Silent Hill 2

We face the demons of our own creation. Wandering. And wallowing. Eventually we will all find ourselves at our own version of Silent Hill, and how we each walk away from it, if at all, is our choice.

(Before you start reading this review please keep in mind that I am not from America and my English can be ruff.) Silent Hill 2 is a game about James Sunderland who gets a letter from his dead wife Mary Shepherd-Sunderland. On the letter the letter it explains how she wants James to come see her in Silent Hill in their "special place". As James travels through the thick fog of Silent Hill he faces monsters created from within his psyche. The deeper we (the players) dives into the dark themes of this game the more we see that the characters introduced within the story all have a dark past and a reason for them to be in Silent Hill.
*This next part will be Spoiler heavy and will have my own bias opinion*
This game has a special place in my heart, as I have played and beaten this game in various stages of my life. The themes of this game are hard to grasp especially for todays standards. Silent Hill 2 will tackle themes of sexual assault, rape, denial of once death, crime and punishment. This game came out in 2001, during the time when games like Metal Gear Sold 2, Devil May Cry, Tony Hawks Pro Skater 3 came out. For a game to cover topics like sexual assault, was never heard about or even talked about, this made this game so different and difficult to talk about. Rather than playing as a super human fighting demons like a badass, we wore playing as James, a human with the same qualities as every other person.
I have played a lot of games, have consumed a lot of movie media but nothing have ever stuck my heart and effected my daily life like Silent Hill 2. There are nights that I will be walking back from the gym and I will be listing to the incredible soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka. Every time I do this I think about where I am in life, and where I see my self in the future, there is no other media that has left me with such affect to where I just think so clearly and feel at such peace with my own self and everything around me. And as I read through different reviews I see the same effect on other people talking about how they have fallen in love with this title and the story with it's soundtrack. This is do to the incredible direction and craftiness done by Masashi Tsuboyama, with showing his incredible skills in creating a psychological story with using inspirations from other media.
For my last statement, I will say this, if you are reading this and never played or experienced this game, watch "two best friends play" on youtube play Silent Hill 2, not only are they fumy, they give some of the best commentary I have found for this game. They talk about all the different themes, symbolisms, background for this game. With that said this game is a masterpiece.

I could write a pages long paper on this game, and in all likelihood will, but for now I will say this. Through a persons life there’s only a handful of pieces of media that truly affect and change a person. And silent hill 2 is one of those works of art for me.

Goddamn man, I just beat this fucking game, and this is probably the best game I've played in my entire life. You know those games where you play them and you feel like you just hit a life milestone? Not in some corny, melodramatic way, but in like a 'holy shit, I just experienced that'. That's how I felt when I beat this.

I've been a fan of the Silent Hill franchise since before I ever touched the series. I heard the soundtrack to this game, and it was so affecting on me that for an art class I was taking in college, I redesigned the cover art and booklet for the album. I didn't really know shit about the game, but I got the vibe from the soundtrack and I knew what Pyramid Head was. The soundtrack only gets better when you fit it into the context of the game, even though it was completely brilliant on its own. After falling in love with its soundtrack, knowing its acclaim through older relatives, my friends, the gaming community in general, and this website, I figured I needed to check it out. And holy fucking shit, it absolutely and completely lives up to the hype.

If I sound a bit too vulgar and erratic, I just finished this game, and I'm just completely floored by how brilliant it is. There's so much up in the air, so much mystery to it, even after you beat it. The gameplay is so goddamn tense and anxious, and the level design is utterly brilliant. Without giving too much away, this game dwells on a lot of topics such as reality, death, emotionality, and psychology. But it dresses all of these themes up as characters, sound effects, level design, bosses, and even the gameplay. You feel so vulnerable and scared the whole time because of how regular the protagonist, James Sutherland, moves by comparison to the hellish creatures he has to fight. They contort themselves, thrust themselves at you, squirm and crawl in inhuman, surreal ways. The characters James interacts with add so much to the game too. And the atmosphere, holy fucking shit the atmosphere. I have never played a game more atmospheric in my entire life. It is genuinely more engrossing and terrifying than any horror movie I've ever seen. Not a second of camp, not a second of being overdone or ludicrious. It is perfectly disturbing, Satanic, surreal, and ominous the whole time. The soundtrack, which I loved immensely, adds so much to this too. The music is as otherworldly, demented, dark, and surreal as the game is. It's so mindblowingly tense, dark, mysterious, paranoid, and psychotic that for me, I had to put the game down so I didn't start getting too freaked out. But I could only do that in increments, because it was just that fun.

I won't go into how rich and metathematic the symbolism is, because that's the best part of the game and you really should experience that for yourself. However, when I finished the game, taking into account all the messages and themes the elements of the game were symbolic of and trying to convey, I was honestly floored. It's really on a par with surrealist films in that regard. It's not cheesy or half-assed like some video games that vie to have 'messages' convey, it really nails it home without piling it on thick. But when you sit with it long enough, you can't help but be stunned. Luckily, sitting with it long enough means just playing through the game intently, which if you want to not have to keep restarting (it is survival horror after all), you'll have to be doing anyway.

For anyone who may be interested in playing this I absolutely recommend it. And if you get to it, buckle up, because you are in for a hell of a ride.

Este juego ha hecho cosas que pocos han hecho.
No deje de pensar en el todo el tiempo, lo único que hacía era esperar la noche para jugarlo por horas.
En mis pensamientos sin descanso veía a ese pueblo, silent hill.

Played Disco Elysium just before this. Both have extremely intricate plots and characterisation but in Silent Hill 2 Kojima manages to achieve the same effect with none of the 'pretentious' language of the former. While I was playing I already grasped the Vertigo obsession complex and the delusions of the character but there are literally so many layers to the story despite it using very simple language. I'm still reeling from the thought of what everything means and I can now see why the director was influenced by Crime and Punishment because of how detailed the psychological exploration of the characters is.