Retro Dreams: A Review of Silent Hill 2

Prologue

In the spring of 1999, I began my transition from an awkward pre teen who didn’t mind having any friends to an awkward teen obsessed with making the worst friends possible. My suburban town had a back alley which conveniently ran parallel to the main road by which I navigated my bike from my house to Mammoth Video, a rental outlet 10 times better than Blockbuster Video, multiple times a week. If I stuck to the alleys, perhaps the heavily populated Mack avenue wouldn’t see my shame. Sometimes in early spring, heavy snow still rests on the pavement, so I’d walk instead. When I made my way to Mammoth Video in March of 1999, I had fixed camera angles and survival horror on the mind. Capcom’s brand, specifically. I was obsessed with Resident Evil, and its sequel, Resident Evil 2, cemented my condition of survival horror junkie. And I needed a fix. I’d blindly rented games such as Overblood and Clocktower (the PSX remake, not the Super Famicom original) to wildly varying reactions, but my pre-teen brain had no idea he was ready for Silent Hill.

As I stared in bewilderment at the box art, of a negative photo image of Harry Mason in mild distress, I knew this was going to be different from Resident Evil, but how different? I was stoked to find out. I headed back home with my copy of Silent Hill and was rudely seized by a terrible discomfort in my stomach. Each step I took loosened my bowels. The sense of urgency plastered on my face inevitably resembled Harry Mason’s visage on that now iconic box art. I tried keeping it together, but every ginger step made me that much further away from my parent’s bathroom. I’d have to run. Little did I realize I was mimicking the very same long and ungraceful strides Harry Mason would take as he bolted his way through the town of Silent Hill. When at last I’d made it home, I raced past my father, seated comfortably on his living room couch, and dropped my rented copy of Silent Hill on the carpeted floor. My father, usually a stoic man jovially advised me to “keep my butt cheeks together.” It was a remarkable piece of life advice.

As grateful as I was that I had made it to the toilet just in time, I grew annoyed that I had to wait just a little bit longer to pop Silent Hill into my Playstation One. When I did, I only played the intro. I made my way down its linear alleys, and gradually they became darker and bloodier. The sound design, like something out of an industrial meat packing factory, made me bite hard down on my lower lip. At the end, a man with disfigured features hanged crucified to barbed wire, and as Harry Mason dryly wonders to himself what the hell is going on, a plethora of demon children with knives come out of the woodwork, stabbing myself and Harry to death. I turned the game off, feeling a sick combination of dread, frustration, and confusion. Those feelings evolved into morbid curiosity by the next day, and that was when I realized, playing through the same section again, that I had just experienced my first “intentional death” in a video game, a gameplay trope prevalent in JRPGs at the time. Harry jolts awake inside a diner. A radio begins to play staticky white noise. Harry walks up to it, and mutters aloud both to himself and me, with the indifference of a Rust Belt millennial: “Radio…what’s up with that radio?” And then all hell breaks loose again…

My first memory of playing Silent Hill 2 is a false one, because I recall playing it with a friend of mine at my house on a crisp Sunday in October of 2001. I didn’t yet own a Playstation 2, because I received a PS2 in December, on my birthday. But I do remember vividly that random Sunday in a memory forgotten to time, that being the first time glare from the sun obnoxiously gleamed off my Mitsibushi CRT television, interrupting my enjoyment of a video game. We were playing Silent Hill 2 in the early afternoon as my father watched an AFC football game kickoff in the living room. I closed the curtains and immediately that nebulous Sunday depression hit, as if I was doing something I wasn’t supposed to be doing. It felt like an inappropriate way to play a survival horror game, but it wasn’t the worst way to experience Silent Hill 2.

Silent Hill was an ugly game, developed on hardware that has become notorious for for its harshly jagged polygonal character models and puce colored environments. Silent Hill 2 looks like how I remember Silent Hill 1 ought to have looked. It was cinematic. It boasted a film grain that many developers would cop in the future. Silent Hill 2 is to Super Metroid as Silent Hill is to Metroid. Silent Hill 2 is the Super Nintendo version of Silent Hill. Silent Hill 2 is the definitive edition of Silent Hill.

It also doesn’t have to worry about following up the baggage of Silent Hill 1. Team Silent’s initial director Keiichiro Toyoma left the company to pursue his own creation, Siren. This allowed the developers to take the concept of Silent Hill and run hog wild with it. Silent Hill was a proof of concept. Not every story in the franchise had to follow the absurd, and let’s admit it, limiting storyline of the first game. SH2 didn’t have to be a continuation of Harry Mason and his daughter; it could be an entirely new story, unchained to the cult lore presented in Silent Hill 1. That is, until Silent Hill 3 came out.

James’s very troubled, and very personal plunge into his own abyss, into his own heart of darkness, is the crux of Silent Hill 2’s story. He is wracked with numerous emotions, namely: confusion, guilt, and horror. He meets other characters tormented by traumas of their own. This is all displayed pretty matter of factly, and the game plays each scenario about as straight as it gets. Characters like Eddie and Angela will appear ahead of you in the game for absolutely no rhyme or reason. What took navigating a geometrically confusing terrain and melting wax dolls with horseshoes to unlock the next area for James, we’re never entirely sure just how the other Silent Hill tourists made their own way through. And that’s one of Silent Hill 2’s greatest strengths, and why it remains the most popular and critically acclaimed of the series.

Restless Dreams

Does Silent Hill 2, or any of the games in the series make any logistical, real world sense? Silent Hill, and survival horror games in general, definitely aren’t for everybody. They don’t play particularly well. Many are derided for having tank controls, fixed camera angles, and pre-rendered backgrounds. Playing Silent Hill 2 to “have a good time” is about as far off on missing the point as trying to explain why someone might love horrifically gruesome slasher movies but laughs while watching Hereditary (let me just address this real quick; everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but if you left Hereditary with the honest to God feeling of laughter, you may be a psychopath). To experience Silent Hill is to put your mind in a very specific place. It doesn’t feel satisfying having James gingerly inch his way closer to a demented, objectified nurse brandishing a steel pipe and then ungracefully unloading 4–5 handgun shots directly into her chest. It feels like relief. The sense of reward and gratification comes from surviving the game’s labrytrinhine design.

At least, labyrinthine for fools like me. I have no sense of direction, so it’s a wonder that Silent Hill 2 comes with one of most dynamic and rewarding maps ever in a video game. For survival horror affairs, a good, functioning map is essential. Those with spatial awareness and sense of direction, be damned. I finished this game in just under 10 hours, reminding myself of the warm sounds of paper gracefully crinkling every time I hit the triangle (or y button for Xboxers) to bring up the map every 30 seconds. It was like a heroin fix.

One of the big criticisms of SH 2 is its linearity when compared to the first game. And while the opening hours of Silent Hill 1 are memorable for in its semi open area exploration, I applaud the boldness of SH2’s linear design. About halfway through, you are given an opportunity to scrounge for items in Silent Hill proper in an ingeniously crafted section that isn’t entirely critical path. It’s dense with side activities, at least for a horror game in 2001, but I welcomed the change. Silent Hill 2’s pacing is a masterclass. James begins the game outside, similarly to Harry. Subverting the expectations of Silent Hill 1, James doesn’t encounter anything directly horrifying in the first handful of minutes. And also unlike Harry, he is equipped to fight back the first time he encounters a monster.

The welcome ambience of daytime Silent Hill is harshly abandoned off once James enters into the first level of the game: the Woodside Apartment Complex. Darkness and claustrophobia are utilized to remarkably oppressive excess here. The hallways feel like they can barely hold James’s own body width. Most of the doors are locked, with no hope of ever unlocking what’s inside. Their secrets remain forever hidden. Unknown. The Brookhaven Hospital makes the apartments out to be a prototype. Where the apartments featured rooms that had a sameness, the hospital is defined by its contrast in personality. The impossible design of the leg monsters in the apartments are substituted with the scantily clad objectified nurses that are a manifestation of something sexual James doesn’t want us or himself to know about. The Brookehaven hospital is also the first instance of the game shifting itself into another reality. James calls it “the Other world.” We called it the Nightmare world. This Other World is signaled by deafening sirens. What was once an unremarkable and mundane place of healing and bureaucracy morphs into something else entirely. The hardwood floors become metallic grates; the walls, once brown, become putrid.

The most undeniably scary part of Silent Hill 2 is ironically, the normal version of the Lakeview Hotel. It’s the game’s final level (or second to last, if we’re counting the nightmare hotel) and Team Silent achieves such a quietly unsettling atmosphere. You don’t encounter many enemies from the outset. There’s no music. Halfway through it, James must descend down an elevator while leaving behind all his inventory, including his flashlight and radio. As anxiety inducing as the radio can be, with its endless emission of white noise, it’s also the most useful tool in the entire game. Every time the radio chatter bursts forth, you and James can prepare accordingly. The radio is a harbinger of what’s to come. But Silent Hill 2 becomes truly dreadful once you’re naked with exposure. Down in the basement of the hotel, at the very end of this section, James inches forth and immediately confronts two monsters who are deathly still. No noise, no fanfare, just the despairingly silent tension that separates you and rotted flesh. It’s as if you are suddenly outside of time and space, your sole companions being only your deepest insecurities.

One of my earliest childhood memories is a nightmare. I’m in my old bedroom in my parents house. The only light I see is from the Surge green color of my digital alarm clock, and though I can’t recall the exact time, it’s definitely late. It’s so late that it’s almost early morning. Slowly, I notice my door creaking open. As it opens, I expect to see a large figure, humanoid. Instead, a small fairy, complete with wings, daintily flutters its way towards me. Simultaneously, ambulance and firetruck sirens gradually begin to suffocate my eardrums. First it’s quiet, but their urgency amplifies as the fairy makes its way closer. I’m not terrified yet, more like curious. I’m certainly too scared to pull the covers off. They’re a source of warmth, and yet they’re also weighing me down. The fairy eventually appears directly in front of my face. It grows larger. I see its face, and now I’m really scared. But I refuse to bury my head under the comforter. The sirens are deafening now. They sound as if they’re parked right outside the driveway. But the exigency of the sirens doesn’t stop. The fairy has mutated into a fully sized adult human, but his wings are still attached. Its face is stoic and determined. I should have known. It has the face of my father. He extends one of his hands, and it is making its way towards my crotch. Red and blue lights flood my room, and as I feel the sensation of his hand against me, I shut my eyes as hard as I possibly can. The sound, the lights, and his touch are so intense, and I wait for him to finish the job so I can wake up out of this nightmare. His hand makes one sudden jerk, like tearing off a band-aid, and the sensation is so intense that I am finally, mercifully, jolted awake.

Yikes…

When most people think back on Silent Hill 2, they remember Pyramid Head. He’s synonymous with Silent Hill, and yet his presence feels like it should only belong to this game. It probably should have. While it isn’t directly addressed in SH2 (thankfully), James’s issues with sexuality are a prominent aspect of his psyche. Our first introduction to Pyramid Head is him gazing at you, separated by steel bars. The next time we see him is more iconic, but this initial encounter is way more effective at establishing his menace. And then we see him in all his glory, thrusting up against one of Woodside Apartment’s leggy residents. James darts into the nearby closet, even though the monster clearly senses his presence. Instantly, I’m reminded of Jeffrey Beaumont’s voyeurism as he stares on helplessly as Frank Booth mercilessly beats Dorothy Vallens. It’s David Lynch by way of Alfred Hitchcock, and 15 years after the release of Blue Velvet, James Sunderland whips out his pistol and unloads an entire clip into the painfully angular dome of PH. Pyramid Head is not unaffected by this, but instead of tearing open the closet and James to shreds, he leaves the apartment. James and the player breathe a collective sigh of relief. Like Nemesis on painkillers, Pyramid Head saunters through the hallways dragging around a buster sword he can barely handle. He pursues us throughout the game but never with any sense of urgency or purpose. He definitely doesn’t want to kill James. On the rooftop of the hospital, PH gently nudges James down four stories. It severely wounds him, because when you open your inventory, our health indicator is bright red. But the goal is never death. Death is too easy a fate for our protagonist.

James Sunderland: Irredeemable Monster or Unfortunate Victim of Circumstance?

James: “It’s hot as hell in here.”

Angela: “You see it too? For me, it’s always like this…”

There are six different endings to Silent Hill 2, and I can say that I am very pleased with the one I got during my most recent play through, having not played SH2 in almost 2 decades. The most universally accepted interpretation of James Sunderland is that he’s an irredeemable monster who couldn’t bear to live with himself after killing his wife. But that’s only half of the truth. You finally get to read Mary’s letter to James just before the end credits. Her illness, whatever it was, demanded three years of James’s life and energy. Mary apologizes profusely near the end of her letter, and even tells James to live his own life now, guilt free. She acknowledges how badly she treated James, how she couldn’t give him anything in those three years she was dying. It’s all vague and left to interpretation. But I think this is what most people who play this game misunderstand. James isn’t a monster, he’s a human being. Three years is a long time for anyone to endure being with a dying spouse who may have already given up on life. I understand that may be a hard pill to swallow for some people. Anyone who can appreciate a good work of Russian Literature can relate to the courage it takes to even entertain the thought of putting yourself in another person’s shoes. Most of the people I know, who happen to be Americans, seem more comfortable judging harshly from a distance rather than judge themselves.

Solaris is not a work of Russian Literature, but it is a pre-90s Polish work within the confines of Eastern Bloc Communism. It was made into a movie by Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose works have become synonymous with deep philosophy and psychology. While the novel, written by Polish author Stanislav Lem, can be a bit dry in its scientific monologuing, the motion picture is human and contemplative. Rangnarok’s Youtube video on Silent Hill 2 and Solaris notes the similarities between the two works, most notably in the relationship between James and Mary. Mary/Maria has been dead for three years, and yet she talks to James in the story as if she’s simultaneously alive and confused of her place within this town. Every character James encounters acts this way. Critics of the game chide the voice acting as bad, while fans justify its stiltedness as being dreamlike, and therefore sufficiently unsettling. And I’m also not entirely convinced that Maria and Mary are the same person. I don’t know, it seems too obvious and easy for a development team with such immense talent. Maybe Maria’s provocative sexuality suggests not James’s desire in abstaining from sex, but quite literally the opposite. What I’m saying is, maybe James isn’t a terrible person for murdering his wife, but that perhaps he cheated on her with someone else. Maria could be a partial manifestation of Mary, because it’s very possible James displaced his lust onto another person. It makes more sense than the theory of Pyramid Head being a representation for James’s blue balls. And I’m not saying Maria is a literal person that James slept with, but rather another psychic creation of his own unbearable guilt having cheated on his dying wife of three years. The bottom line, is whatever the interpretation, it’s a ghastly existence for our player protagonist.

Eddie is the only other man you encounter on your tour through SH2, which is something I hadn’t even considered until I sat down to type this sentence. The first time we meet him, he’s in the bathroom puking his guts out. He has an overwhelming weight of guilt over killing someone, or something. The next time we see him is in Pete’s Bowl-O-Rama joylessly devouring an entire pizza. James is frustrated by Eddie’s apathy, which results in one of the game’s most memorable lines. “How can you just sit there and eat pizza?” What’s interesting about this exchange, aside from its bizarrely Silent Hill-ian etherealness, is how angry James gets that Eddie has found a coping mechanism for himself. Eddie’s able to chill out at Pete’s Bowl-O-Rama and take a break from his journey of self-loathing, while James is solely determined by his own impatient sense of urgency.

Angela is the first character we meet. She hands you a knife for a reason that won’t become apparent until later. You can’t use it combat; James just knows he shouldn’t use it. Team Silent intentionally gave Angela an older voice actress and modeled her face to look older than it actually is. She’s burdened by some serious trauma regarding her parents, but like everything else in the game, we’re not entirely sure what it all means. Then we run into her in the Labryinth and she’s calling you “Mama” as a staircase to nowhere is ablaze. Angela suggests that James might be a suitable candidate to replace her mother and take care of her. We do battle with the Doorman in a small room as Angela sits passively in the corner. Disgusting holes pepper the walls around us, making sickening slurping sounds. You can imagine how awful Angela’s childhood was. And if you thought demonic door dads weren’t macabre enough, the final boss battle of the game is against a demigod version of Mary that has infused herself with the bed she lived in for three years. I swear to Christ, Team Silent is the “Hold My Beer” developer of giving mundane, everyday objects a terrifying spin.

Lastly, there’s Laura, and honestly, I have no idea who or what she represents. There are no allusions from either James or Mary that they ever had any children. She acts like a brat around James, and speaks of Mary quite fondly. In fact, Mary and Laura have a relationship of their own, something that James never seems to question. Apparently, the game factors how much you attempt to read the letter from Mary that’s in your inventory the entire game. I only tried reading it once, so maybe that’s why I have such a vague understanding of Laura.

Final Thoughts

But that’s the beauty of Silent Hill 2. I have absolutely zero interest in going back and replaying the game right now, but I know that in 5–10 years there’s a strong possibility I’ll want to revisit Silent Hill, and perhaps I’ll be a slightly different person when that happens. Maybe I’ll check that letter more frequently. Perhaps I’ll forget about that little nugget of info entirely and wind up pleasantly surprised with an entirely different ending than the one I received this go around.

The first four Silent Hill games vary in quality, but they are all worth revisiting. They were created by a team of disgustingly creative and honest people who simply wanted to make something frightening and unique. In regards to video game narrative, Team Silent was without peer in the early 2000s. It’s a wonder the games were as successful as they were, and undue praise must be given to publisher Konami, a company that has unfortunately become synonymous with greed and corruption in the past decade. If you have to play one, Silent Hill 2 is the most sound choice as a standalone experience. The criticisms aimed at the other games focus a lot on the cult lore, and I can certainly see the reasoning behind them. As lame as it sounds, SH2 gave me a similar feeling after having watched a David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, or Takashi Miike film. They can be brutal and uncompromising, but they can also be unimaginably beautiful. And all of them will certainly stick with you long after the final credits.