*Minor Spoilers*

Whenever someone asks me “Name some of your favourite games”, Silent Hill 2 will ALWAYS be come to mind. It is one of my top games ever since I first watched a friend play it many years ago and was left terrified. The strange creatures and horrific themes that are in play throughout the game are enough to leave you with nightmares for years. I have read so many blogs, articles and watched videos on the amazing storyline of Silent Hill 2, and I even wrote my own psychological horror novel based on themes from this very game two years ago, which goes to show how much it still plays on my mind to this day.

Originally I was going to write a retrospective, similar to the Shadow of the Colossus one that I wrote, but I couldn’t really get into the thick of it without detailing every single element of this game. There is so much to it, such was what every monster represents, or the key importance of specific scenes (or all of them), and it would have evolved and become an enormous thesis. Instead I have decided to discuss the horror of Silent Hill 2. I have picked this game specifically, rather than the series as a whole, because this was one of the scariest stories I have ever known, one that got inside my head and burrowed its way into the deepest darkest recesses of my mind.
While the other games in the series are still scary, Silent 3 is a fantastic game, and number 4; The Room, take the series in a different direction of horror, Silent Hill 2 is the one that stands out amongst the others as a truly terrifying experience. It is not for the classic horror elements, such as jump scares or messed up creatures (which the game has got), but instead it is the type of horror that really gets inside your head and messes about once it is in there.

Now I was only thirteen when this game was released, so I never really understood, or got, the deep story that had been written beneath the surface. On the front it is a man who travels to a spooky town and has to fight monsters; that is the basis of the game, and that alone was scary enough for me. There are jump scares and tense moments, such as being stuck in a small room with a large dangerous monster, but there is so much more here for people if they look deeper into it.

Silent Hill 2 is a pinnacle of story telling. It is a game that tells us a story without using any words. Sure there is a main plot line that is really deep and wonderful (unfortunately I am not getting into this today), there is another story that is hidden between the lines.
The entire thing is drenched in symbolism, this is something that I love; physical manifestations of psychological representations. In other words; your deepest and darkest thoughts or fears brought out in front of you. A lot of things might look like something (such as a grotesque four legged table monster thing…) but in reality it actually means something far worse (the table thing is actually a representation of a young girls abusive father who sexually molested her. The table is actually a bed with what appear to be two people beneath a bloody sheet).


This type of symbolism, such as having a monster look like something and mean something else, was later milked in future instalments of the series and not done as well as this, often having wishy-washy reasons behind the true meaning of it (especially when an American developer took over and tried to replicate Japanese Horror in a western way, which naturally didn’t work), but when this Silent Hill game was released, it had rarely been done before.
The original Silent Hill (released for the PlayStation in 1999) had used a lot of symbolism as well, but they had done it in more of a blatant way. The story followed Harry Mason who returns to the town of Silent Hill with his daughter… who he weirdly found lying about as a baby on her own, and him and his wife adopted her. Anyway it turns out that she is the reincarnation of a girl who was sacrificed by a strange cult. Her return to the town has marked for some strange events to take place and now Harry is caught in the middle of it. The monsters are all representations of the little girl’s fears, such as a fear of dogs or other children, and naturally they are horrific versions of this.
This is what I mean by the symbolism being far more blatant than in number 2, as well as the fact that you are pretty much told what each monster refers to through diary pages and other written documents that Harry finds along his journey. The idea of a demonic god and the cult turn the original Silent Hill almost into a B-movie plot line.

Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, is so much more subtle about its symbolism and what monsters and key moments in the game refer to. I will go further into what thing symbolise later, but for the moment, Silent Hill 2 is based around psychological horror, rather than practical horror, if you know what I mean. It has stripped away the cult and focuses solely on the central character and his own psyche. It is clear that the story was written first and then the gameplay added in afterwards.
While both games use jump scares and tension building, as with all horror elements, the original game is more focused on the monsters, almost as if they had a good idea for a game and added in the plot later. That is not to say that the original game is not good (although the auto-aim and bad acting does see to that), it is still a great horror game and a couple of moments that occur are brilliant. One fantastic part is when the nurse; Lisa, realises why she is still alive despite all the other nurses are horrific monsters (a question she has asked throughout seeing her in the game) and that is because she IS just like them, at which point blood pours out of her head and she slowly staggers to the protagonist who flees. It is a well written moment with some brilliant accompanying music.

Silent Hill 2 uses its horror elements to really get into our heads and mess us up from the inside. A great moment of this is when the new protagonist; James, enters a room to find a large monster effectively raping two others. It is a grotesque moment that we really had no idea what is going on in it, because we have simply never seen anything like that before. The shot is quick and we are left wondering what the hell we had just seen. That type of imagery tends to play on our minds and we begin to think deeper and deeper into it, sometimes even leaving us terrified of the unknown, of the parts that we actually didn’t see. If we had seen the entire rape scene, then it would have lost its main horrific element. Yes, the scene would have been horrific in its own right, but giving us a glimpse of it allows the audience to make up the rest of the story in their heads, and we are left never truly knowing what was happening.
It is a case of staring into the darkness and wondering what horrors might be staring back. We have all done it at one point in time, whether it be a dark alleyway or the upstairs landing, we have stared into the abyss and let our imaginations run wild. The unknown is usually more scary than what is actually in front of us, because our minds are left to create the horror ourselves, that is when you know you are really scared.


The journey into the unknown is one on the main factors in play here. At one point the player finds themselves in a small lakeside museum. Everything appears normal until you discover a destroyed bit of wall and a staircase leading downward. It must go beneath the lake and stretches on for what feels like forever the further and further you descend. You don’t know that it is that awaits for you at the bottom. The map you have of town doesn’t show this location. You are now going off map and into a dark and terrifyingly unknown place. While the other locations in the game are scary in their own way, they are more traditional horror, such as a messed up hospital, but with this mysterious unmapped place, you feel as if anything could happen at any moment. You have no idea what could be behind the next door. It literally could be anything.
This makes you feel vulnerable, causing you to take rooms more cautiously and slower, often equipping that weapon you have saved for when you might need it the most.

Feeling vulnerable is a great thing that computer games have over films and books. We are in control of the protagonist. We have to make the choice and force the avatar to open the door and move into the next room. If you can give the player the feel that they are vulnerable in this scary situation, then you can make them terrified to do anything.
This brings me to my next point. As with all horror computer games, the gameplay itself plays a role in the horror. The awkward camera angles and clunky controls, help us feel as if we are assailable. We are not a tough macho marine who is sent into the town to shoot everything with an AK47, but instead we are a simple every day man, who is also a bit of a drip. He has probably never fired a gun before and swings a piece of wood around rather frantically as you try and fight off the grotesque creatures that come after you. Sometimes you find yourself stuck in a tight corridor with no clear way out, facing against a group of mannequin legs trying to get you. These situations, when we really do have to fight our way out, are a great contrast to running around the misty streets avoiding the humanoid figures you can just about see. A lot of the game is less focused on fighting the enemies and more on trying to get through locked doors, as you can, sometimes, easily get away from the creatures, but you will always know when they are around.
Limited resources are not something unheard of in a survival horror game, and this is no different. The fact that we have to scavenge everything and we might not be able to use the shotgun for every situation due to the limited ammo, means that we forced to use whatever we can, and fight each battle remembering what resources we have available to us.
Usually when we play survival horrors, we tend to save our more powerful weapons and healing items for bosses or encounters where we are against the odds, sticking with the starting weapon. But sometimes it doesn’t always work like that because we have run out of ammo for it, or it is simply not doing enough damage, so we must change and start using our special saved up weapons now and it makes us terrified that we might not have enough if we do find ourselves in more dangerous situations, especially when music or sound cues come into play.

Sound is a brilliant element for the horror genre. If it is done right then it can have the same amount of effect on the audience as the moments of unknown wondering as we stare into the darkness or anticipate the next encounter. The reason for this is because it builds the same kind of tension. In this game it is worse when we can hear something, but we cannot see it. A nearby noise draws our attention, but we have no idea where the source is. Our minds begin to over think where the sound is coming from or what could be making the sound, and tension begins to build.
A great moment of this is when you are in the mysterious location mentioned earlier, and you can hear a noise unlike anything you have heard before in the game (being that you are about half way through the game, you would have already experienced a lot). The noise is coming from inside a darkened prison cell, but you cannot see what it is. You do not have to stop and look, but you feel compelled to, in case it is of some importance or some immediate threat, but you never get the answers that you want.

The same can be said for the lack of sound. While the focus of Silent Hill 3 is noise, which is does fanatically, Silent Hill 2 uses silence. Most of the scenes are awkwardly quiet, only hearing the sound of James (the protagonist) breathing or his footsteps running across various different floor type. This makes such a difference when the monsters do show up, as their horrifying noises create such a dramatic opposition to the few moments before, that your heart does truly begin to start beating against your ribcage as you try and figure out what is the best way to deal with this situation.
The game features a static radio that makes a ridiculous amount of noise whenever a creature is nearby. It feels as well as if these are the best times to play really obscure abstract music. All of these mixed together create a really terrifying experience for the player. Sometimes the sound can be almost deafening. The moment the monster is dead, everything returns to the silence and we are left catching our breath and returning to wondering what awaits for us around the next corner. It is in these moments that we are desperately listening out for something, and once again the horror of the unknown takes hold.


There are a few moments in the game when James is forced to do something that we ourselves would never EVER do, such as jump into a big dark hole that has no bottom in sight, or put our arm into a small hole, despite the fact that a strange liquid appears to be oozing out of it, and the room it is in is filled with insects. James is a character who does not care, and not because he is a tough macho AK47 wielding man, it is because he is truly someone who has nothing left to lose. He is here to find his wife, who he must know cannot be here, not really, give that she had died an unknown amount of time ago, yet he still ventures on. A normal person would have turned around at the first sight of a monster, hopped back into their car and sped off, but James really is a man with nothing to lose. He has given up. He even says early on in the game that he doesn’t care if it is dangerous or not, and this says a lot about the man. But James’ psyche is not what this article is about, although that itself would make a great bit of writing.

The monsters themselves are the key factor in messing with our minds. As I have already said before, you have the moments of insanity, such as the rape scene mentioned earlier, that play on our minds, but the monsters themselves do this as well. If you just look at them, they are simply messed up humans; one being a set of mannequin legs attached to a normal pair of legs, but if you go deeper into the story of Silent Hill 2, you learn that James is a very sexually frustrated person. A lot of the monsters are physical representations of this. This is why the nurses in Silent Hill have big tits! It was because of this game and James’ own manifestations of his sexual desires. After this they became a bit of a running theme and later games in the series had them for no other reason but because a previous game had featured them as well. The true meaning of why they are like that have been lost over the years.
A lot of the monsters are female, or at least have female features, making them more disturbing than if they were male or just non humanoid monsters. This game stripped away the classic dog enemy that the previous game had, as well as every other sequel had, making it far more unique. We get the feeling that every monster in the game serves a purpose and represents something locked deep away within James’ mind.
The way they move, however, is twitchy and contorted, disassociating us from the fact that they are not actually people, despite their human features. This is a great way to play with the player’s mind as at first we might confuse them for other people, until we get close enough to see. The first section of the game has us chase one of these staggering monsters through the fog as James believes that it was another person.

This is not something that Silent Hill has done specifically. This is something that has often appeared in horror films/games/shows and everything else, but having this mixed in with the horror elements that make Silent Hill 2 unique, helps to build a truly horrifying experience. Its a mixture of traditional and untraditional horror that really creates the right balance. It is not just through the visials or the sound either, but also the topics that the story dears to tell us.
It touches on many mature themes and taboo subjects including: morality, grief, abuse (physical, sexual, etc.), suicide, mental illness and mental health, death, trauma, rape, guilt, existentialism, bullying, domestic violence, incest, loneliness, body image, murder, substance abuse, pain and suffering, loss of loved ones, relationship issues, euthanasia, self-loathing, and sexuality among others, so it is not afraid to venture into some of these terrifying concepts. This is brilliant portrayed in the game numerous times, usually in subtle or convoluted ways, most of the time passing us by as just random frightful moments, but as you can see there is lot more to it than it first appears.


This is what is fantastic about Silent Hill 2. I could go on for pages and pages about each character, monster, moment, and really give you an in-depth analysis on them and how they relate to the main story or James’ subconscious, but really that is best to be experienced for yourself.
Silent Hill 2 is a truly terrifying experience for different reasons to what are considered more traditional for the genre.
If you have never played it then it is definitely worth it, as the experience itself still holds up to today. The intentional clunkly controls adds to it, and the graphics are surprisingly good to this day (if not a little robotic in cutscenes).

Check out the trailer below and you will see the type of horror that the game features. The trailer is well done and shows quick cut to shots that never really give us any true idea as to what is going on, instead we are left trying to figure it out for ourselves.
This is just a taster for what Silent Hill 2 has in store. It is one of my all time favourite games, with a rich and deep story of redemption and punishment, while at the same time, creates a horrifying experience for the player.

If I were reviewing it, then I would still give it five robots out of five to this day.

 

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