Looking back on my older reviews is something of a sentimental experience for me. At the same time, however, they can just as easily showcase either opinions that I don’t exactly agree with anymore for whatever reason that may be, or inexperienced ramblings of pure rage-filled spite. Silent Hill 2 is such a game. For being the first review I’ve ever posted on this website, it has uh…certainly shown its age alright.

Oh, not particularly because I now enjoy the game nowadays. I don’t, I still think it’s a horrendous title and I’d rather tear off every single individual eyelash I have, pour them all into the most bitter-tasting tea imaginable, and drink them all in one go than ever have the misfortune of playing this miserable game ever again. But more so because to be blunt, my original review was kind of all over the place. It’s to be expected I suppose, it WAS my first review and I was rather bewildered at what I had just played. THIS was the game everyone was crazy over? This repetitive, mind-numbingly boring slogfest was the horror masterpiece that everyone and their grandmother regarded so highly? Really? There had to have been something I missed, something I just didn’t quite understand. I decided to replay the game recently on the hardest difficulty for both the puzzles and combat and let me tell you, that was a mistake. More so the combat. Even people who love Silent Hill 2 will often tell you to stay as far away from hard mode as humanly possible, and I’ll explain why in a bit.

Starting with controls and handling, the game just feels wrong right out of the gate. I opted to try the tank controls for a more “authentic” experience idk. I never really enjoyed tank controls but I’ve tolerated them to a degree, and I’ve gotta say…these are some of the worst tank controls I’ve ever experienced in any game. Tank controls primarily work with a fixed camera angle like the original Resident Evil titles had, and the camera in Silent Hill 2 genuinely cannot seem to make up its mind. There are times when it transitions from a fixed angle and then drunkenly swings to a different more free-camera-esc point of view, consequently screwing up the direction you were previously holding. Even in closed-off linear hallways, you can still rotate the camera. It makes combat so much worse than it already is, and general navigation outside of the wide-open spaces of the streets is an imprecise chore. I immediately switched back to the other control style (outside of a few sections I’ll get to later on), but this is by far the least of this game’s problems.

One of my many main issues with SH2 was that the enemies weren’t much of a threat at all. Easily taken out, avoided, and not anything to dread or fear, just annoying roadblocks occasionally hindering progress. Design-wise and metaphorically they’re another story, but we’ll get to that point later (I’ve been saying that a lot haven’t I). Hard mode doesn’t address this issue at all. It just makes the enemies more annoying, as they attack faster and often cheap-shot you before you can get a good hit on them. That’s about it. The melee combat is horrendously repetitive and the gunplay is just classic Resident Evil gunplay (which already wasn’t good to begin with) but with somehow even less mechanical depth. You can’t aim up for a critical headshot, nor can you aim down to kneecap an enemy, just point and shoot with sluggish drawing. That’s it. What’s even more head-scratching is that the game, even on hard mode positively FLOODS your inventory with ammo. Usually, resource scarcity would be a thing to add a degree of risk to fighting enemies as they don’t drop any items when killed. Combat would be a thing that’s discouraged, but there’s no point to this when the game just gives you a ton of ammo at every opportunity. And if you manage to run out you still have your good ol’ wooden stick to mindlessly bash the brains out of any enemy you come across. Combat was still just as awful as I originally remembered it being all those years back; none of the enemies posed a significant threat, the finishing kick only seemed to function when it felt like it, the melee combat was still insanely clunky and sluggish, and the ammo for firearms is a resource you never once have to worry about. It’s purely a means to dispatch the obstacles in your way, but it’s also extremely unpleasant and mindless. I get that combat is not “the point” ™ of Silent Hill 2, but it’s something you’re going to have to experience in some form or another. In the open areas of the town, it’s completely avoidable as the streets are big and wide and the enemies are stupidly easy to maneuver around, not so much in the cramped corridors, hallways, or rooms. There is no tension to be found with the enemy encounters if you can endlessly stunlock every enemy to death with a wooden stick while still having 15 rounds of handgun and shotgun ammo on standby. It’s like I’m stuck with two options here, the difficulty that’s stupidly easy and boring, or the difficulty whose idea of challenge is to just make everything slightly more annoying. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I will say hard mode is quite possibly the easiest way to obtain the “In Water” ending but that’s really about all it’s good for, isn’t it?

The boss fights were already terrible on the original difficulty, a game of getting some potshots off, running to another corner of the cramped arena, rinsing, and repeating. Every boss is designed like this, and hard mode cranks it up even further by giving these things so much more health to deal with. The Pyramid Head fights get the absolute worst of it, the first encounter has you avoiding the slow easily telegraphed attacks it throws out for a few seconds by walking in circles until it just randomly decides to leave. How exciting. But in hard mode you HAVE to pump ammo into it to make it go away, because if you try the original running away method, Pyramid Head takes, no joke, not even kidding, over an HOUR to leave on its own. What…bonehead decided that this amount of time was a necessary addition to this difficulty? Killing him with ammo is not difficult at all but like guys…really? An HOUR? Not a single human being on planet Earth has that kind of patience, and each encounter just progressively keeps getting worse and worse. The second encounter is even worse as you have a defenseless AI companion following you that simultaneously cannot seem to keep up with you, and constantly gets in the way. Running full steam ahead doesn’t work so the only way to prevent her from getting killed by Pyramid Head is to shoot it and slow it down, but UH OH, turns out that she’s able to be killed by your own stupid gunfire! And there’s not much space to maneuver around as it’s a series of extremely narrow corridors with little to no breathing room, so oftentimes she stands in your path like a complete halfwit and you’re not able to do much about it! It got so bad that I had to actively switch BACK to tank controls to try and maneuver around her a little better and get more shots off of Pyramid Head. I don’t feel the need to bring up any other boss encounter because, again, they’re all the same. Get some potshots in, run to another corner of the room, get some more shots in, run to the opposite corner, etc.

The puzzles were fine. Nothing spectacular, nothing mind-boggling either, but they got the job done well. They even have neat symbolism that pertains to the game’s many recurring themes which is cool. The item puzzles on the other hand are much less interesting. The importance these items have in conjunction with what you need to use them for often feels completely disjointed. On my very first playthrough, for instance, it took me AGES to figure out that you needed to push the juice box in the disposal chute to get a key. For a while, I thought the juice box was a form of health restoration. I hadn’t found many health-boosting items beforehand so I kind of just kept it in my inventory while I aimlessly wandered around the apartment looking for more puzzle pieces that never existed. And yeah even if you chalk that up to my ignorance, on my second playthrough knowing that you have to use the juice box and push it down the chute, the solution is inherently unsatisfying because these two puzzle elements have nothing to do with each other at all. The same goes for the elaborately designed keys that are both only used to unlock a crusty ahh box with no attachment to either one. In Resident Evil (or at least the first one anyway) when I picked up a key item it felt a little exciting. Partially because I KNEW it was going to be used for something important that was intrinsically connected to the said item later down the road, and getting acquainted with intriguingly designed lock doors beforehand only bolstered my curiosity. It felt like I was progressing towards something continuously throughout the entire campaign. In Silent Hill 2 it just feels like you’re aimlessly wandering around and picking up a bunch of stuff for the sake of it, and then just haphazardly being able to use them later on in some disconnected way. The payoff feels woefully lacking.

In general, exploration feels like a chore. The main game outside of combat feels like a door-opening simulator, constantly checking to see if the barrage of samey-looking doors (most of which are locked or broken) in the samey-looking hallways will have the cutscene or item needed to progress the story in some way. All the while I was also frequently checking the map like a pirate with short-term memory loss to see which doors I’d already attempted to open and which ones I hadn’t. This isn’t fun for the record, it’s cumbersome and tedious, I must’ve spent around 40% of my total game time just fiddling around with the stupid map because of the constant barrage of locked doors and samey hallways. There’s just…nothing for me here. Not the combat, not the puzzles, and CERTAINLY not the gameplay outside of these two factors, which leads me to my ultimate point that I haven’t brought up yet; the big elephant in the room you could say.

Silent Hill 2 is not a traditional survival horror title. It’s a psychological horror at its very core. Almost every ounce of the game is dripping with symbolic themes regarding so many different incredibly dark subject matters, not just in the environmental design, not just in the monsters that roam the town, but in the characters themselves. Even the puzzles reflect this to some degree. The game is very clearly trying to tell a story with complex themes above all else and be a competent video game second. Here’s the problem though: I can’t connect with experiences like that. I know I’ll likely get a barrage of people going “Why are you even COMPARING this game to Resident Evil, they offer completely different experiences” and you’d be right. But to put it simply, I’m just the kind of person who values pure gameplay when I go into a game. I can’t help it. It’s the main reason I enjoy playing games to begin with - to engage with the mechanics presented and to make my own kind of fun out of it. It’s why I enjoy other horror games a lot more than this: they focus more on the extremely tense blood-pumping action that happens during the gameplay; the kind of action that makes you extremely nervous about continuing onward from where you’re standing. THAT’S what I love about these kinds of games. Granted that’s not ALL I enjoy in a horror title and that’s not to say I don’t appreciate a great story to go alongside the experience, I really do. But I’m just not into the kind of games that are the other way around entirely. Like, yeah, it’s cool that the monsters surrounding Silent Hill are a manifestation of James’ psychological and emotional distress, but how much does that realistically keep me invested in it when I’m too busy playing Whack-a-Nurse for the majority of the campaign? When I have to engage with some of the worst melee combat I’ve seen in a game since Dead Island’s drunken first-person flailing the most I can muster is a “Wow that factoid is pretty neat” and not much else. Even when the game intentionally tries to be campy and goofy it kinda gets under my skin for the little it has to offer me in every other area. Yeah very funny a joke ending involves a dog being the mastermind behind every event that’s unfolded, except it feels like the gameplay was designed by an actual canine with how terrible it is. And no, I can’t particularly swallow the pill of “Well maybe they just made the game INTENTIONALLY bad/clunky to evoke some sort of emotion out of you”, I can’t stand that line of reasoning personally. I mean yeah, it…certainly did evoke an emotion out of me alright; they did, in fact, succeed in that department. Just…probably wasn’t the emotion they were expecting. But I don’t personally see combat that’s intentionally made to be clunky to symbolize James’ lack of experience as a fighter: I just see a horrendously designed combat system that’s agonizing to sit through. I don’t see exploration that’s meant to be mind-numbing to symbolize what the character is going through emotionally: I just see a chore that needs to be taken care of so that the game can be finished. I don’t hear voice acting that’s “a little off” to elicit an uneasy atmosphere: I just hear terrible voice acting. People who were randomly plucked off the street, read directly from the script and never asked for a take 2.

But why this game specifically? I’ve even sung a few praises of other titles that were intentionally more art than game, like Scorn for instance (and that game didn’t even really have a story at all). But something about this game sucks the life out of me and I don’t know why. I mean, I DO know why, I hate everything about the pure gameplay side of this entire experience, but so many others connect so heavily with the thematic elements that this game provides in a way that I cannot. I guess I’m a little envious of everyone else in that regard. I do think the symbolic and thematic elements in this game are very well-crafted, and the lonely desolate atmosphere is nicely done as well; but the gameplay portion of the actual video game is so bad, so utterly PUTRID, that I just can’t enjoy it no matter how much I try. It’s a case where I finally understand what the game wants to accomplish, and I fully respect those who connect with these kinds of experiences more than I do. But Silent Hill 2 isn’t a game that I ever want to return to for another go: it’s a game where it’s way better to DISCUSS the things it has to offer rather than play the things it has to offer. Perhaps I would connect more with the other entries if I ever get to them (I doubt it though, to be honest with you), but even after I’ve experienced pretty much everything this game has to offer, it’s something I never want to come back to playing ever again.