Heavan’s Night
“In my restless dreams, I see that town, Silent Hill.” It is the first thing you hear when reading the letter of your supposed-to-be dead wife, which instantly sets up your mind to imagine and try to figure out what things you’ll see on your quest to find Mary. Going into this game, I had known farewell what to expect and how to handle it since I had played Silent Hill 3 before 2. Knowing this, I proceeded with the game, and my hopes were as high as expected, and yet, my expectations were somehow overachieved. One thing about this game that cannot be toppled is the atmosphere; the music in the opening sections just eases you into a quest that barely reveals itself. The fog adds a hint of subtlety and serves as a way to hide graphical limitations from a two-decade-old gem. It works cohesively with everything to make you question whether the fog is your friend or your enemy.
I think a good scare happens when it doesn’t. You slowly feel your alertness rise, and everything in your body tense as you hear music slowly amp up and random noises register out of nowhere. You either stand still or keep walking closer to the noise, expecting something, anything, and then. Nothing. You feel it, you say to yourself, “It can’t be over; there has to be something else. Maybe it’s going to pop out if I keep going”. And it never does. Suddenly, you slowly return to your senses and feel the game take you where it wants you to go. It may just be a video game, but you can somehow feel an actual sense of living in it; it’s as if the team who made it mass-produced a haunted item, and it works beautifully like that, giving the town a sense of control, not you as the player.
Everyone has things they wish to hide, whether it was things we said or things we did. “We’re all sinners”. This game manifests those feelings ideally and in such a way that makes you fear it but also forces you to face it.
The character “James’s” sexual frustrations are shown firsthand as the monsters show and act like a repressed memory trying to haunt him and drag him down. The already popular and highly overused pyramid head represents James' guilt and how he simply can’t seem to accept the things he’s done. He even kills and damages other monsters without hesitation to merely be the only one to punish James. And this small synopsis barely covers the things that Silent Hill 2 and the whole series invoke. Each mainline game, while not perfect, is a dreaded and melancholic experience, and for giving this game more credit than I should, each time you play this game, you know you will feel a sense of sadness and bleakness.
I may have experienced this game in the worst way possible with the Xbox 360 port, and it may not have been the original version, which is always the preferred way of playing. Still, considering how expensive an original copy is and getting it to run on computer hardware, this is the most convenient way of playing. And it’s a bummer since such a gem has had such rough maintenance, yet it still keeps attracting people to it. It's ironic.