at many moments it's surprising that Silent Hill 2 exists in the state that it does. any amount of genuinely bizarre non-sequiturs and imagery is probably enough to make a game published by any multinational entertainment corporation's existence strange, but this game has quite a lot of it. completely nonsense sounds, inexplicable rooms, weird one-off mechanics, unintuitive puzzle solutions, awkward dialogue, etc. most media aiming to disturb in any capacity has this issue where it relies on tropes which, while they may have been novel at some point in time, are at least presently fundamentally familiar. it's really hard to get scared by Frankenstein's monster when you can find a children's costume of them at any Spirit Halloween. see also the trend of "horror" media drifting evermore towards being any genre other than horror. so it is refreshing that this game manages to avoid that pitfall despite its extravagant influence on like at least a third of horror games made after it, especially indies.

setting-wise, it's worth noting that, at least as far as I can tell, there is no malevolence, at least no supernatural malevolence. the town acts as an impersonal axis mundi for (a) plane(s) of being which render concrete the depths of your soul, but only that. whatever equanimities and/or neuroses you enter with are roughly what inform the world around you. in some ways, it's surprisingly mundane, just a mirror of reality -- this type of experience is not only not far off from many in-real-life phenomena such as religious and psychedelic experience, but is also (obviously) a straightforward metaphor for the aforementioned moods even in mundane contexts. one imagines James does not feel too wildly different in the real world relative to the Otherworld save for the fact that he's having to stomp some giant bugs or whatever in the latter.