So last night I watched the fucking two-hour long YouTube vid of three nerdy Silent Hill fanatics explaining why the Silent Hill HD Collection was bad and what exactly it did wrong. Needless to say, they were completely right and proved it. I had never actually finished Silent Hill 3 before, despite owning it and being a big fan of the first two games. The footage they used for their review looked interesting and made me pick the game back up. I’m currently trudging through it, but what better timing to go back and think about Silent Hill 2?

I didn’t get to play the first Silent Hill game until I was able to mod my PSP and play the official PSN version on it. My experience with “survival horror” games beforehand was limited. I had tried a bit of Resident Evil and thought the horror aspects were laughable. I’ve heard the Onimusha series branded as survival horror too, but like Resident Evil, they’re pretty much just action games with zombie and blood. People need to stop using the horror label so liberally, but anyway. Loved the first Silent Hill, had to play the second and third, found them at a GameStop, and here I am months later.

Silent Hill 2 does everything a sequel should. It isn’t as obvious, but it took the most successful aspects of the first game’s horror and storytelling and expanded upon their strengths. The main appeal of Silent Hill‘s horror is that you have no idea what’s going on. You feel completely at the mercy of an entire supernatural town that just plays with your senses and defies all logic and reality without any consistency whatsoever. You’re a complete toy, a victim of a game that constantly changes its own rules.

In the first game, the town’s supernatural powers, to an extent, were controlled by the evil cult known as The Order. In 2, there is no cult. You just have to accept that the town is naturally the way it is, and the desire to learn as much as you can about the why the town is the way it is and learn anything more about it is primarily what keeps the player interested in playing more of the game and subjecting themselves to the terror of the town of Silent Hill. By removing the cult, Silent Hill 2 increases the sense of confusion and mystery about Silent Hill.

In Silent Hill 2, you play as James Sunderland, a middle-aged man who is a widower after his wife Mary passed away from an illness. He receives a letter years after Mary’s death asking him to come to Silent Hill, a resort town where the two once visited when they were younger and have fond memories of. James, deep in depression and apparently having nothing else to live for goes to Silent Hill in hopes of getting to the bottom of this mystery.

On his way through the town, he discovers that the entire area is almost completely empty, with buildings old and decrepit and no signs of livelihood anywhere, as well as a dense fog that covers the entire town. While exploring Silent Hill, he comes upon four other humans. There is Laura, a bratty girl who seems to know more about what’s going on than she appears to, Eddie, a heavyset and unintelligent man who is in the town for reasons unknown, Angela, an emotionally unstable young girl who claims to be in the town searching for her grandmother, and Maria, a girl around James’s who bears a mysterious resemblance to Mary, despite having a completely different personality and sense of fashion.

As the player, you control James and explore Silent Hill searching for the next clue that will hopefully bring you closer to finding Mary, or whoever wrote the letter claiming to be Mary. Most of Silent Hill 2 and the series in general functions as a standard adventure game. You walk through buildings and other areas, picking up objects and using them in the right places so you can progress forward and figure out more complex puzzles and riddles along the way. There are also several grotesque monsters walking around Silent Hill, and you will have to pick up makeshift weapons on your way through the town in order to fight them.

Because James is just an ordinary guy with no combat experience, the combat aspect of the Silent Hill series is deliberately poor and crippled to discourage you from fighting and make the monsters seem like more of a threat. James swings his weapons awkwardly, and it is very difficult to aim, so fighting most of the time is guaranteed to get you hurt and you’re generally only meant to fight in brief spurts to get away from enemies or clear a path. This is one of the many subtle details in gameplay that add to Silent Hill‘s horror, giving the player a heightened sense of anxiety and greater fear of the game’s enemies and environments, because it is such a nuisance for the player to overcome them.

You can also pick up guns, but ammo is scarce, so as powerful as the guns are you are inclined to save them for emergencies. There are also items scattered about such as first-aid kits that can restore lost health. Each area you explore in Silent Hill has a map, and what’s great about the map is that every time you approach a locked door or a blocked off hallway or something of the sort, it is marked on your map from then on so you don’t find yourself running in circles. I can’t express how glad I was to see this when I first played, because there are certainly a lot of developers who would neglect to do something so simple yet so helpful.

And that’s about the gist of the gameplay. Though the interactive experience is what makes the horror and world of Silent Hill so gripping, it is only because of the excellently designed environments that make it so. There is a very artistic quality to the way the first three Silent Hill games achieve horror, and 2 is no exception to that. Like I’ve said before, much if not all of these artistic touches are very subtle. A major part of this is the pacing, for starters. You can go a very long time without even seeing a monster or some other anomaly, which lures the player into a false sense of security before you begin to realize when something really is wrong.

The Silent Hill series doesn’t specialize in jump scares or anything cheap like that (though they are used, sparingly and tastefully), the series specializes in setting a mood. A feeling of dread, confusion, and general unease emphasized by the strange and disturbing background areas, deformed monsters, and the brilliant atmospheric soundtrack of the renowned Akira Yamaoka.

In most areas in Silent Hill 2, the music is very minimal and ambient, turning itself on and off at random to confuse the player and put them on edge when they least expect it. Though most events in Silent Hill 2 are scripted, there are times when sounds and music randomly play, making each experience slightly different for each player, and making it impossible to know what’s coming next.

As I said with the environments, nothing can serve a better example than the Other World, the name dubbed to the parallel dimension James finds himself trapped in at random. Though this other dimension mirrors the real world, it is much more chaotic. Blood is splattered on the walls, the ground is replaced by steel grates that seem to have an endless abyss beneath them, and many other touches that vary by area to make the town really look like a Hell on Earth.

When in the Other World, the “rules” of the town also change. You can enter a door on the first floor and for no logical reason find it somehow led you to the third floor. When in the real world, you can go into the Other World at any time, ensuring you can never be prepared and you’re completely at the mercy of the demonic town.

The monsters of Silent Hill 2 are also great. Deformed beasts that can rarely be compared to any animal or person that have stocky, unnaturally mechanical movements that seem to have no purpose in life other than trying to kill James Sunderland. Even these monsters have a reason to be in the game other than to give a threat to the player.

They also add to the narrative. Almost every monster’s design symbolizes something about a character in the game. For example, the Mannequin enemy is two pairs of legs attached to each other at the torso, symbolizing James’s sexual frustration he felt without Mary. There’s more than that, but I wouldn’t want to give too much of the game away.

There’s also Pyramid Head, the most iconic monster from Silent Hill 2. As his name suggests, he has a humanoid body and wears only a loincloth and a giant triangular helmet. Pyramid Head also carries with him a gigantic sword that he wields effortlessly. Pyramid Head randomly harasses James through the course of the game, and this is a great addition because Pyramid Head is the only monster in the game that cannot be harmed, so the player is forced to run and hide in fear of him. No matter how good at combat you are, you can still be utterly helpless at times.

About that, though, there is a slight problem with the monsters in Silent Hill 2. Even with the crippled combat, you can eventually get the hang of it and kill monsters without much trouble, and even on normal difficulty health restoring items are handed out to you like candy, so I swear it’s almost impossible to lose if you don’t mind using them at all.

Even without using your guns, your melee weapons are eventually strong enough to work fine for killing monsters. And monsters don’t ever re-spawn when you kill them in “dungeons,” so once you clear out the areas you know that for the most part you’re pretty much safe, which is bad because it’s clear that’s never what you’re supposed to (correctly) feel. There also aren’t enough monsters on the street to pose a threat, and the area is so big you can simply outrun them.

Silent Hill 2 also gives the option to control James directly, instead of using the “tank controls” founded by Resident Evil which were in Silent Hill 1 where you had to rotate your character in the direction you wanted to go before pressing up to move in that direction. Though this does make the game easier to control and combat easier as a result, I actually support this change and think the benefits of being able to explore the environments more thoroughly without frustration adds to the game more than it possibly hinders it.

There really aren’t many flaws in Silent Hill 2. It has a specific goal, message, and feeling, and through all the reasons I outlined above I believe it accomplished them just about as perfectly as it could have. Though Silent Hill 2 is a scary and unsettling game, I think it is the least scary of the original trilogy.

Silent Hill 2 has more of an oppressing and depressing atmosphere rather than a disturbing one, to mirror James’s apathy, loneliness, and general depression. It works very well, and with the symbolism in the monsters and environments, gives Silent Hill 2 an excellent narrative that tells an interesting and captivating story without shoving it all in the player’s face and leaving just the right amount of the story and town up to the interpretation of the player. Because of this, both the gameplay and story of Silent Hill 2 have flawless pacing.

Overall, I think I like the first Silent Hill more, because I like the design and general tone of the town and Other World better in it, even though the second game has a much better plot and environments that serve more purpose to it. It also probably has a lot to do with the fact I played it first, and the first impression of Silent Hill is always going to be the strongest. In any case, both games get the highest amount of recommendation from me for being two of the very few examples of games that I believe stand at the top of their genre and achieve their very high creative ambition.