Saturday Morning Gaming: Silent Hill 2’s Remake

Silent Hill 2 was originally released for the PS2 back on September 25, 2001. I bought it but only played maybe a couple of hours into it. It was too disturbing and, well, a lot happened that month. Grand Theft Auto 3 released on October 22, 2001 and, yeah, that was game over for Silent Hill 2. I wanted a game that scratched itches, not created them in places I couldn’t reach.

GTA 3 was a game that you could just *PLAY*. Do you want to do the main mission? Nah. Let’s see how many cars we can put in a parking lot and then let’s throw a grenade and see how long the chain reaction of explosions goes. Let’s steal a taxi and just drive around doing fares. Let’s do some Dukes of Hazard jumps in the Banshee that we got at Capital Autos. Silent Hill 2? That’s long gone in the rear view mirror.

Well, 23 years pass and my bud tells me “I GOT THE NEW SILENT HILL! LET’S PLAY IT!!!” and, you know what? Sure. I remembered thinking that the opening cutscene of Silent Hill 2 was nigh-photorealistic and how unsettling that was.

Hee hee. We were so young!

I’ve heard multiple people tell me that Silent Hill 2 is one of the best psychological horror games of all time and has one of the best bad guys (Pyramid Head) of all time and there are so very many different layers to the game and… well, I have to say that I had to have my friend explain the game to me.

The game that *I* experienced was a game of a guy who was tormented by demons as he’s looking for his wife (that he thought was dead) and the demons are weirdly sexy. High heel monsters, leg monsters, nurse monsters. There is a whole lot of “going down” in the game. You go down very long staircases, you jump into pits, you jump into an open grave… and then you’re magically at sea level again. There’s this recurring thing where you go from being in the real world to jumping into the Nevernever. Then there’s a big reveal and, after the big reveal, you go *UP* a staircase. Oh, and there’s this weird chick who keeps flirting with you and dying and then coming back. Oh! And there are other people there who show up sometimes. You kill some of them.

And, after it was done and we put down the controller, my buddy explained to me that Pyramid Head was the good guy. He represents the need of the protagonist James to wrestle with his guilt. The weirdly sexy demons are the various shameful urges the guy had while caretaking his wife. The weird chick who keeps inappropriately flirting with him represents his desire to have his wife back and inability to move on.

So Pyramid Head was trying to help James move on.

And, like, I didn’t get *ANY* of that. I just got the weirdness and the vague understanding that this was a game about guilt, I guess. I didn’t get that it was about *PROCESSING* at all.

Was it a *GOOD* game? Eh. It was okay. It was vaguely harrowing to play and there were a lot of awful boss monsters and I mostly felt pity for everybody.

I understand that this was one of the first games to really kick the whole “Can Videogames Be Art?” debate into high gear and “not particularly fun but exceptionally compelling” puts Silent Hill 2 in the same category as atonal music, I guess. Some vague “eat your vegetables” sentiment.

I’d never play Silent Hill 2 again but, I guess, I’m glad I finally played it for real.

Though I feel like I need something to wash the taste out of my mouth. Maybe I should check out the GTA 3 remaster…

So… what are you playing?

(Featured image is Silent Hill 2 promotional art.)