Silent Hill 2

​The Silent Hill games have been of interest to me for a while, but I never got around to playing any of them, until recently. I decided to start with the earliest game I could for the PC, which was the Silent Hill 2 Director's Edition. Quite a few people have hailed it as among the best examples of horror in video games, so I had high expectations on that front - though I was aware that certain age related factors (specifically graphics and controls) might stand out more for me playing the game now about 14 years after the original release, and I think 12 years after the Director's Cut edition.

​I didn't need to worry about the graphics. Having never been overly concerned about graphical fidelity in general, I thought Silent Hill 2 looked excellent. The grainy, dark and foggy atmosphere serves brilliantly to hide any shortcomings in details, and had me immersed from the start. Some of the monsters were perhaps a little indistinct, and there were some clever aspects of their visual design that I only really appreciated after looking them up on a wiki after finishing the game, but during the game itself I felt it suited the mood - everything in the town is worn and grimy, so why not the monsters too? Indeed, they would probably have stood out like sore thumbs had they been more detailed.

The bathroom where you start the game.

​But it's some time before you encounter your first monster. Your character, James Sunderland, is first engaged with an initial walk down a lakeside dirt path, which introduced me to the first of the fixed cameras prevalent in many areas of the game. Complaints about cameras felt like a constant aspect in reviews back at the time, and I certainly wouldn't say that Silent Hill's camera is always helpful, or that the controls are smooth and intuitive... but of course, for a horror game this isn't necessarily a problem. The way you often find yourself walking forward, but with the camera facing back at James so that you can't see where you're going, sounds like it should be irritating or cheap, but it never did for me. 

This misty, winding path was a most suitably creepy introduction to the game.

​Things clearly aren't entirely natural or grounded in the town of Silent Hill, so why should you have a perfect view of whatever you want? I think it serves to give the player a sense of vulnerability and uncertainty which matches what James is going through. It's also important to note that these fixed cameras are never used to give monsters a cheap jump on you - the camera doesn't force you to move in such a way that you would walk into enemies simply because you didn't know they were there, even if the game was missing the sound cues and the static from your radio which gives warning of danger nearby.

With the darkness pressing in as well, even when the camera is on your side, there are still plenty of places for things to hide.

​Your first encounter is actually another person, rather than a monster. There are a few characters in the game, two of which you meet in a few different cut-scene encounters, and one who accompanies you for part of the game. Aside from the one who accompanies you, I felt they might actually be the weakest part of the game, for me. I didn't get enough of a sense of their characters from the fairly brief cut-scenes, and the voice acting felt off. That's an unusual complaint for me, since generally I don't notice 'bad acting'. It's entirely possible that it was intentional, again adding to the odd, slightly off feeling of the whole town, but I wasn't sure. I felt like one of them could have been cut entirely and it wouldn't have affected the game, while the other should have been given more time, since her experiences do influence some of the dangers James faces, and could have gone deeper into some of the mature themes that the game has been credited with covering. But as it was, the fact you see so little of her made the exploration of those themes feel a little superficial.

You might find yourself exploring more than a few rooms like this, but Silent Hill keeps things unpredictable enough that you can never be relaxed about it.

​I personally found the first monsters you meet were the best in the game, and I was a little disappointed that the others I encountered didn't have quite the same impact on me. Their behaviour switches from slow and steady when they are stood up, to becoming fast, scuttling things when you knock them down. If you don't finish them, they will stand up again, but the speed with which they move means you may have to run to chase them down, and if you're in an unfamiliar environment, running into unchecked dark crevices or round blind corners is far from an enticing prospect. Their movement on the ground was fantastically creepy, and remained so throughout the game. In contrast, while most of the later monsters had interesting visual design, they were generally just things that walked towards you and attacked, without any change in behaviour when injured or dead, and therefore predictable.

One of the now iconic monstrous nurses. Sadly not as interesting or nuanced in their behavioural design as in their visual design.

​An important point here: I played the game on too easy a difficulty level. I went for the normal sort of difficulty because I didn't want to risk spoiling the story by getting stuck on some boss fight or monster encounter, but it turned out that halfway through the game I was stockpiling loads of med-kits, health drinks, hundreds of rounds of pistol ammunition, and plenty of shotgun and rifle shells too. I basically stopped being afraid of the monsters, which must have impacted my experience of the game. It did achieve my goal though, and it meant the boss battles were easy - which is good, since they weren't especially fun from a gameplay point of view, so I was very happy to quickly complete them.

Some of these screenshots might seem to be a bit unclear about what kind of location you're looking at, but when you're playing through the game yourself the different places have very different vibes.

​But not being afraid of the monsters definitely doesn't mean I wasn't afraid. There are some great moments in there, relying on fear of the unknown that definitely put a shiver down my spine. Spoilers here, so skip to the next paragraph if you want to play the game for yourself. Okay. At one point, there is a large dark room, so large that with the constant fog you can't see both walls. As you move in there, you hear something massive running in the distance. Then you hear it again, closer. There's a platform in the centre of the area, so you stop there, just to get off the floor. You can still hear the thing moving around. You head back to the entrance, certain that at any moment it's going to leap out of the darkness and charge at you. The best part - nothing happens. Even when you go back and put in some discs to open a door elsewhere, there's nothing there. Nothing that cares enough to try and attack you, anyway. The other part that I remember was a stairway. You start in a building that's part of the town, and you find a creepy staircase in the basement. Heading down, the steps keep going, and going, and going. I felt compelled to walk rather than run, since I was sure something was going to happen at any moment. I wanted to turn around and look back to see if there was some kind of trick and I just needed to go back out again, but I was afraid of what I might see. Again, nothing happens - eventually you reach the bottom and pass through a door.

It also isn't all murky darkness, and some of the outdoor locations in particular can be almost pleasant, in an overcast, gloomy way (discounting the monsters, of course).

​I could go on more about the little details like James looking at items that can be picked up (much more immersive than having everything glitter or glow), and the neat way the map gets updated with marker pen scrawls. The puzzles were also largely interesting rather than annoying, though you do spend a lot of the game basically collecting keys to access new areas. I had to check a walkthrough a few times, twice to find an object I had overlooked, and once in a very cool section where I had missed the clue about how to progress, and had consequently gotten totally lost, which required a reload. Luckily the PC version has quick-saves and the ability to save where you like (which probably also reduced the tension provided by the monsters roaming around).
 
All in all, I found it a hugely atmospheric and interesting game, and I'm very glad to have played it at last. Complaints I have are generally minor, or can be put down to age (using your inventory and map is clunky and slow, for instance). I won't be playing again for one of the different endings anytime soon, but I will definitely remember this first visit to Silent Hill.

(screenshots are all from silenthillmemories.net)