Note: This review contains spoilers for Silent Hill 2.
In the modern world of cinematic games, it can be hard sometimes to return to the early days of gaming. Atari graphics are often unclear as to who or what you are at any given time, NES games are difficult and slow, SNES a prettier version of that, and the early polygon era of the Playstation and Nintendo 64 are a hideous display of cardboard boxes and fuzzy lines. I'm oversimplifying the generations a bit here, but building up to the Playstation 2, Xbox, and Gamecube era was a series of trial and error trying to get games to feel good, and to follow up that comfort of control with challenge and style. With it, we began to see new experiments, and out of this we got the survival horror genre. We couldn't call these "cinematic" in the strictest sense, but games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill certainly felt like they had an atmosphere all their own. Metal Gear Solid of that same era would give us the cinematic experience in games that would become much more common place by the 2010s, but what was unique about the Resident Evil and, particularly, the Silent Hill franchises was that it was able to create its atmosphere and sense of place mostly out of the video game medium. Resident Evil had a tension building animatic of a door opening as you stepped into a new room, and Silent Hill's now iconic fog created a sense of unease as the player ventured through the hostile town. Of course, Silent Hill's fog was used to conceal draw distance issues on the original Playstation, and Resident Evil was covering load times with its door animatic, but neither limitation was treated like a hindrance. They utilized their game-ness to impress upon the player something while also pulling a curtain over their limitations. While both franchises have their fair share of classics, the most impressive of the bunch is probably Silent Hill 2. Certainly not the most important game, which would have to go to Resident Evil 4, a game whose influence the shooter genre is still trying to escape. But where Resident Evil 4 doubled down on the series' campiness, Silent Hill 2 wanted to tell a story that mattered.
Silent Hill 2 tells the story of James Sunderland, an everyman come to the foggy town of Silent Hill to look for his wife, Mary, who sent him a letter asking to meet at their "special place". The thing is, Mary died 3 years ago. James realizes how crazy this is, but is compelled almost irrationally to see if maybe she really is in Silent Hill. Pretty much from the first shot of James staring at himself in a dingy bathroom mirror, we know that there is something off about him. Without putting too fine a point on it, this first shot is no coincidence. The game itself acts as psychological evaluation of James, the final days of his wife's illness, and the horrific truth he must confront. Silent Hill, in the eyes of James Sunderland, is populated with violent monsters, each one a disturbing reflection of something in James' troubled mind. He navigates places in the town, bumping into several other people on similar quests to his own, until finally he ends up in their special place in a hotel overlooking the lake. But Mary isn't there. Instead, all James finds is a videotape where he learns the truth about why he is in Silent hill. James' wife didn't die of her illness. He smothered her in her hospital bed. A vision of his wife tells him it was okay. She told him many times she wanted to die. It was mercy. But James doesn't accept this. "No", he says. "That's not true. I hated you. I hated that you were taking away my life."
In a cinematic game, that would have been the whole story, but Silent Hill 2 allows for another layer of narrative depth. The game doesn't just let the cinematics do the talking, but rather allows the plot and themes to dictate everything from the location settings to the monster designs. The straight jacket enemy looks to have its arms beneath its skin, always looking confined and uncomfortable in its own body. The enemy, fighting itself, will cough a damaging haze at James if gotten to close to, in an unsettling image of a sickly person fighting themselves. The mannequin enemies are a female torso with mannequin legs for both legs and arms, so that when the creature chases after James it looks like flailing legs attempting to wrap themselves over you. The eerie sexual nature of this creature isn't its only image, however, as in the latter part of the game you see James smothering Mary to the sight of distorted, flailing legs underneath a pillow. The sexual nature of it, however, bleeds over into other designs as well. The bubblehead nurses wear a low cut top with cleavage, an odd design choice for a creature based around a hospital, a place of what one would assume would be a place of horror for James. By far the biggest horror James faces, however, is the phallic Pyramid Head, a humanoid with bloody butchers smock and a metallic, pyramid helmet and massive sword dragging behind him. The creature is seen twice raping other creatures, once stacking two mannequin creatures on top of each other while viciously ramming its hips into them before murdering them both, and again sucking a moaning straight jacket enemy underneath its hood before also killing it. The sexual nature of the game isn't directly explained to the player, but rather acts as pieces to a larger whole for the player to discover.
Looking at the designs of the creatures after the finale, there is a dissonance between the reveal of James' murder and the disturbing sexual nature of the creatures. The key, however, lies in Maria. Maria is a doppelganger for Mary in looks, but in personality and dress is her exact opposite. She's sexual, aggressive, and prodding. She toys with James throughout the game, teasing him about whether he truly loved the wife he so illogically searches for. But more is than meets the eye with Maria, as she drips information on Mary she could never have known, and numerous times she is killed and tortured in front of him (and always by Pyramid Head). For James, Maria isn't just an improbable glitch in the matrix, but an exaggeration of his late wife to his sexually frustrated ego. James wasn't just mourning his wife's physical degradation as a loving husband, but as a frustrated man searching for desire and passion, and that's where the first part of this game comes in place. James is complex and extremely full of flaws, some of which are unexplainable in a morally sensible way. He is not a good person, by any stretch. He is despicable, and the game acts as exploration of his inner conflict. All of the monsters sexual characteristics paint a bleak picture of James' state of mind: the sexualized nurses, like projected versions of those that greeted him everyday when he visited his wife, the leggy mannequins that act both as sexual iconography and imagery of his wife's death throws, and the towering, indestructible Pyramid Head that chases him with his phallic image and sexually assaults the other demons of his psyche, acting as final judgement for what he's done and who he has become. In reflection, bleak almost doesn't cover it.
But this is where the game begins to tread on its second part: an examination of guilt and self-imposed punishment. James' story seems pretty well cinched up: the abomination Pyramid Head is a manifestation of his self-destructive guilt - guilt he more than deserves. But James isn't the only person in this story. James runs into three others (not including Maria), two of which suffer their own form of guilt along the way. Eddie, a teenage boy whose weight has made him the local punching bag of various bullies at his school, is wrestling with the brutal maiming of a peer and death of his peer's dog. Eddie, however, doesn't reach judgement from his own projection of guilt. Eddie's monsters are easy to kill, and he comes to truly enjoy it as the game goes on until James is forced to kill him outright in Eddie's own vision of Silent Hill, a meat freezer with hung bodies. Angela, another runaway teen, is desperately looking for her mother in the foggy town after having stabbed her sexually abusive father multiple times. She even sees her own monster, one even James can see, in Abstract Daddy. Abstract Daddy may have the most disturbing design of any of the creatures in the game, looking like two figures on a bed with one set of legs and one set of arms underneath the mattress, as well as a long slit that can encapsulate James and hurt him. Underneath what looks like the hunched body of the topmost person in its form is a phallic looking tube with a mouth at the end that twitches and squirms, forever trying to escape the undefined mass on top of it. The creature is absolutely horrific, only made worse by the room in which it is first seen with walls of flesh, tube like holes everywhere with another flesh like tube pulsing in and out. The game throws subtlety out the window entirely for its most horrific moment, making it absolutely impossible to misinterpret what is going on, but this is all to the game's benefit. Angela does not make it out of Silent Hill alive. She accepts her punishment, and walks into the fire that engulfs her vision of the town. In these three characters, we have three completely different stages of guilt. We have the unrepentant Eddie, whose wrath ends in another lashing out at him, the self-loathing James who gets a number of endings, and Angela, who was only repaying the horrors done to her, but unable to live with her trauma or the way she handled it and ultimately succumbs to her own judgement. Eddie and James are easy to hate and to feel some kind of catharsis in their downfalls, but Angela invokes empathy, and yet like the latter two she must pay the price. It begs the question: is this self imposed guilt and our catharsis particularly healthy, or does it require more scrutiny? Was Angela's wrath worthy of punishment by torture and reliving her past, or is she the exception that shows issue with the system as a whole? The game gives no definite answers, only proposes the questions for us to ponder.
James has multiple potential endings. James confronts two Pyramid Head creatures, telling them he "no longer needs [them] anymore" after realizing their true purpose, to which they both kill themselves. He ascends the hotel to its roof and meets a version of Mary, bound to her bed in monstrous form. After killing her ( and without considering the "joke" endings), there are four endings, all of which lead to different implications as to how James confronts his past. In the first and most likely ending, James leaves the town with Laura, an 8 year old girl who met Mary in the hospital and often ran into James while looking for her, to start anew. In the second ending, and the first I got on my first play, James takes Mary's corpse and drives them both into the lake, committing suicide. In the third, James collects various artifacts and distressingly implies he is going to resurrect her with dark magic. In the final ending, he leaves Mary behind and leaves the town with Maria, who gives a telling cough as they drive away, implying a cycle of illness and death. Each ending is unlocked by doing obtuse things, such as not healing enough or always paying too much attention to Maria. The game reflects on the way you role play as James to determine his ending. Your interaction with the game is taken into account, weighed as cannon in James' personality, and his ending tailored accordingly. In the first ending, James is allowed a second life; the second, self-imposed punishment; the third, an inability to confront reality to the point of violating nature; and fourth, denying all culpability only to suffer all over again. With the exception of the first and most likely ending, James is punished. He does not come out of his guilt free. However, the first ending being most likely, we can consider some canonical weight in it. If he gets away from his guilt, why didn't Angela, who arguable deserved it more? In the end, we can only accept it as personal choice to try and outlive that guilt, for whatever that is worth.
Silent Hill 2, however, is a game. The basic gameplay loop (which is going to sound mundane in comparison), has you exploring areas and checking doors. You solve little adventure game type riddles and unlock doors, the quintessential survival horror loop. Combat is clumsy at best, requiring you to hold a button to get into "attack stance", and each attack taking an absurd amount of frames to complete. While puzzles are certainly hit and miss, the gameplay really shines in its exploration and its unpolished combat. Venturing through creepy apartment buildings or hospitals not knowing what lies behind each door and trying to clear your map is fulfilling in a completionist kind of way. Your mileage will certainly vary on exploration, since once you've run through the whole building some of its creepiness begins to wane, but I'm personally a sucker for exploration, it being one of my favorite aspects to games as a medium. Combat, however, is clunky for a reason. James isn't some combat veteran, or otherwise professionally trained in swinging metal pipes and wooden planks around. He's stiff and anxious in each swing, and it lends itself well to a believable world. You feel immersed in its clunkiness, and this isn't just an excuse for an otherwise stellar game to get away with a weaker part of its toolbox. Games shouldn't be designed for ease of use alone, but rather for the experience they provide. Silent Hill games have always valued running away as an equally useful tactic to combat. Likewise, the game's use of tank controls and bizarre camera angles feel completely at home in the unsettling atmosphere the game is creating. I was surprised how used to the tank controls I got so early in the game. They certainly aren't the most comfortable configuration for a game, but they act as an understandable sacrifice for a bit of artistic freedom. If I had to come up with a criticism for the game, it would be that by the halfway point it was too easy.
Silent Hill 2 isn't perfect, but it is well beyond the sum of its parts. The game creates a haunting experience unique to the gaming medium, and with depth rarely seen in its peers. Engaged with its characters and themes, it's easy to forget you're playing a game at all. Instead, it feels like you're living someone else's nightmare as it is projected on the fragmented walls of their skull, and just like a projection, its hard to get out in front of it without seeing it coloring you as well.
10
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