House of Nettles: #silent hill 2

Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition - ★★★★½

2024-10-29T20:23:53Z

Having played only two Silent Hill games, I've already formed my opinion that this is what Silent Hill should be. Although the original marshaled an incredible ambiance, it didn't quite manage to coalesce it into cogent themes. It lives in my memory largely as a collection of horror vignettes which, while strikingly effective given the limited palette of the PS1, are little more than the sum of their parts.

Silent Hill 2 learns that lesson well, and strides forth confidently with a degree of narrative focus and aptitude that's rare to see in games before or since. Everything in this town of Silent Hill curls meticulously around its true function, even long before the player begins to suspect that it has a function at all. Where the first game just asks the player to experience it, the second asks the player to understand it, and is consistent enough to truly reward that understanding. In doing so, it manages to be effective not just as a game or as a mood poem but as a horror story—something I've never seen another game fully succeed at.

The craftsmanship is also outstanding even beyond the purely narrative realm. When I first played Resident Evil (2002) I was shocked by how much mileage it got out of its much-derided "tank controls" as a means of giving the game itself detailed control over the camera angles without bewildering the player's movement. Silent Hill 2 takes this to the next level, allowing the movement of the player itself to guide the camera along paths that echo those of horror cinematography. My breath was stolen when, in the opening sequence as James walks down a long dirt path through the woods, the camera began trailing him with trees interspersed, using filmic techniques to convey a sense of being watched and stalked.

It's just not possible to do that sort of things with the now-standard two-stick full-motion camera controls, and I became even more thoroughly convinced playing this game that we let ourselves throw away a gem of design in tank controls. They do feel awkward, this I won't deny—but must games always feel smooth? What is life without a little variation in the texture? I dearly hope that one day fixed cameras and relative controls are added back to the toolbox of game design, as I long to see what a game could do if it truly iterated on the way Silent Hill 2 wields the camera as a piece of the artistry during the game itself.

The only place this doesn't rise above its predecessor are the combat and resource management mechanics, which still feel by-the-book relative to Resident Evil's brilliance. The combat is perhaps slightly better here, but only by virtue of being easier to avoid. But if the niche this series is carving for itself is tremendous atmosphere, narrative, and visual artistry, you won't hear a single complaint from me.

repentance for small sins

2024-10-22T18:46:24Z

i've come around 360 to thinking that silent hill 2 is underrated actually but only because i haven't seen enough people talk about the parallelism between sh2's crowleyan psychologizing of sh1's necromantic horror on one hand and the homologous relationship between contemporary occultism and its demonological predecessors on the other

2024-10-21T03:57:21Z

I have formed the opinion that Silent Hill 2's "health drink" is an unflavored yogurt/raw quinoa smoothie with no other ingredients and I will not be swayed from this

2024-10-16T05:47:06Z

my two hottest survival horror takes are:

the "ink ribbon" style save economy is actually genius and totally changes the way the player approaches the game. it's a huge factor in what makes resource management so compelling in early Residents Evil
fixed camera angles are worth every bit of the awkwardness of tank controls and more. I've only just started playing Silent Hill 2 and it's already going completely off the wall with the camera in a way that just wouldn't work if you had to adjust your heading every time it cut

neither of these should be in every game, or even every survival horror game—Silent Hill never used ink ribbons because it's not really about the resource mechanics in the first place and that's fine. but it's a tragedy that they've completely exited the modern design lexicon

2024-10-07T02:51:27Z

Máxima asked:

Are you going to play Silent Hill 2 OG or Remake this halloween?

As good as the remake looks, it's made by an entirely different team

Good question! For those unfamiliar, I've had a yearly tradition since 2021 of playing a classic survival horror game each October, because I like themes. I've played Resident Evil (GameCube version), Silent Hill (PlayStation version which I think is the only one), and Resident Evil 2 (2019 remake) so far. This year, as Máxima accurately recalls, I am planning to play Silent Hill 2.

Originally I thought I would obviously be playing the original, since the remake was being made by Bloober Team whose horror output has not seemed particularly great. But with this remake reviewing quite well, I did take some time to consider it as a real possibility. Ultimately, particularly after consulting Christa who has strong opinions about these sorts of things, I decided to stick with the original.

Where I've found my interest in Resident Evil as a series largely orbiting its mechanics and the use of game design to convey a notion of "horror", at least in the first Silent Hill much more of what I found compelling was wrapped up in the story and atmosphere. That's much harder to preserve, let alone elaborate on, in a remake. Even a really good remake made in 2024 will still have 2024-era textures and mocap and movement. If I'm playing a game for its vibe, I think I want the first time I play it to be with the original vibe.