Silent Hill 2 is an Imperfect Classic

October 8, 2024 • 4400 words (18 min)

Content warning: references to suicide

Silent Hill 2 was the game that got me invested in the horror genre and retro games as a teenager. In the years since, I've returned to the game again and again, each time with a new perspective as my knowledge of the Silent Hill series and survival horror in general has grown. With the remake on the horizon, it was a perfect time to come back once more and put down my thoughts in a review.

Locations and Atmosphere

The opening of Silent Hill 2 efficiently sets up its story and atmosphere. It's a game that thrives on ambiguity: the first shot is James' face shrouded in shadow, his expression difficult to read. The first gameplay segment is a long walk down a foggy road. Every once in a while, you can hear another set of footsteps over James', so subtle and quick it might seem like your mind is playing tricks on you. This opening isn't as gripping or intense as the first Silent Hill's incredible start, but it prepares you for Silent Hill 2's more melancholic approach to the town.

The music holds a lot of weight in building atmosphere. It uses booming, industrial noise that blend with the sounds of monsters, masking their presence or creating the sense that something might be nearby, even if you're in an empty room (although, after a few hours, it's pretty easy to distinguish between sounds that might be dangerous and sounds that are just background noise). I played the game on emulator for the first time for this review, and thus with headphones for the first time, which opened up a whole new auditory experience. Monsters seem much closer, and there were several times when I got startled by sound effects I didn't remember, like the running footsteps in the dark room in Toluca prison. I also gained a new appreciation for the noises that monsters make: the fleshy, inhuman, ripping sounds of the nurses; the snarling, echoing grunts of Pyramid Head. Without much in the way of combat, Silent Hill 2 relies on unsettling sound effects and disturbing imagery to create tension during exploration, and it still works even after multiple playthroughs.

The design of the different areas is also fantastic. For the most part, Silent Hill 2 abandons the rusty, bloody aesthetic of its predecessor's otherworld (which would make a return in the third game's impressive graphics) in exchange for grimy natural environments. The lighting makes large areas feel particularly oppressive; all you can do is stare into complete darkness, and know you'll have to enter it eventually. The game plays on the fear of typically inhabited locations that are now vacant, dark, and rotting—areas without any monsters are almost more effective, making you feel like you're alone in a place you really shouldn't be. Any people you come across are outsiders, like most of the characters in the story, or dead bodies, who don't feel like they were ever people in the first place. The environments are also very realistic, for better or worse. The buildings have an inexplicable amount of broken locks, but they also feel like real places that could have once served a purpose. There's also some environmental storytelling that fleshes out the unseen inhabitants of Silent Hill, like the bullet holes in the apartment with the handgun, the box with hair in it in the hospital, and the occult symbols and demon stalking the prison.

Each location presents a step up in difficulty, at least at first. The apartments are a pretty easy ride, but they toy with the Silent Hill formula in a way that we'll explore later. Things get more dicey in the hospital, with the far more dangerous nurses who are placed closer to the doors. The prison is the most oppressive area of the game, littered with reminders of the cruelty of the carceral system and the deep-rooted feeling that something has gone horribly wrong here. It features a constant descent down dark holes that inexplicably lead to more architecture deeper and deeper underground in some of the best atmosphere-building in the game. However, the prison is criminally (ha) short, giving way to this game's Nowhere, a set of endless monotone halls that are nowhere near as compelling.

After stumbling into a meat freezer (which could have had more to it, considering that Pyramid Head's design is reminiscent of a butcher), James has to row across Toluca Lake in a section that has symbolic significance but is far too slow, and it can be hard to tell if you're making any progress. Finally, you get to the hotel, which is a little plain at first. It features a section that forces you to remove all of your items, a survival horror classic, but the game doesn't do anything interesting with this. The only monsters you have to face while defenseless are the mannequins, the easiest enemy in the game, and the whole thing is just an overcomplicated detour to grab a few items. At first, I thought the item-less elevator was taking me to a previously nonexistent part of the hotel, like the fourth floor in Silent Hill's hospital, but it was just an area not marked on the guest map. Still, the second half of the hotel makes up for the first half's missed potential with the videotape reveal, which is executed well with no music and quick, blurry flashes. Once the truth is revealed, water begins to drip down the now-rotting walls and pools in the basement. The music is paired perfectly with the visuals and context. The hotel turns into a labyrinth as doors send you to places they're not supposed to, with the halls seemingly growing darker and darker (although that was just the lighting in different parts of the hall—subtly changing the hotel's design so many times would have been too technically difficult for the time). Although the final boss battles are lackluster, they still ride the high of the warped hotel, which is one of my favorite areas both visually and thematically.

The otherworld variants of each location reflect the sins of their pasts. The hospital becomes covered in white sheets like padded cells, playing on a theme of psychosis and questioning reality. The prison echoes with banging metal bars and has an intense theme of cruelty and punishment that lingers throughout the rest of the game. The hotel's veneer is dropped and it fills with water, the rot that festers under its surface reflecting James' approach of avoiding the truth about Mary until he no longer has any choice. This approach to the otherworld is also unique compared to the first game, and Silent Hill 2 uses these expectations against you.

In Conversation with Silent Hill 1

Silent Hill 2 isn't often thought of as a sequel. The first and third games in the series follow one cohesive storyline, so Silent Hill 2 feels disconnected from them. However, even though it has a self-contained narrative, Silent Hill 2 is aware of the expectations set by its predecessor and exploits them.

The first exploration section in Silent Hill 2, the apartments, doesn't play out like you'd expect. The first thing the game does is show you a bunch of items—a key, a locked clock with a puzzle scrawled on the wall next to it, a piece of trash in a chute you have to knock out—but they're all just out of reach. You can't find the tools to solve these puzzles, and progression isn't unlocked by the player. Instead you encounter Pyramid Head, not attacking, but standing menacingly behind a set of bars. Only after a bit of wandering do you hear a scream, and run to the room near where you first saw Pyramid Head to find a dead body and a key that unlocks the rest of the apartment. After that, the area plays out like a typical survival horror level, easing you back into a familiar place. In this first sequence, the game withholds control: the town of Silent Hill has the power here, not you. It knocks you off balance, subverting your expectations of how survival horror games should work and creating a sense of unease and helplessness that will return throughout the game.

Another expectation from the previous game that Silent Hill 2 plays with is how the otherworld works. In the first Silent Hill, most of the areas have a distinct "before," where the location seems normal, and "after," where it warps into a nightmare zone of darkness, mangled corpses, and rusted metal bars. However, in Silent Hill 2, the only area where the otherworld transition is as explicit is the hospital. Every other location morphs in more subtle ways, the architecture twisting and looping around you. This is another way the game unsettles the player: there's no way to predict when and how the world will shift and you'll be plunged into a nightmare. It toes the line between reality and unreality, allowing both to exist in the same location without an explicit map change.

The characters in Silent Hill 2 are more engaging, expanding on methods of storytelling that the first game set up. They're ambiguous and defensive, they speak in subtext and don't immediately trust James. Laura in particular acts as a red herring to anyone who has played the first game. While players' perception of Silent Hill now is that it's a town that recreates your individual fears and sins, that's entirely because of Silent Hill 2. In the first game, the horror came from the nightmares of a traumatized girl, Alessa, and audiences coming into its sequel probably expected something similar. Laura is introduced as a girl who's unaffected by the town's monsters, who even locks James in a room with them, and knows details about his wife that she shouldn't—she could easily be a candidate for the Alessa character of this game. Part of Silent Hill 2's twist is that the horror isn't born from one person, but that everyone who comes to the town sees their own personal hell. It's a natural expansion of ideas from Silent Hill.

Combat

Before diving into my criticism of the combat in Silent Hill 2, I want to say that I beat the game on normal mode, and I've played it multiple times before. A newcomer or someone playing on hard mode might have a different experience. Still, I beat it without dying and with over 200 handgun bullets left. The Silent Hill games are not very difficult; the wealth of healing items and ammo around the world, as well as unlimited inventory space and saves, removes the resource management elements that typically make survival horror games challenging.

The combat in Silent Hill 2 is slow and clunky. In some games, this really works: the first Dark Souls, for example, forces you to think through every action you and your enemy take and commit to each slow animation, creating a far more engaging and strategic experience than just mashing buttons. Silent Hill's contemporary series, Resident Evil, uses this combat style masterfully, generating intense stress as you're forced to consider whether to fight or run, whether you could pull either of these options off effectively, and how it would affect your limited inventory. Silent Hill 2 could have used the same tactic and created stressful situations in close quarters, but it rarely does. The simplest enemies—lying figures and mannequins—are easy to deal with using melee weapons to avoid wasting ammo, and even though the melee aiming can be a pain, they don't do enough damage for this to be a serious problem. For all other enemies, standing back and shooting them is the best strategy, and they can rarely get close enough to hit you before dying, unlike Resident Evil enemies. The streets are full of monsters, but it's incredibly easy to run past them and not worth your time to fight them. The combat is even simpler than its predecessor, Silent Hill, where enemies like the pterodactyls (I refuse to call them "air screamers") and dogs ("groaners") could catch up to you on the streets, and I almost ran out of ammo in the hospital. There were only a few moments in Silent Hill 2 where the combat caused me any stress: the scene where James gets the radio, because I forgot the controls and was mashing buttons while the monster slowly walked toward me; later areas where monsters are positioned closer to doors and started to attack while the scene was fading in; a few times where Pyramid Head appeared out of nowhere; and a moment in the hotel when I got stuck in a corner and couldn't run around the larger monsters. This lackluster combat also makes game mechanics like turning the flashlight on and off to avoid detection obsolete, and I was just annoyed whenever I accidentally hit the flashlight button.

Still, I had some good moments with the regular enemies. My favorites are the lying figures that scuttle around on the ground, and the first one that came out from under a car actually made me jump. Sometimes, if you kill and enemy and enter a room, the enemy will get back up when you come out of the room. I'm not sure if it was because I didn't fully kill them or because they have a random chance to get up, but I'm leaning toward the latter. There were also places where the game hides enemies in the background of cutscenes or camera angles, making use of the best feature of fixed camera horror.

The boss battles suffer the most from the issues with Silent Hill 2's combat. Pyramid Head's fights consist of running back and forth between corners of the room and dodging his slow attacks. He also runs on a timer and will leave (or kill himself) once it's up—you can shoot him to speed up the timer, but it's not necessary. The final boss is also easy, although its bug attack can be really annoying. It's hard to see coming thanks to the camera and will stun you for a long time while the boss just kind of hovers around you. I assume you're supposed to rely on sound cues, but James' animations are so slow that it can be hard to react effectively, and it's easier to just run around the area and take occasional potshots at the boss. Eddie's fight is a bit of a step up since he uses both his revolver and fists, and will hide behind things when he's at low health. The two fights I think are the best are the ones where you face boss version of regular enemies: the one where Laura locks James in a room, and the one with Angela. Both of them make good use of the cramped quarters they take place in, with the bosses posing an actual threat. The room with Angela, as well as the design of the boss, is extremely evocative and uncomfortable. You can immediately tell what's going on, even though she spells it out a few minutes later.

Pyramid Head is much more effective as a regular enemy. There's no announcement of his presence, no cutscene or special sound effects—he's just there. I always forget when and where the hospital chase scene takes place, making his appearance in a random hallway much scarier. Similarly, in Nowhere, you can't be sure which part of the labyrinth he'll appear in, or whether the splashing footsteps belong to him or a normal enemy. He's also a lot faster after switching from the knife to a spear, although his aim is pretty terrible (I ran right past him in a narrow hallway while he was jabbing at me). In a modern game, he could be terrifying as a stalker enemy, although the Resident Evil 2 remake might have done that so well that no one else can compare.

Silent Hill has always been the more psychological younger sibling of the Resident Evil series. While the disturbing imagery and themes are more likely to stick with you after the game is finished, difficult combat creates a stressful experience in the moment and can amplify subtle horror. Without it, Silent Hill 2 falls a bit flat on the overt horror side of things. However, its storytelling is remarkable, not just for a game from 2001; it's better written than many games today, handling difficult themes with an impressive degree of care and restraint.

Characters

The characters in Silent Hill 2 are three-dimensional, and the issues they deal with like sexual abuse, depression, and suicidal ideation are surprisingly well-written. They often speak in subtext and only spell out what's going on until after the emotional impact of the scene has hit you. This is especially the case for Angela's scenes in front of the mirror and on the burning staircase, where the scene is able to convey emotion through imagery and somewhat ambiguous dialogue before she makes her feelings more clear. Even the less fleshed-out characters like Eddie and Laura have depth beyond the archetypes they're introduced as.

The voice acting can take away from the writing in some cases, however. The voice work is typical of its time, with some great moments, especially from Monica Horgan's Mary/Maria, as well as moments that fall flat. The heavier scenes with Laura and Angela are brought down a bit by awkward, unconvincing voice acting. On the other hand, there are some fantastic vocal performances. In the prison scene with Maria, it's immediately clear from voice alone that Maria is not herself. She starts in the softer tones of Mary, and as the scene goes on, switches to the harder edge of Maria's voice. Distinguishing between two characters that look identical and sound so similar takes talent. Horgan's reading of the final letter is also incredible.

There are also scenes that are meant to be off-putting (which, in my opinion, doesn't explain unconvincing performances in other scenes). The best of these is the scene where Maria catches up with James after the hospital's transformation. It makes excellent use of its FMV with close-ups that break the 180 rule, making the scene feel jarring and disconnected from its environment. The vocal performance is also great, with Maria rapidly swapping how she approaches James, going from anger to fear to worry.

Maria's motivations in many of her scenes seem to switch on a dime. She plays on common tropes of female characters in video games: sometimes, she's the mysterious, seductive type, the woman who flirts with the first strange man she meets and knows more than she lets on; other times, she's the scared girl who needs to be saved by our big strong hero. The other female characters directly reference these tropes too, with Angela asking if James will magically heal her pain, and Laura being a jerk instead of the typical scared little girl. However, Maria in particular feels like the game's way of commenting on archetypes of female characters. She isn't a person, she's an illusion created by the town, and thus adheres to whatever flat archetype she needs to be at any given time. Her existence is entirely centered around James, in both a literal and storytelling sense. Still, she has moments where she attempts to separate herself from Mary and assert her individuality. I haven't played Born From a Wish, but I wanted to see more of her own personality in the base game. It could make the tragedy of her character more explicit.

Laura is the representation of innocence of Silent Hill, which is funny considering her personality (not that I hate her; her early scenes are a source of humor in the darkness of the rest of the game). Much of the first half of the game's plot revolves around chasing her to protect her from monsters that she doesn't even see, but it feels deeper than that. James following her is like him chasing the fantasy of his own innocence, the potential for a normal life, the child he and Mary might have had if things hadn't gone wrong. Laura has her own depth beyond being a symbol, though; she was friends with Mary, and she's disgusted when James reveals that he killed her.

Eddie is the most disappointing character in the game, because he's the most flat. His characterization boils down to him taking revenge for being bullied, or at least his perception that he's being bullied. It's interesting that he doesn't react to Laura calling him a "gutless fatso." Maybe it's just because he's early into his descent into madness, but the game could have done something with him only attacking the faceless illusions of Silent Hill, not real people, at least until his final scene with James.

In contrast, Angela is the best-written character in the game, and it blows my mind that a game from 2001 managed to handle her storyline with such care. Her reactions to her abuse feel realistic: she's dissociative and suicidal, frightened and uncomfortable around James, and jumps between asking if he's going to hurt her and mocking what she thinks his intentions are, like she's accepted the terrifying possibility that he could hurt her and her only recourse is to lash out. Like many of the characters, her ending is a tragedy, but hers hits especially hard because you're unable to help. All you can do is watch and hope that she finds her own way out of hell.

Mary, despite her minimal appearances, is a fascinating character. Her final letter does the heavy lifting in characterizing her as loving and despairing, with a thick layer of self-hatred just under the surface. Her ultimate conclusion of forgiving James for moving on does feel a bit cheap to me. Obviously, she didn't know what would happen to her, so it makes sense for her to write what she did. However, the way the game presents it feels like all of James' sins are forgiven too quickly, at least in the Leave ending. The letter takes on different connotations depending on the ending you get, and feels more darkly ironic in endings like In Water. Still, it feels too simple for her to release her intense conflict and grief over her illness just to say "I love you James, move on." Maybe I'm too cynical, maybe it's meant to be read as her giving up and accepting her death, or as an expression of her self-hatred, but the way I interpreted her letter left it lacking.

James, although he isn't the most interesting character in the world, is also well-written. You can understand his actions and motivations, even if you don't sympathize with them. One of my favorite pieces of his dialogue comes right after the hospital and Maria's "death," where he says: "Maria's dead. I couldn't protect her. Once again, I couldn't do anything to help. Laura has run off somewhere. Mary… What… What should I do? Are you… really waiting somewhere for me? Or is this your way of taking… I'm going to find Mary… It's the only thing I have left to hope for." This conveys his hopelessness and growing dread that he'll have to face the truth, that this entire journey has been for nothing but his own punishment. You get the sense that he is trying to do the right thing and feels immensely guilty, which is compounded by things like his reaction to Maria's multiple deaths and Pyramid Head's existence as a punisher. It's difficult to create a character who is understandable and even likable, with complex motivations behind him killing Mary, but Silent Hill 2 pulls it off.

Endings

On my playthrough for this review, I got the Leave ending, but I've gotten the In Water and Rebirth endings on previous playthroughs, and I'm aware of other endings to the game. Leave is the "good" ending, where James and Laura escape Silent Hill and go on with their lives; maybe James adopts Laura, like Mary wanted to, or maybe they go separate ways and he just keeps on living. It's also a very unsatisfying ending to me. Like I mentioned while discussing Mary's letter, it feels like everything wraps up too easily. While there is some ambiguity for what happens next, it's clear that James' sins have been forgiven, at least by him and the town, and he's able to move on without dwelling on it any more. Part of the issue is with the medium of video games: without digging deep into his psyche and character arc like a novel could, I'm not really convinced that James has developed enough for this ending to be satisfying.

I don't have any strong opinions on the Maria ending, but I (perhaps controversially) like the In Water ending. Both of them feel like the tragedy has come to a head; James can't escape Silent Hill or what he's done. The In Water ending in particular makes great use of the water symbolism throughout the game, with James' guilt literally consuming him as he drives into Toluce Lake.

I also really enjoy the Rebirth ending, a semi-secret ending that involves James attempting to bring Mary back to life using the power of the old gods of Silent Hill. It's partially because I like the occult stuff in Silent Hill 1 and 3 that was mostly absent in 2, but the Rebirth ending also presents a unique take on James' journey. He doesn't escape or become consumed by Silent Hill, but attempts to harness its power and lets it transform him. It might have been cool to see versions of him and Mary reborn in Silent Hill 3, warped into monstrous inhabitants of the town, but together again at last.

Conclusion

Silent Hill 2 is still one of the best survival horror games ever made. It isn't without its flaws, and modern reverence of the game tends to overshadow these flaws, as well as creating a dominant narrative about the game's themes that very few interpretations add a new perspective to. However, it more than earns its reputation with its remarkable storytelling and excellent atmosphere. Despite my misgivings, I'm looking forward to playing and reviewing the remake.