Silent Hill 2 (ps2)

 

Silent Hill 2 is notoriously ranked as one of the greatest horror games ever, or even one of the greatest video games of all time. Of course I had to play it at some point, But i wanted to wait until I had a proper retro setup with a CRT tv and original ps2 and a physical copy of SH2. Finally I got it all and was able to sit down in pitch blackness with the audio up to experience what everyone is talking about.

The game has an iconic start where your estranged wife writes you a letter to come find her in Silent Hill. You start off in a bathroom of all places and slowly wander around in the fog until you come across the city. The atmosphere and artstyle is very unique and unmistakable, especially the fog and surreal otherwordly ambience, music, and atmosphere. It feels like you're playing a dream or something, they nailed that aspect.

The mechanics are pretty minimal. It's a sort of mix between classic Resident Evil and other more point & click adventure games. Where you have these tank controls by default, that you can actually switch to more modern style controls in the menu, and you also have an unlimited inventory where you need to extremely carefully exmaine the enviornments to find required items to progress. You also get a decent selection of weapons from melee to guns, the controls for the guns are pretty similar to classic RE, albeit a bit less restrictive as you have more mobility and theres even a quick-turn button.

When you start the game you get TWO difficulty selections. One for combat, and one for 'riddles'. Its pretty amazing that you can actually adjust the puzzle difficulty, and apparently everytime you play through the game the numbers/codes for the puzzles are randomized so you cant just look things up online mostly, forcing the player to actually figure it out themselves for the most part. That's a good and immersive touch.

But in terms of overall combat difficulty, on the default setting Normal, its not a very hard game at all. There is a huge abundance of ammo and medical supplies, and its incredibly easy to just run past 90% of enemy encounters in the game. That's not to say the threats arent heart pumping, its almost better this way where its not constantly frustrating trial & error, instead its always this looming nearby threat you have to worry about.

The way combat works for the most part is whenever you enter an area, its almost like enemies just constantly respawn, except sometimes they don't. I'm not sure, I couldn't really figure out the rhyme or reason to it. Like certain areas there will always be respawning enemies, and others there wont be? It's weird, its not really that bad, but for much of the game I figured there just wasnt any point to kill enemies because they'll just respawn anyway. But as I played more I found some enemies/certain areas where enemies dont respawn and warranted using ammo to get rid of them. Its fun and satisfying to use guns like Shotgun/pistol and then kicking them when theyre down to permanently kill them.

The core of the gameplay here is going into new areas, and constantly pulling up the Map Screen because as you check doors and explore, little scribbles and markings get dynamically added to your map so its imperative to be constantly checking the map screen to try to figure out what to do next. This is a decent system, but I do have some complaints. For one thing it takes way too damn long for the map to be pulled up, its almost like 4 second load/animation everytime you pull in and out of the map screen, which you do CONSTANTLY, like youll be looking at the map once every 10 seconds atleast in a lot of cases. Another gripe is the map screen is , at first, really confusing and hard to make sense of what any of the scribbles mean. Its not until you put many hours in until you start to figure out the method of how these scribbles work. Which in one sense is kind of immersive and fun because it helps the confusion and sense of being lost in this scary place, but also doesnt really make sense because if you yourself were the one scribbling markings on the map, you'd atleast know what your own markings mean.

There are these frequent big red pages which are save points, the saves are unlimited unlike RE, and the save screen is creepy and this intense bright red color with James staring at himself which is quite haunting. So you never feel like you're really losing progress, because its pretty hard to die actually. I don't think I really died at all during my plathrough unless it was on purpose or something.

So you start the game wandering through this forest, to a graveyard, then arrive at silent hill, you walk around the town until you get inside of the Apartments.

The Apartments is the first real area of the game where it will test if you can get through this game or not. Actually, I played this game once before many years ago, and got to the beginning apartmnts area, got so lost and confused that I just dropped the game out of apathy towards it

Coming back to it later, yeah this area is kind of bad.
For starters its extremely dark, like not just my TV, just in general the game can be so pitch black you genuinely cant see much of anything.

That by its self wouldn't be so bad, but in this apartments area, literally every single room and hallway looks exactly the same. It's literally like the same hallway/room copy pasted 50 times. No joke. What the fuck were they thinking? Couldnt they have made set pieces or more individual places stand out more? It's a mess. If they were trying to go for some fever dream where youre stuck in a loop and at a total loss, I guess it worked, but at a certain point its just fucking tedious and annoying to play through.

But slowly as you start to figure out that you NEED the map, and you NEED to stare at the map screen every 10 seconds, you start to make your way through this place.

The map thing is especially make or break because you have to PICK UP the maps before you can even use them. Usually they're at the beginning of the area, but sometimes they're not. And that brings me to another really bad gripe I unfortunately have with this game:

Items are REALLY hard to see for the most part.

In a game all about finding KEY items to progress, its incredibly easy to just run right past an important item because they are so tiny or are actually just hidden somewhere you can barely see.
Eventually I figured out that the characters head actually turns and looks towards items in the room, but that too is really easy to miss, and doesn't even happen if you're sprinting.

So combine extremely dark enviornments, with miniscule tiny items that dont shimmer or gleam or do anything to look distinct and are incredibly easy to miss, it starts to be a nightmare, for better or worse.
 
Ontop of that, when you DO find the items, some of the puzzles required to progress are just flat out bullshit.

Overall I actually had a good time with most of the puzzles, and could figure them out myself, but theres a handful that are just stupid, unintuitive, or the games mechanics just fuck you over and is bullshit.

For example, inside the apartments, you find the item 'Pack of juice'  so I'm like, ok, pack of juice, what is that health or something? Well I eventually cleared every single room in the apartment and got stuck for progress, missing a crucial item. It turns out you're somehow supposed to know that you need to find a Garbage chute, and Use the Pack of Juice on the Garbage Chute to unstick some key item from the chute and then go get it. I even found the garbage chute and inspected it, but the hint wasn't very clear.

Other example of something bullshit that makes no sense
Early on in the apartments you find a handgun, but you CANNOT pick it up until you find the flashlight.
I found the handgun first, and for 5 mins was spamming all sorts of angles to try to pick it up. Nope. Very stupid.

Some other examples of bullshit puzzles:
Later on in the game theres a room that deliberately breaks your flashlight when you enter it, then locks you inside. It spawns nonstop bugs that crawl on you and damage you. I quickly learned that i can turn off my flashlight to avoid the damage. Well it also turns out that unless you turn the flashlight on, you cant interact with the keypad by the door. So for 15 mins I would just wlak around the room spamming Interact and nothing would happen , because the game taught me to turn off my flashlight to avoid damage. Wtf?

Other examples of cryptic bullshit that barely makes sense:
Later on in the game in the Prison area, theres a locked hatch on the floor. I cleared the entire prison area, got a bunch of items. Tried using the items on the floor, nothing worked. It was like a piece of hair, a horse shoe, and some doll or something. Apparently you're somehow supposed to know to combine ALL 3 of these items into a Handle for the chute. How does that shit even make sense? Mind boggling.

Also, in this prison area, the map is REALLY badly hidden and almost impossible to see. So I ran around the entire prison without a map and obviously couldn't make sense of anything or figure out where to go, so had to kill myself and look up online where the fucking map is. Why cant they just give you the map or make it more obvious? It's just annoying.


Almost done naming off the bullshit parts

ANother one:

Towards the end of the game in the hotel, theres a dining room where you have a cutscene with a piano.
The first time I was in this area, I walked around the whole place spamming Use on everything to make sure I didnt miss anything. Ok

Then I explored the whole hotel until I got stuck, couldn't progress
Turns out there was apparently a fucking key somewhere in the dining room on a random plate? Yeah, COULDN"T see it. The items are MINISCULE and really easy to miss. Why!?

Lastly, in the hotel area, theres a music box that needs 3 boxes.
Well guess what, one of the boxes is OUTSIDE THE HOTEL ON A WELL, so if you ran past it and cleared the whole hotel, who the hell would think to leave the hotel and backtrack through the game looking for it? Just bad.

And finally, when you do get all 3 music boxes, you'd think you just walk up to the pedistal thing and press Use on all 3, but nope, you have to somehow know to walk on all sides of the pedistal and put all 3 on each side. Except the camera angle is fucked up and you can barely tell that theres anything on the sides.

Oh yeah and when you do finally put all 3 pieces on it, it asks you a puzzle that requires trivia knowledge of random childrens fairtytales like Little mermaid and shit. And theres nowhere in the game that tells you the answers. So you have to either go watch 3 fairy tale movies, or google the answers. Bad.


With all those gripes out of the way the game is still amazing.
Once you get past the apartment things do pickup and get unforgettable. You  slowly start to uncover more and more of Silent Hill, getting dozens of maps of new areas. You go to a Hospital, Apartments, Explore the whole city, This crazy underground labyrinth/prison area, it does feel like you go on a journey.

The plot/characters/cutscenes/voice acting are equally bizarre, hilarious, and disturbing. You find all sorts of weird characters that just act off, theres this crazy suicidal weird woman called Angela that gives you her knife that apparently does nothing? theres this other guy who at first is just a normal dude you find him puking inside a room in the apartment, then later on he goes crazy with a gun saying hes sick of being picked on and kills someone and tries to kill you, you find this almost clone of your wife Mary, called Maria, which is just really bizarre and she ends up tagging along with you almost like an escort mission but not really. And of course all sorts of strange things happen with them. The voice acting is kind of terrible but in a campy, enderaing B movie way. At times it can be great and convincing, but other times just sounds hilarious and has laugh out loud moments where you'll be laughing at how edgy or blatant some of the writing is. Like early in the game in the Apartments, the first time you discover Pyramid head cutscene, it almost looks like hes raping another monster or something! what the fuck! crazy stuff.

The monster designed is twisted as well, almost literaly. Because some of the monsters will  have legs where their torso should be, they look disturbing and creepy. Theres a decent variety too, you have those guys, these zombie type nurse things, the weird monsters that crawl on the roofs/under the fence floor things, its kinda hard to explain the monsters in this game they just look really nightmarish and well done.

One of the greatest things SH2 does is the sound design. This is some of the greatest audio design i've experienced in a game. The ambience and sound effects/music are amazing. When you go through the various enviornments there will be many points where random sound cues will trigger or just weird noises or spooky things and you have no idea what it is, if its coming for you, or what. Like theres an are in the prison where certain places will trigger a sound of this creepy groaning noise, but you never find out what it is. Another place plays sounds of a baby crying, another place you can knock on a bathroom stall, and after a few seconds it knocks back at you. Just little things like that. The music is very well done with disturbing swells of creepy droning ambient music that are just perfect. Theres also many uplifting/nostalgic/melancholic sounding songs that play throughout various parts of the plot.

For me the game was constantly engaging and I wanted to keep playing to figure out what Mary meant by 'Find me in my special place in Silent hill'  the more I played, the closer I got to her. Towards the end of the game you find out shes in the Hotel on the third floor, and when you get up there you just find a VHS and put a tape in and you uncover some disturbing stuff. Apparently theres an insane amount of things that affect the ending, such as small things like examining  certain items too much, or not healing yourself enough, stuff like that.  The ending I got was the one where the reason James goes to Silent hill , is to commit suicide to be with his dead wife..pretty grim and edgy, the  game isn't afraid to be very gritty and dark in tone. There's still a lot to discover with the plot, by the end you're still not sure what the hells is going on, or what Silent Hill even is, is James just gone insane and imagining it all because he killed his wife? Who knows. I like that its ambiguous.

The game has a few boss fights but they're not much of anything really.
The first encounter with pyramid head you're locked inside a room where he just keeps swinging at you with his sword, you try shooting at him but it makes a metallic noise like nothing happens. So you just have to run around in circles for literally like 5 minutes and then he runs away and you can progress. I thought this part was pretty stupid, especially because for 5 mins I was running around wondering "What the fuck do I do, is this what im supposed to do?" Yeah I looked it up online, and yep, youre not even supposed to shoot at him, it does nothing. Just wait it out. Which would be fine, but it takes WAY too long. Should be like 90 seconds, not 5 mins!

The other boss fights are much better, theres a part with these crazy monsters on the ceiling you blast with shotgun, later on you get a boss fight against the previous human friend guy, then you get a fight with 2 pyramid heads where you have to use their sword against them that one was pretty fun and took some skill, then you have the last boss which is like your wife attached to some thing on the ceiling where you just blast a few times.

Even though the game has annoyances, frustrations, and flaws, I can see how people think its one of the greatest games of all time. They're actually remaking this game soon, now that I have the original one completed I'll be interested to see how that remake goes..

8/10