Silent Hill 2
By Cerebus
July 2002
When I was about ten years old, I had recently moved to Iowa City,
Iowa, where, as many kids do when they want to make a little bit
of money on top of their paltry allowance, I had a newspaper route.
Every day of the week, regardless of the weather (okay, occasionally
my mom would drive me when it was truly yucky outside, but I digress)
I'd leave the house at about 4:15 a.m. to go pick up my papers a
few blocks from my house, and spend a good hour and a half delivering
themtwenty-three papers on weekdays, and about eighty on Sundays.
On this particular weekday morning, as it often was in Iowa early
in the morning, it was foggyvery foggy, in fact. I followed
my normal route through the neighborhood, and halfway through my
route, as usual, I cut through the empty lot next to my house to
save some time. Since it was foggy, I wasn't wearing my glassesthey
would have hurt my clarity of vision (I'm nearsighted) more than
they would have helped. As I strolled across the lot, it was absolutely
quiet, with only the rumble of trucks on the highway about ten miles
away echoing across the rolling hills.
It was at this moment that I stumbled across something that looked
like a human skull.
Granted, with my bad eyesight, it was probably a rock, but as any
ten-year-old would, I got close enough to get myself utterly terrified,
and then took off running, heading directly for the nearest streetlight,
and didn't stop until I had reached the apartment building at the
bottom of the hill, which was completely out of my normal route.
It took a good ten minutes before I could venture outside again.
Why am I relating this story? Well, it's simplesince that
morning, I've been fairly difficult to scare. Perhaps it's the dulling
effect that television has on a person after years of exposure,
or maybe the simple inevitable act of growing up nearly removes
that emotion from the human suite of emotions. Regardless, the simple
fact is that playing Silent Hill 2 came closer to scaring
me than anything in the intervening twenty years. The combination
of eerie ambient sound effects with the most maddeningly realistic
fog I've seen in a video game brought me all the way back to that
morning in Iowathat's not to say that Silent Hill 2 is
a perfect game, because it's not. It does, however, get under your
skin, and truly brings into question the sanity of the game designers.
"Hello, My Name Is James, and I'll Be Your Protagonist
this Evening."
You begin the game as James Sunderland, a sad fellow whose wife
passed away three years before from a long illness. He's wandered
aimlessly since her passing, until a letterfrom his dead wifearrives
in the mail, beckoning him to Silent Hill, where she's apparently
waiting for him. James hardly believes that it's possible that his
wife sent him the letter, but he's curious enough to jump in the
car and head for the small lakefront town. Once he arrives at the
outskirts of Silent Hill, he finds the road blocked off, and he
must venture into the area on footwhich is where you begin.
You goal is to attempt to find the person who wrote you the letter,
and determine if your beloved was responsible for it.
I wasn't as captivated by the plot as I expected to beit
seemed to be secondary to the gameplay, or more likely, secondary
to the technical presentation of the game. I didn't care that he'd
lost his wifeall I knew was that he had to go through a ghostly
town, solve puzzles, kill bad guys, and progress from one point
to another. I still don't know why there were all sorts of creepy
creatures lurking around the streets, but perhaps I just didn't
understand the conclusion of the game. The plot in the original
Silent Hill was far more engrossing than that of this gameI'm
pulling for a return to a better story in the recently announced
Silent Hill 3.
"Let's See What's Behind Door Number Two ..."
As far as gameplay goes, SH2 is pretty much right on. Your
controls are simplemove with the left analog stick, use the
right stick as a camera in first-person mode, and your essential
maneuvers are assigned buttons. There are two character motion options
a la Grim
Fandango; one mode is based on screen directions
(up = forward, left = left, etc.), and the other is based on what
direction your character is facing (left = turn left, forward =
move character in direction he's facing, etc.). I can't stand the
second option (the default) so I switched it right away. This only
causes a few problems when the camera angle changes dramatically
in between rooms, so I recommend using whatever option you find
most intuitive.
Silent Hill 2, like Silent Hill, is not a game of
killing everything that movesit's a game of running away from
things that might likely kill you. The reason I didn't like the
original game was because I couldn't get into that mentality. Now
that I'm older and wiser, running seems a more likely option, especially
for the main characterJames is an amateur fighter. He's not
a very good shot, so close range is about all he can handle. He's
also a bit slowhe's no Jesse Owens, that's for sure. Still,
the fact that he is such a ... well ... wuss, makes the game that
much more frightening to play. You have to run away from
some enemies.
There aren't very many inventory puzzles in SH2, so I won't
reveal any of them in detail. I will say that simply navigating
through a building with locked doors and stairwells, trying to reach
that floor that you know exists but you can't find your wayI
enjoy that sort of spatial exploration puzzle. There are some maze-like
areas that make very little sense, but they are short-lived, and
your character draws a map as he's exploring. (In fact, the auto-mapping
that was introduced in the original SH returns in this game,
as one of the star attractions.) Other than exploration, there's
on the order of five run-of-the-mill adventure game puzzles (no
Zork Nemesis severed heads, sorry), none of which were very
difficult to solve.
Much of your time playing this game will be wandering the streets
and buildings, looking for things. You will run into creatures,
many of them quite disgusting (although there are only about six
typesa bit of a disappointment there). You will have to either
run away or beat them/shoot them/slice them into submission. Although
it makes little mention of this in the game's manual, apparently
the "attack" action button makes use of the analog PS2
button featureI never noticed. If you have an option to hit
something scary hard, harder, or hardest, which will you choose?
Hardest every time! (An undocumented "feature" when fightingoftentimes,
your opponent will be knocked unconscious on the ground. You must
finish him off, but your stick with nails, for some reason, can't
hit the ground. Hit the attack button without readying your weapon
with the shoulder button to stomp its head and kill the beast. Nice
image, eh?) I should mention here that upon starting the game, you
have three choices for puzzle difficulty and three choices for enemy
difficulty. Adventure purists can actually turn off the combat,
leaving James to simply wander the streets, looking for things to
dobut that gets very boring very fast.
I'll say one fairly negative thing about the gameplay. It just
doesn't make sense much of the time. There's a series of holes later
in the game that you have to jump into, even though you can't see
the bottom. Could anyone really do this? Four times in a row? Without
breaking his legs? And while I'm asking questions, who left all
of this ammo and health scattered about town? You don't have to
ask these questions, but again, the story seems secondary to the
technical experience of playing it.
"Look at this Beauty, FolksCan You See Yourselves
in It?"
Silent Hill 2 may not have the most compelling gameplay
among PS2 games, but I can easily say that the presentation of the
game is absolutely superb. This was my first PS2 game, so I wasn't
sure what to expect from the platform at allbased on my experiences
with PC games and older consoles, I knew that many of these adventures
started with a somewhat long rendered movie, detailing the backgrounds
of the characters and their predicaments. I expected the same from
SH2, and so I sat, watching as James walked into a roadside
rest stop, looking into a mirror and rubbing his eyes and face,
asking himself what he was doing here in Silent Hill. Then,
nothing. Just James looking into a mirror. I started to panicwhat
if the system was broken already? I hadn't even had it a day, and
it wasn't working right. I picked up the controller to try to reset
the game, and James moved away from the sink as I moved the analog
stick. The realization that "this was the game"
took a few minutes to sink in, and I've been impressed ever since.
There's a lot of fog in SH2. A lot. But this fog
is so real, swirling into eddies of mysterious shadows, filling
nooks and cranniesit's a pleasure to "walk" through.
Of course, it does serve the purpose of preventing any sort of distance
clipping when exploring the environment, but that aside, it's a
great way to build suspense. When you hear something that has got
to be dangerous, just outside of your fog-inhibited vision,
it gets very creepy very fast. I played this game with headphones
on, and the sound effects were tremendous. Wandering through an
abandoned hospital with creepy things following you, listening for
their footsteps, the only light coming from your flashlightclassic
horror gaming. The entire town was meticulously designed, with signs,
construction sites, abandoned vehicles, houses, apartment complexeseverything
you'd expect to find in a town like this but wouldn't expect to
be rendered in a game, regardless of platform. In fact, the experience
of playing this game was extraordinary, with the following exceptions.
Exception A: Voice acting. These folks can act, and they perform
wellbut every time you hear them speak, it's as if they're
in exactly the same room. No echo, no nothing. If I talk to you
in a carpeted room, and then talk to you later in a jail cell, I'll
sound quite different. It's as if they recorded all of the dialogue
in a single session, in one studio, and decided not to enhance it
with effects depending on the characters' location. I'm nitpicking
here, but it did seem inconsistent.
Exception B: Prerendered movies. The movements of the characters
in the real-time rendered scenes was quite goodso good that
I don't know why they bothered prerendering movies with higher resolution
and better anti-aliasing. The characters in those cutscenes don't
move quite right, and it interrupts the experience to switch to
a different mode. Sometimes it was only for a second or two, and
then back to real-time rendering. Again, nitpicking, but it bugged
me.
"Here's My Business CardCall Me If You're in the
Market in the Future."
Overall, the Silent Hill 2 experience is worth having, if
just for the freak-out value. It's not that compelling a story,
and the puzzles aren't too difficult, but it's gorgeous to look
at and listen to. I finished SH2 in a depressing ten hours,
and got a rating of 9/10 upon completion (I was quite the swordsman
with my nail-ridden plank!), but there were at least two additional
endings that I could play through again to see, if this was the
only game on my list to playbut it's not, and until companies
realize that very few games are worth replaying, console adventure
games will remain somewhat short and uninspired. 
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The Verdict
The Lowdown
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Release Date: September 2001
Available for: 
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