't done anything to warrant needing atonement so to her Silent Hill is just an abandoned town. She doesn't see anything created by the town for others, no monsters, no Maria, nothing. Once you figure this out it kind of starts to put things into place how James isn't exactly innocent and starts to hint towards the twist, that being that James killed his wife as I mentioned earlier.

I think ultimately what it comes down to is that Silent Hill 2 feels like it has something to say. It's a story of self reflection and choosing your path in how you atone for the terrible things you have done. The way these themes are portrayed throughout the game with the constant symbolism just really elevates the whole story with how many minor elements allude to future events or character's thought processes, such as the fact that numerous dead bodies in the game's overworld are all wearing James's clothing which alludes to his thoughts of wishing he were dead/thinking he should be dead after killing Mary which is known from one of the various endings you can possibly get. I just think the use of motifs and symbolism to drive themes is a really cool think in fiction and I haven't seen a horror game do it on the same level that Silent Hill 2 does. Hell it even made one of my biggest complaints about the game, just the sheer amount of ammo you get so killing things isn't really a tough choice or a challenge, not a problem for me anymore once I realized that the ease at killing things and the rate at which you find the tools to do it is because killing is already easy for James since he did it once before. So killing all of the monsters that come after him is an easy thing for him. It's really impressive how much this game managed to pull off and I wish I could go into all of it without needlessly doubling the length of this review.

Going into Silent Hill 2 I was ready to be underwhelmed after how hard people push this as one of the best games of all time, since usually when people always talk something up to me like they do with this game I end up going in with my expectations set a bit too high. This however lives up to the hype and goes well beyond what I was expecting. If you're looking for an incredible horror game, look no further than this. The game is the absolute peak of the genre for me and I recommend it to anyone who's looking for the best the medium has to offer in terms of horror.

10/10

Reviewed on Oct 03, 2021


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