Silent Hill 2 is a singular experience, but the more I played, the more I started to genuinely resent that it existed.
This has less to do with it’s narrative or aesthetic qualities (which are culled from other popular media that I find more satisfying) but more so with the fact that most of it’s genuinely successful/upsetting moments are derived from how unpleasant the game is to actually play. Ultimately, Silent Hill 2 can only really exist as a videogame and that is both a blessing and a curse.
I’ll try to explain. Silent Hill 2 feels wrong to play. The inertia of James as an avatar is unpleasantly slimy. He glides across surfaces as if without friction. He runs too fast and walks too slowly. There are crunchy footstep samples for seemingly every surface in the game, but they don’t feel punctuated by James’ movement. It’s like someone is offstage doing a live Foley track and botching it. It’s grotesque and I love it.
The camera bobs, sways and pans at the press of a button, scrambling to focus on James within the exquisitely rendered fog. It’s nauseating and frequently disorientating. It becomes necessary to obsessively check the maps. Trying to get your bearings or a clear view of the environment is frequently a chore. It’s maddening but this necessitates players filling in the blanks. Players do half the world-building here.
Combat and time sensitive movements (like James’ turning radius) feel like treacle, unsatisfying, laborious and slow. In contrast, the text display speed is almost instantaneous. Sentences unnervingly hover in front of 3D landscapes and are gone in an instant. It’s uncanny.
SH2 is ultimately very much a work that is more than the sum of it’s parts (as so many good games are) but I kind of hate it because it’s just not fun to play, and i’m all about fun these days. BUT, the fact that I have such strong feelings for it 15 years after first playing it are a testament to it’s enduring peculiarity, never outdone.
Silent Hill 2 deserves every vote it gets.