Silent Hill 2

Introduction

The Silent Hill series has been a blind spot for me over the years. Especially since I've gotten more and more into Resident Evil and the survival horror genre in general my mind has wondered back to this series from time to time. This blind spot isn't totally of my own creation though. The Silent Hill series isn't exactly easily accessible or legally attainable or even functional on PC. Seriously, what is with these video game companies not respecting their own works of art by maintaining them for future generations? Perfect example is that up until recently the original Resident Evil trilogy was unavailable on modern hardware. And at the end of the day, RE is legally attainable on PC mostly thanks to the efforts of GOG, not Capcom. Silent Hill's original titles are in an even worse spot from what I understand. Now I should preface this by saying I'm the type of guy that likes an easy entry point to get into stuff. I'll by all means tweak, overhaul, and fix games via mods all the time, I mean I'm a fan of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series... but usually I have to like something first before investing time into it. For Silent Hill I had very little to ride on other than what I had heard from other survival horror fans online and some obnoxious TV ads from the 2000s for the movie spin-off.

The barrier to entry finally broke when I saw this pop up on my YouTube recommendations:

YouTube works in mysterious ways. I had maybe watched one of these devlogs years ago, but for it to show up right when I was rounding out playing CONSCRIPT, Crow Country, and Tormented Souls was very poetic. Needless to say, this video caught my attention, and I was directed to the Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition website. I've never played any Silent Hill game, but I was entranced by the work that this team had put into rehabbing this classic game. The attention to detail, the adherence to the original vision, and the added accessibility options all fascinated me. By the nature of watching these devlogs I also got exposed to the overall vibe and atmosphere of Silent Hill and that's when I made one key realization: Silent Hill is more Twin Peaks than it is Saw or Hostel.

Don't get me wrong, I like the original Saw movie (Hostel not so much), but Twin Peaks is my jam. That show has got it all. The original eight-episode season is peak television and I've seen nothing quite like it. Silent Hill 2 has that special something too. A dense atmosphere that's nostalgic yet uncanny and haunting. Small town vibes with something larger and unknowable at play. There's some grimy, Saw-esque gore in there too, but for me that's not the selling point. And this is where, similar to Resident Evil, these silly Hollywood movie spin-offs lead people astray.

When I was a kid, it was unlikely that my parents would have let me play Resident Evil or Silent Hill even if I had known about them at the time. If I had known and had asked though, their judgement would have been based on ridiculous TV ads that play these series up as either zombie shoot-'em-ups or grindhouse torture-porn. I get it though, that's marketing, but holy shit do those movies miss the essence of their source material! Despite knowing that movies are often wholly different projects and shouldn't reflect too greatly on any source material, these things still color the populaces opinions of an IP. So, bringing it back around, it wasn't until watching this hour-long devlog of a game I've never played that I finally started to grasp the true essence of Silent Hill.

A Hauntingly Magnetic Atmosphere

Someone's Hometown

I grew up in a small riverside town in central Pennsylvania. Silent Hill feels eerily similar. There's a rundown grit that permeates the town. It's not post-apocalyptic, it's as if the residents started losing their jobs a decade ago and then they straight-up disappeared a month back. Any given night in my hometown you could go out and not see a soul, no cars, no sounds coming from the houses, just a few dim streetlights. Imagining a towering, makeshift wall closing off an alleyway or picturing an endless rift torn through the main street was something otherworldly but at the same time could've fit the vibe. What takes this whole uncanny, personal connection to the next level is the siren. My hometown and Silent Hill are the only two places I've ever heard a siren like this. To this day, where I'm from, we have a volunteer fire department that uses a town-wide siren to alert its members to a fire call. The siren is located at the borough office in the center of town and rings out maybe once or twice a month. For longtime residents you'll always notice the sound but at a certain point it's just background noise. Silent Hill repaints normalcy into something otherworldly and horrifying and for me, it hits something close to home.

Attention to Detail

Check out the screenshots below. I don't know why I love these little interactable stills so much. Actually, I know why, it's all the details. The local map with all the ads on the side, the notes scribbled down, the worn key... damn, it's so cool. These vignettes semi-frequently pop-up throughout your exploration and while you can click right past, they always feel like a little treat to me.

The other nice detail I appreciate is how the map is done and how it meshes with exploration. I love the scribbly, note-taking style annotations that appear on your map as you explore. It feels immersive and informative, a win-win in my book.

Interesting Musical Flourishes and Interludes

Since beating Silent Hill 2 I haven't really left Silent Hill 2, and that thanks to its soundtrack and what an interesting soundtrack it is. Now there's a good bit of what you'd expect from a creepy horror game, think droning ambience, clattering drum-heavy combat music, and some melancholy piano pieces, but there's also so much more. It's the in-between moments, like cutscenes or transition points, in which you encounter the more standout tracks in my opinion. Here are some of my favorite cuts:

Theme of Laura - This is such a weird song. It's like a memory of what a good rock ballad from the 2000s would sound like and it's actually good too. Why am I head-banging and smiling as I drive to the town where my supposedly dead wife is?

Forest - Floaty piano notes, distance strings, it's forlorn and mysterious in the best way.

Promise (Reprise) - Probably the first song I hear in my head when Silent Hill is mentioned. Chilly and slightly creepy piano notes but with enough tempo to keep you swept up and wondering what's going on.

Null Moon - Something about the snappy drum plus the smooth, swaying strings sets this one apart.

True - Might be my favorite track. The winding piano is mesmerizing, perfect for a mysterious setting. Then those swaying strings come in again and things become melancholic all over again.

Promise - Again, it's a sick rock ballad-type track and it just works in this quirky way.

So there's some of my favorites. On their own I think they hold up well, but after playing Silent Hill 2, these tracks take you right back into the town in the best way.

Uncanny, Well-Paced Cutscenes

I'm not a big story guy when it comes to video games. It's usually low on the priority list when I'm evaluating games. Silent Hill 2 though is definitely a strong example of a video game story done well. I really like the short but sweet cutscenes that are well-paced throughout the whole game. It keeps you engaged in the story while getting you back into the gameplay. It helps that the story and its characters are interesting too. The hook of James looking for his dead wife because he got a letter from her is an all-time great one. And then on James' journey, you meet a bunch of strange and memorable characters that interact with his story in peculiar ways. I'm going to leave it at that, mostly because I only have a loose understanding of why things happened the way they did and but also because it's probably best you figure out the story yourself. Just know it's a well-paced mystery.

Silent Hill 2 is not really Survival Horror

The bottom-line here is that I don't think the gameplay was a point of emphasis for the developers of Silent Hill 2. Aside from a few good puzzles, many of the survival horror gameplay staples are flat-out not here. Without a limited inventory or any consideration for balancing resources, I ended the game with an absolute arsenal in my back pocket. There wasn't once the I was hurting for resources as I was simply hemorrhaging handgun bullets. I ended the game with more than 300! The excess of resources, unlimited inventory, often linear levels, and unlimited saves contribute to a lack of decision making that could certainly bore some, especially if not for how Silent Hill 2 excels in other areas.

There's another part of me that's grateful for the lax inventory constraints and overabundance of resources because the combat just isn't very good. The combat is sluggish and repetitive to the extreme. This is coming from someone who loves REmake's combat and by comparison that game has crisp and tight handling. In Silent Hill 2 it seems like James has too much inertia for his size. Stopping and starting is sluggish and the animations are rigid and awkward. Combat is even worse somehow. Something about the animations is just off. They're stiff, janky, and unnatural. The board with nails melee attack in particular is awful. It's like you're bouncing a board off a punching bag as this strange, bouncy thud/scream sound effect plays. It's weird and not in a good way. We're brutalizing these fleshy abominations with the nails jutting off the end of a plank! You'd think something a little more visceral sounding/looking would've been the call. Repeat this four times for every enemy early in the game and now my eyes roll back every time I see another foe on screen. Long story short, this is why I'm glad ammo is in such abundance. It means you can just gun down everything indiscriminately and avoid melee combat.

Verdict

★★★★

Silent Hill 2 is a tough one for me to rate but rather easy for me to write and talk about. What I love about it is so clear to me. The atmosphere, story, soundtrack, and presentation are all 100% up my alley and incredibly influential on modern survival horror. What I don't love is also clear to me. A lot of the gameplay elements I find boring and repetitive. Stuff like combat and the inventory/resource management are just passable enough to not really detract from the other stuff's greatness. It's incredibly cool that there's this Enhanced Edition project for PC and I can absolutely recommend playing Silent Hill 2 this way. It ran flawlessly and looks great for a game from 2001.

and because she'll definitely read this far...

Happy Anniversary Love.
I'm alone there now...
In our 'special place'...
Waiting for you...