Taking a Trip Through Silent Hill 2 for the First Time...

In the final editorial just in time for Halloween, our resident Director braves the fog filled streets of Silent Hill 2, and lives to tell the tale, as well as what he took away from the legendary game…

In my restless dreams, I see that game. Silent Hill 2.

I promised I’d finish that game one day… but I never did.

Well, I beat it now. In my one bedroom apartment, all for you, my fellow Renegades.

The heft and weight that comes with a piece of art like Silent Hill 2 is something that cannot be overstated. It’s one of those works that is such an inspiration to modern entertainment that it feels as though it’s been in existence for forever. Citizen Kane. Harry Potter. 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Beach Boys. Silent Hill 2. All of these pieces of work have influenced so many artists that if one were to look at the source, it could make the lines more blurred between homage and plagiarism. Even people who aren’t fans of horror know at least a little bit of Silent Hill 2’s iconography: the nurses in Brookhaven hospital, and of course Pyramid Head are sure to catch anyone’s eye this Halloween. Hell, one could argue that the franchise has been trying to chase the lightning in a bottle thrill that came with this one installment in the series, that every entry since its release tries to recapture the psychological dread this one game brought, even if it isn’t necessarily the best approach to evolve the franchise. It’s a cultural footprint in the world of video games, and it’s absolutely shocking that it’s been 20 years since it first launched into the pop cultural zeitgeist.

As stated in my Alan Wake editorial, I am “I went to go rent video games at Blockbuster and Hollywood Video“ years old, and I remember vividly passing by the horror games, and Silent Hill’s 2, 3 and 4 would always be placed on the same shelf alongside each other. I was young, I was renting Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Incredibles for the Nintendo Gamecube, and I got Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory on VHS to take advantage of the Rent Two, Get One Free deal they had. AKA: I was too damn young to play Silent Hill, and I was not ready to touch those games.

But I would always check out the cover to the game. I mean, how could you not? When you’re a kid, if something scares you, your first instinct is to run away; but your first action is to inspect. The screaming face blending to the apartment door on the cover of Silent Hill 4: The Room gave me nightmares, and Heather’s face on Silent Hill 3 always looked to me like a fearful warning, as if to say “Don’t pick me up, you’re still pure, you don’t have to experience this.“

Silent Hill 2’s cover, however, was the one that I always remembered. Angela’s face was so melancholic and sad, it didn’t feel like it was trying to scare you from the outset. It sucked you in… as a kid, I wanted to know what made her so sad. When I turned to the back, I was even more curious given the rusted, grungy, industrial aesthetic the game stills showed off. While I knew it was a horror game, and I knew if I played it at that young of an age it would scar me for life… it was hypnotic. Like it had a hold on me.

I never played that game. At least not that version of it. And as the years went on, all I knew of Silent Hill were the films that inevitably came out. I never watched them, but the imagery of desperate people walking through a foggy, empty small town in America where there should definitely be a crowd just captivated me, even if the films quality never reached good quality for me. The franchise would wither away and die, with the last few entries getting dismal reviews from critics and gamers everywhere, and the last bastion of the franchise having a fate similar to shooting itself in the stomach and trying to stop the bleeding with pachinko machines, it feels like there will never be a good venture to the resort town any time soon.

All of that said, I have to admit that I was among the millions of people who ate up the cancelled Silent Hills when it was first announced. P.T. was my first experience with the franchise, actively taking a look at what the series had in store. While we may never know what Hideo Kojima (AKA: gaming’s Spielberg or Tarantino), Guillermo del Toro, and Junji Ito would have brought to the table, but the one thing I cannot give them enough credit for is exposing me to the thrills the horror genre could provide in the world of video games. At the time, the most scary game I ever played was Luigi’s Mansion, and I quit halfway through when the mansion suffers a blackout and let all the ghosts loose because I was a scared little bitch. But something about the liminal space of the repeating apartment hall, the sound design of the screaming fetus and intense moaning from the phones, and the limited control set-up just hooked me.

I was confused. I was nervous. I was terrified. I was hooked instantly.

After that, I saw some theory videos of the games, and had seen some of the endings to the games in passing. The visuals were rough judging by narrowminded standards, but they are truly timeless (in a way, the jagged polygons of the PS1 and uncanny valley realism of the PS2 almost add to the horror), and the designs of the monsters crept to the dark corners of your brain to rest until you lay down in bed. I didn’t understand the stories, but I understood the feelings, the emotions the games wanted you to feel.

But yet… these things weren’t the reasons why I finally decided to start playing the games. No, what convinced me was (and it may sound weird, but I swear it’s true)… the HD remasters.

Don’t fret! I never tried those versions, and I never will. But I watched the comparisons between the original versions of the game and the remasters, and I remember hearing Mary’s letter for the very first time. The raw vulnerability of Monica Taylor Horgan’s voice as it trembles, and hearing the emotionally numb delivery of Guy Cihi’s James caught me off guard. I thought back to Blockbuster, and the melancholy of the woman on the front cover. And when I heard the full letter at any one of the four main endings of the game… I teared up. I never had that happen before.

I sought out the game. I was unsuccessful for a long time because surprisingly, the games I grew up with are starting to fetch for RIDICULOUSLY high prices now! The original Silent Hill on PS1 was going for over 100 bucks! Silent Hill 2 is much of the same. Don’t even get me started on Shattered Memories.

However, one day while perusing my local mall, I was lucky enough to find Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams for the original Xbox. I have an Xbox 360. Not the best version to go for, but for $27.99? That’s a steal!

It was last year, October of 2020, when I first started playing Silent Hill 2. I never beat it.

I will admit, I was probably in the wrong headspace for the game, as I started roaming around the rest of the game with this feeling of “alright, supposedly scariest game of all time! SCARE me!“ And while I felt uneasy, I wasn’t exactly scared. It felt like I was plowing through the town, drinking in everything as much as I could about the series, but I felt as though I had seen everything before. As a matter of fact, I had, because again, when you have something as influential as Silent Hill 2, you will find traces of it everywhere else (it’s admittingly hard to watch films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Halloween if you go in expecting something original).

But over the course of the game, I did start to lower my guard. I was still getting used to the controls and the execution of the boss battles, and while I still wasn’t understanding the hype behind the game, I pressed on. I went through the hospital and prison sections; I braved the labyrinth and fought Eddie in the meat locker; and I took the dinghy across the lake to get to the hotel. But I remember I wanted to save the Eddie boss fight for my fiancé to see, as she did find the game more disturbing than I did.

Then the game wouldn’t let me continue. See -- for those who don’t know, Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams is one of the few games that if you play it on the Xbox 360 instead of the Xbox… and DARE to have more than one save file? YOU WILL BE INCAPABLE OF PLAYING THE GAME ANYMORE, and you’ll have to erase all your progress in order to start it up again. I found that out the hard way (thanks old FAQ’s from 5 years ago).

I’ll be honest, that horrified me. I was so close to the end of the game, but it was like the game was punishing me. Keeping me from going further. I had to start back from the beginning, and earn my way back. It was a chance experience that truth be told was probably caused by faulty emulation, but it doesn’t make it any less unsettling for me.

So I started again, but seeing as how I saw so close to the end of the game, I was frustrated. I was even more ill-equipped to fully appreciate Team Silent’s magnum opus. As such, I quit playing. I just stopped entirely.

A year had passed, and originally I was content to watch the endings on YouTube. I saw the Leave, Maria, In Water, and even the Rebirth endings. I felt more comfortable with the In Water ending personally, it felt thematically appropriate, but I still felt disappointed a bit. I couldn’t understand the hype, the fascination. It felt that a lot of the ideas the game explored were done way better in its wake.

But in the back of my mind, Silent Hill was there. The designs of the creatures and what they meant to James (the scantily clad nurses of Brookhaven Hospital, the slimy lying figures that roam the streets of Silent Hill, the Abstract Daddy from Angela’s nightmare, etc.), the rusted and decayed imagery of the town and the otherworld that gave me flashbacks to Tool music videos, and the haunting music by Akira Yamaoka. All of these had come back in some form or another in my mind, and I couldn’t get it out of my head.

This year, I decided to take the trip back to Silent Hill 2. I beat Alan Wake, and then I took a proper stroll through the long path to Silent Hill.

This second time around, I knew what ending I was going for, and I just gave myself to the game. My expectations were tempered, and I fully immersed myself to what Team Silent wanted me to. And my God… it made all the difference.

I spent most of the game by myself, rather than playing to an audience of my fiancé and my father-in-law, and as such, I felt this dread in my heart when I heard static on the radio, indicating that a monster was nearby. The light twinkling off the slimy, shiny legs of the mannequin monsters. I found myself panicking, trying to find as much ammo as I could around the town, eating up every bit of information I could find in the town and actually took the time to read everything clearly. When I got to the Woodside and Blue Creak Apartments, I felt unnerved the whole time. Running through the dark halls without a flashlight made my anxiety about darkness come back in full swing, and seeing the devilish hue of Pyramid Head through the bars in the halls genuinely spooked me this time. The imagery of said hulking figure taking advantage of the feminine mannequin made me feel disgusted.

I understood now, and I was only going to feel it even more. I remembered the streets, the building names, the characters. I remembered walking down Nathan Ave. to get to Rosewater Park, the voice in the holding cells that continuously says “ritual,“ and the brutal subtext that comes with Angela’s dialogue and her nightmare room (the pistons pumping through the holes in the flesh filled room is especially disturbing). Even the boss battles with Pyramid Head had me screaming, trying to avoid getting killed. Even as I had an arsenal the size of a small militia, I crept through halls and felt my heart jump out of my body when a nurse would creep just out of my view and attack me, or when I’d turn the corner and the mannequins would be posted up, waiting for you to approach before attacking.

I was still going for the In Water ending, because as I explained before, I felt with the journey James Sunderland was going on could only lead to that kind of conclusion, thematically and realistically. But even as I was going for it, I thought back to everything I had heard about the monsters, about Maria and the other characters you find in the game. There’s something about how a game this old and this well crafted can be so open to interpretation. Everyone James encounters feels abnormal, much like the town, and everyone speaks in such a cadence that you feel like you walking through a waking dream. Emotions are heightened, and it’s very clear that in this iteration, the town feeds off of one’s own fears and inner demons to fully realize them for you to see.

In my eyes, Angela, Laura, and Eddie represent all the different sides of ourselves, and the journey James takes is that of self-acceptance. He starts the story emotionally numb (and as you carry on, you understand why), and he eventually starts to feel again, starts to open up to all the sides of himself that he doesn’t want to confront. Angela, is an emotionally broken woman who is overwhelmed with guilt, shame, and disgust with what she was unable to control. As she treks further in the town, she (like James) is looking for someone, but ends up confronting truths about herself that she has to accept whether she likes it or not; however she eventually becomes overtaken by the shame and disgust within herself that she gives herself to the kind of punishment she feels she deserves. Eddie, meanwhile, is an absolute psychopath that is what happens when one runs away from responsibility for one’s own actions and thoughts rather than accept the consequences. He becomes more unhinged, and starts lashing out until he becomes a shell of his former self, giving in to his hate and disgust for everyone -- even his gluttonous appearance could be a metaphor for how bloodhungry one could be when they’ve harmed anyone or anything once (could I be hinting at something? possibly…). But Laura is how we all start: completely innocent, with no sins to speak of, and sees the world as one big playground where we learn about ourselves and the people we know. Unlike everyone else in the game (James included), she doesn’t see any monsters and sees only the people. But maybe it’s also how as a kid, the only people we are afraid of are people; looking out for strangers that could take you away from your parents or friends. She’s the lost youth we all have in ourselves. In the end, James must come to terms with all these sides of himself as he uncovers the truth behind Silent Hill, and whether or not his dead wife really is at their special place at the Lakeview Hotel.

In the end, I faced off against the two Pyramid Heads, ready to help James atone for his sins and accept the truth: he killed Mary, and it was for a multitude of reasons. Part of it was empathy, as she laid in bed, spitting venomous words at James day in and day out, her body deteriorating with the sickness that consumed her, writhing in pain with each passing day. Part of it was anger, with how James felt neglected both emotionally and sexually as Mary got worse and worse, walking the streets at night fantasizing about affairs he could be having and going to strip clubs to see the beauty and lust his wife used to have, wanting to feel sweet freedom again. But maybe a part of it was guilt, as he couldn’t think of any other way to make up for what she was going through, and he felt so soft and ashamed that he wasn’t a better man. After a long struggle, the two creatures by James’ own design throw themselves onto spikes and impale themselves. The only natural place for this to go was to the top of the hotel, and meet with Mary once and for all.

Only… it wasn’t Mary. Instead, it’s Maria. James exclaims that he doesn’t need her anymore, and that he understands now. We end on Maria morphing into a demonic form of what Mary must’ve looked like on her death bed, struggling to breathe as James took her life. And when I took out the final boss… I got a scene with James and Mary, where he confesses all of his complex emotions that came with the decision to take her life.

“I wanted my life back,“ James pleads.

Mary responds, “James… if that were true, then why do you look so sad?“

She hands James the letter we have at the beginning of the game, and tells us to go on with our life. And with that, Laura and James end up leaving Silent Hill, as we hear the full letter from Mary.

As you can tell, I didn’t get the In Water ending, the one that I thought was thematically fitting for all the themes the game goes into… but upon finishing the game and being greeted with the site of James making it out of the town, I felt… free. This game, which had so long haunted my memory for almost two decades, which had such an influence on not only myself and the entertainment I experienced, was finally out of my hands. I went through the hell scape that was Silent Hill, and I came out the other side changed. It was like waking up from a really long, detailed dream that you felt was never going to end, with the sun shining bright on you.

As much as I wanted the ending I thought was right… I became attached with the journey, the character of James and how flawed he was. As terrible as he was, and as complex as his actions were, he too had a chance to escape his own nightmares and control his own destiny. And likewise, I too can let go of the baggage that comes with this magnificent work of art.

Well, this editorial has gone on too long, so I’ll say goodbye. It was a long journey that I doubt I’ll ever forget. I can’t say that it’s a perfect game, because there are some gameplay mechanics that I think aren’t very good (the boat section, and even the combat could’ve been improved), and there were a couple of texture loading glitches in my copy of Silent Hill 2 that occasionally broke immersion… but in all fairness, what piece of art is perfect? And that’s what Silent Hill 2 is: a piece of art that transcends its flaws to create something that will go from creeping into the dark recesses of your mind, to nuzzling close to your heart and tenderly never lets go. It can’t tell you to remember it, but I can’t bare to forget it. And that’s why I want you - my dear Renegades - to experience this masterpiece for the first time time if you haven’t had the chance yet. Do what’s best for you, Renegades.

Silent Hill 2… you made me happy.

Silent Hill 2 is available on PS2, Xbox, and PC (though it’s expensive).