Virtual 100 #42: Silent Hill 2 (2024)

Yes, you read that right, it’s #42. There are 41 more entries into the Virtual 100 that are not listed here. It’s something that I’ve been working on for a little over a year now, and most of it was contained on my old blog. But I am compiling all the past Virtual 100 entries and will hopefully release them as one large volume once this is all said and done. One day. In the year 2039.

The Silent Hill series as a whole has been a bit of a conundrum. It was a cool series that started with a great game, had a sequel that many consider to be one of the best survival horror experiences ever, and then… it just kinda went downhill from there.

I have fond memories of the original Silent Hill on Playstation. Silent Hill is the game that convinced me to buy a Playstation in the first place. Not because it was such a draw that I had to have it, but because I bought it brand new for about ten bucks. Allow me a few minutes for a little bit of a flashback. Back when I was in school, I lived next to a used CD store, and had gotten in pretty good with the guys that worked there; I would order a burger at the joint next door, then stand in there and bullshit with them until my food was done. And of course, I would buy stuff. They even had a small selection of “used” games.

Every once in a while, when my timing was right, I’d be in there when their shipment came in. A guy with a black trash bag tucked under his arm would stroll in, wait for the customers to leave (except for me, cuz I was “cool”). Then he’d dump the bag out on the counter, which was essentially just a mix of whatever games he had acquired. He never said where he got them from, and we didn’t ask. This was 1999-ish, and the games were a mix of N64 and Playstation games. N64 games were seventy bucks at retail, so getting one or two here or there for fifteen or twenty dollars was too good to pass up for a mostly-broke college kid like me. I remember getting Super Smash Bros for a few bucks, among others. But the stand-out memory was when I bought Silent Hill.

The reason it stands out is because I didn’t actually own a Playstation, and didn’t even really know much about it. I was a Nintendo guy at the time. In ‘99 I was still rocking my Super Nintendo, and of course I had to have the N64 for Legend of Zelda. But this was the days when I was still a student, and minimum wage was about $4 an hour. My job waiting tables netted me about thirty bucks a night— fifty on a friday. I couldn’t just run out and buy a Playstation. But hey, the game was sitting right there on the counter, and it had only been available for a week or two. The game had literally just come out. So I asked how much, and handed over the ten dollar bill. I took it home, set it on my shelf, and stared at it.

Some of the lighting in the game is pretty impressive.

And there it sat, for about a month, until I had saved enough money to buy a Playstation. I believe Toys R Us was having a sale at the time, and I was able to get it for about $150. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were probably trying to move units to clear shelf space for the upcoming PSOne, that ugly little thing with the rounded corners. But mine was still the original form-factor (but without the IDE).

This is all a very long way to say that Silent Hill was my first experience on the Playstation. Not just with the console itself, but with the superior sound that came with the CD format, with full motion video cutscenes, voice acting, etc. I was getting the full shebang right off the bat.

And it scared the shit out of me. The sound design in the original Silent Hill is stuff of legends by now, but back then, it was downright unsettling. I had never heard anything like it, and sitting in my dark apartment alone while playing it was quite the experience. There’s no way to have that first experience again; no matter what they could have done with Silent Hill 2, the cherry had been popped.

So while Silent Hill 2 may have been the epitome of greatness for many when it released on the PS2, for me it could never reach the heights of the first, much in the same way any Jurassic Park movie could never, ever, be as epic and incredible as sitting in the theater seeing the original for the first time.

I don’t have the same soft spot for Silent Hill 2 that many do. I eagerly awaited the release of the second game, being a huge fan of the original SH. And it was good. But I personally felt James Sunderland’s story, while intriguing, was nowhere near as interesting as the story of Harry Mason’s search for Cheryl.

But that was over two decades ago, and now sitting here in 2025 I’ve just wrapped up my initial play-through of Silent Hill 2’s remake. And it’s a mixed bag. In a way, Silent Hill 2 Remake is too much of a good thing, and I wish I meant that as a positive.

I have to give Bloober Team a lot of credit. It takes some big brass balls to attempt a remake of a game with this kind of pedigree. Silent Hill 2 is a game that is on such a pedestal that it was never very likely they’d hit it out of the park.

And for the most part, they pulled it off… with some huge caveats. Bloober proves that they understand what makes an atmosphere creepy. They get the visuals, as Silent Hill 2 looks fantastic and atmospheric, and their interpretation of Silent Hill’s “otherworld” is both reminiscent of the original, but also fresh. There’s only so much you can do with different shades of brown, but the grimy, rust-covered grates and dirty walls still look good, even by today’s standards. With each game that Bloober Team releases, they improve their understanding of visuals and ambiance.

But… their combat still needs work. A lot of work. Perhaps the most frustrating part of the Silent Hill 2 remake was the unbalanced combat. I get the challenge; they had to change from old-school tank controls to a more modern control scheme, and therefore had to update the combat as well. Functionally, it’s fine. It works well enough, and I never really had a problem in the control department. It wasn’t clunky or unresponsive. Like I said, it was fine.

My problem came with the enemies James encounters, and how cheap they can be at times. I played on whatever the default settings were for difficulty, and while the game gives plenty of bullets and health items, it also delivers a ton of cheap shots that can do quite a bit of damage. One particular monster is the (for lack of a better description) four-legged mannequin. It’s the headless one with two more legs for arms. It hides under tables, around corners, crouched in between boxes, and will stay there, undetected, until James gets too close. It won’t even set off his radio. I got hit by so many cheap shots in the early goings that I was burning through health drinks left and right. After a while, I learned to peek around every corner while navigating a room.

And it made progress so, so slow, checking every nook and cranny trying to avoid a sneak attack. At the same time, it also made the radio somewhat useless, as the other monsters, such as the giant roaches and the nurses, all make their own noises when close. The one that you would need the radio for is the one creature that doesn’t trigger it. It’s kinda dumb.

James’ main form of defense is a dodge move that will get him out of harm’s way, should he get a little too close for comfort with a monster. And it works well, for the most part. But later in the game, when encountering the knife-wielding nurses for example, when not even the dodge sufficed, as they will swipe their knife faster than he can dodge. James might get away on the first swing, but he’ll get hit by one or two more before he has a chance to dodge again. I formed a decent strategy by waiting until one got close enough that one shot from the shotgun would knock them down. Then I’d beat the ever-loving shit out of them with the pipe while they were on the ground. But even then, I was burning through far more shotgun shells than I preferred, and it was only a matter of time until I was back to whacking them with the pipe while trying to dodge as best I could. When in tight rooms or hallways, it would usually result in having to down a health item or two afterwards, as the Knife Nurses would always get in a few good hits, while at the same time requiring quite a few hits with the pipe. Shooting them with the pistol would usually end with having to smack them around anyway, as they barely flinch as you fire away at them. They cover the ground quickly, and if you get caught in a reload, you better have a health syringe handy.

This was all manageable for the first ten hours of the game, but after that, I began to really tire of the cheap shots by the four-legged mannequins and the knife nurses. By hour eighteen, I was really tired of fighting. If I do end up playing this game through again, it will be with the combat dumbed down as much as I can get it.

This brings me to my next little gripe of the game, and it’s that there is very little reward for exploration. I’m the type of gamer that has to check every corner of the map to make sure I’m not missing something. I’ve been conditioned by modern gaming to expect there to be something tucked away off the beaten path, and Silent Hill 2 offers many little businesses and rooms that are relatively tucked away. The problem is, exploring them is often more to the detriment of the player than a reward. Sure, taking a look in a corner cafe might offer up some extra bullets or a health bottle, but it might also get you a sneak attack from a mannequin or a nurse, in which case you get to choose whether to burn the bullets you just found, or duke it out and risking using up the extra health you just found. Very little of it offers up anything substantial.

The original Silent Hill game had lore, chance encounters, quirky items that could be found, etc. There was a samurai sword, a laser gun, extra cut-scenes, and more. It was one of the reasons why the original was so fuckin’ awesome. It had a super dark, serious story, but also this weirdness to it that underlined just how ridiculous the whole thing was. It had a gag reel in the credits for cryin’ out loud.

In my opinion, the game is at its creepiest not with the rust and gore, but with the mundane, eerily vacant as if time had forgotten it.

To be fair, that nuance was kind of lost in the original Silent Hill 2 as well, but it’s all but extinct in the remake. Which brings me to the biggest thing about this remake, and a faux-pas that Bloober is totally guilty of, even though it’s not really their fault.

You see, the original Silent Hill 2 took inspiration from a bunch of different sources. They took inspiration from David Lynch films, Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, various classical artists and painters, etc. When writing the story, they also incorporated psychological themes, intentionally designing certain monsters a certain way based on the themes and the feeling of uneasiness they wanted to portray. Pyramid Head, for example, was very specifically designed.

For Silent Hill 2 Remake’s inspiration, it’s obvious Bloober Team used… Silent Hill 2. Perhaps they had a deeper understanding of the source material than I’m giving them credit for, but at the same time I can’t help but wonder if they designed the nurses the way they did, because that’s what was in the original. There was probably a line to walk between creative freedom and being true to the source material, where they could only take so many liberties. I do realize they were working in close contact with the original creators though, and they included a lot of easter eggs from the original Silent Hill 2 (further reinforcing a popular time loop theory), as well as some that apparently are so well hidden you’ll need a Youtube video to find them. I will be honest, I didn’t understand the significance of very specific objects and locations that could be examined in the game. They didn’t do anything in particular; it wasn’t until I looked up some fan theory videos that I realized they were things James interacted with in the original SH2. It’s been so long since I played that game, I wouldn’t have remembered. It’s obviously there for the hardcore fans, and that’s really cool.

The thing that really wore me down was the length of the game, and the amount of time spent in each location. Remember up at the top when I mentioned it being “too much of a good thing?” Some of these areas outstay their welcome far too often, and I was left traversing a building long after my brain was ready for something new. The pacing in the game is awful. And again, I’m not entirely sure this is Bloober Team’s fault (I mean, it is) but the game has some— I’m going to call them “puzzle houses”— that bring the game to an agonizingly slow burn. And to be fair, the original had the puzzle houses as well— those buildings that were full of locked rooms and never-ending hallways. But they were usually navigated in an hour or two. I think the first apartment in the remake clocked in at least three hours. And I groaned at that. I believe my playtime was reaching five or six hours by the time James finally stepped outside. Then after a brief jaunt and some tourism with Maria, I found myself in the hospital, which I had to traverse twice— once in Silent Hill, and again in the otherworld. I thought to myself that surely the otherworld version would be a truncated, more streamlined run-through of the alternate reality hospital. But nope, I had to go through all three floors, all over again.

By the time I hit the ten-hour mark, I would have been done with the entire original game, but asking online, I realized I was barely past the halfway mark. It was a bit deflating, if I’m honest. After that, my play sessions decreased dramatically. I found myself playing for shorter stretches, and the time between sessions began to grow, as I felt like playing other things instead. The thought of going back in and grinding through that Prison was not nearly as appealing as loading up Dragon’s Dogma II and hacking away at some goblins.

But grind through I did, and holy shit that Prison was indeed a grind. There is a puzzle in the prison that consists of a scale with several missing weights. The combinations of weights will move the scale to unlock multiple sections of the prison. Each section is its own wing of the prison, with its own puzzles and locked doors. At the end of each section is another weight that must be taken back to the scale and added to it to unlock another section. If I wasn’t playing the game while chatting with friends, I would have stopped playing at least three times. But every time they asked me to join them in the Battlefield 6 beta, I declined, explaining that I needed to get through this game, and that was literally the only thing that was making it bearable.

“Why didn’t you just stop for a bit?” I hear you asking. Because I don’t like stopping halfway through a puzzle. My feeble brain would take way too long to remember what I was doing and where I left off. I prefer to finish it up before I stop my session. And the prison was one giant, long puzzle.

After that were several more long “puzzle houses,” and my final play time with the game ended up being a little over 18 hours. I realize that’s probably longer than most people would take, but I will explore every corner of a map that I can. It’s my gaming OCD. I also tend to walk in places I’ve never been rather than run, for fear of missing something.

The gripes that I had with the other characters were mostly resolved by the end of the game. I’m not sure if Angela’s scenario differs depending on the ending of the game the player gets, but in my play-through, she asks for the knife back, James refuses to give it to her, and she leaves. James’ ending saw him leave Silent Hill with Laura walking next to him. I’m not sure what the criteria is for getting the different endings, but I think this was the “good” ending.

In all, even though I had a ton of complaints about the game, I did enjoy Silent Hill 2. As I said way up at the top, I was never the huge fanatic that others were at the time, so I didn’t anticipate this game the way I did, say, Resident Evil 2’s remake. I probably liked it more than I did the original game, but man, if Bloober Team wants to take a stab at another Silent Hill, they need to learn how to edit themselves. Somebody there needs to be able to say, “Okay, that’s enough of that.” Because my biggest gripe was that it was a great game that just over-stayed its welcome. I was ready to be done by hour 12, and it still dragged on for another six hours. Even Resident Evil 4’s remake was cut down a little, because the original was long as hell.

Okay, I’m wrapping this up. Silent Hill 2 is getting chalked up as #42 on the Virtual 100.