Silent Hill 2 is STILL considered one of the best survival horror games ever.
Celebrating the 25th anniversary of Silent Hill 2 — a game considered by many to be the GREATEST survival horror game of all time!
OK, I admit — I was WAYYY late to the party for Silent Hill 2.
As in, 25 years late. But thankfully, I rectified that issue just in time for our all-encompassing Halloween soirée. And yes, pretty much everything you’ve ever heard about Silent Hill 2 is true … it’s DEFINITELY one of the best horror video games ever made, and a strong contender for the absolute best of all time.
Now, it’s a funny thing with Silent Hill 2. Today everybody champions it as an exemplary genre offering, but when it first came out in 2001 it was actually overshadowed by a ton of other games — Grand Theft Auto 3, Metal Gear Solid 2, Halo, Super Smash Bros. Melee. Weirdly enough, if you go back and look at the reviews for the game back then, they’re pretty good but nobody was hailing Silent Hill 2 is an unassailable masterpiece, either. It’s a game that earned its reputation organically from REAL gamers and not the conglomerate-owned magazines and websites; over the last two and a half decades, Silent Hill 2 has grown from a niche cult classic to a game routinely regarded as one of the absolute best of its decade.
You know, the same way mainstream movie critics are just now realizing that They Live and Halloween 3 are actually intelligent commentaries on consumerism and not just throwaway eighties trash. Funny how horror is always given its proper regard twenty years late, regardless of the medium.
As for Silent Hill 2 itself, well, it’s pretty much the closest thing the PS2 has to a proper one-to-one Jacob’s Ladder analogue. I’ve heard some people describe Silent Hill 2 is Mulholland Drive with zombies, and really, that’s not too far off as a synopsis. Sure, Resident Evil may have kick-started the whole survival horror trend, but I think it’s safe to say that Silent Hill 2 perfected it. Even now you can see the game’s influence, not just in terms of aesthetics but also form, pacing and narrative. It’s a game that’s been copied many, many times, but none of its imitators seem to capture the essence that makes Silent Hill 2 such a monumental step forward for the video game genre.
Nobody is going to claim Silent Hill 2 was the first “psychological horror” video game. Hell, you could argue that Pac-Man … technically, a game about being pursued by ghosts in a pitch black abyss, albeit one scattered with colorful fruits … already did that 21 years prior. But what Silent Hill 2 DID do, however, was give us a console horror game that was more about an emotionally engaging story than it was instant gratification action (as the case with Doom) or nailing you with jump scares galore (i.e., the Resident Evil model.) It’s a game that’s always making you second guess things … your character’s motivations, what the monsters are and aren’t and how much of the game is “real” and how much of it is mere illusion. Or delusion, if we wanted to be a little more accurate.
Even compared to the original Silent Hill on the PS1, Silent Hill 2 feels like a VERY different type of interactive experience. It has a slower pace, with more of an emphasis on exploration (which makes sense, considering the game is a showcase for that brand new PS2 hardware.) It’s a game that’s constantly envelopes you in a LITERALLY fog of war, making you anxious about invisible things that could be just a few feet away from you. It’s a classical horror movie trick; Silent Hill 2 works, primarily, by showing you nothing and hyping you up so much that you subconsciously fill in the blanks yourself. You kinda created your own personal terror in your head while you played the game — and that was a VERY uncommon thing for console games to do back in 2001.
Sure, Silent Hill 2 looks date today, but it doesn’t look AS outmoded as you might expect. In fact, the graphics are still fairly impressive, replete with backgrounds that’ll totally gross you out all these years later. Sense of place is so pivotal in horror games like this and there is no denying how well Silent Hill 2 executes it … in several different interpretations of the term. When you walk into a crusty, abandoned prison bathroom, you almost feel like you can smell it. The immersion created by this game is absolutely incredible, and perhaps the great x-factor that has given it its legs for so long.
Nobody is going to accuse Silent Hill 2 of being a totally perfect game. It has some glaring issues. The voice acting, as good as it is is, does occasionally come off as corny and campy. And there are some occasional camera issues, where you keep walking in and out of rooms by mistake (or, even worse, keep accidentally running face first into Pyramid Head.) A few of the puzzles are a little oblique and every now and then you’ll stumble across an item that you SHOULD be able to pick up that you’ll have to press the button four or five times before the game finally recognizes it. Of course, none of this issues are significant enough to detract from the overall awesomeness of the game — and now that I’m older, I can even admire the ingenuity of a puzzle where you have to MacGyver a fish hook using a strong of some random person’s hair and a crooked needle.
Even though it is a 25-year-old game, I’m still a bit hesitant about spoiling anything for other Johnny-Come-Latelies. Even if you know most of the plot points by memetic osmosis or watched the subpar live-action adaptation that came out earlier this year, playing it for yourself and living out the story with a controller in your hands is a totally different kind of experience. The dread, the terror, the despair … it all hits so much harder as a video game, especially down the final stretch when it’s revealed that your character may or may not be who you think he is. It’s a masterful work of suspense and identity crisis, plus it has a prominent subplot about a stripper AND a guy who likes to eat a lot of pizza in it.
The game, simply put, is a MUST experience for anybody who even claims to be a fan of cerebral horror. Lots of games (and movies, for that matter) have tried to replicate what this game does … and frankly, none of them even hold a candle to what this game did a quarter century ago.