Silent Hill 2 is a 2001 success horror/puzzle game released for the playstation 2 by Konami. It's the sequel to the first Silent Hill game released in 1999 for the initial playstation. Silent Hill 2 sometimes appears by many as landmark game, which capitalised on components of game design recently ignored or seen as of secondary importance. It really is difficult to categorise the appeal of Silent Hill 2, as at first glance its gameplay could show up primitive or certainly repetitive, while its subject matter and storyline are nothing new to the horror genre. To put it in more prosaic terms Silent Hill 2 is very much 'more than the sum of its parts', which makes it an especially interesting applicant for in depth analysis. For the greatest part of the essay I'll refer to the game via the shorthand guide: SH2.
Gameplay in SH2 revolves around an assortment of puzzle solving and simple fight. As the key protagonist progresses through the town of Silent Hill, he must combat various monsters by using a variety of weapons. These range from a straightforward plank to a hunting rifle. Commensurate with the success horror character of the overall game, ammunition is quite scarce as are the supplies essential for healing, and specific enemies may take significant time and effort to kill. The ball player will find him/herself conserving ammunition for the more robust foes and bosses, and therefore any encounter with a monster brings with it a sense of trepidation and stress and anxiety. Even minimal powerful of the monsters becomes formidable if the player's health insurance and ammo is low, and he/she is obligated to use the real wood plank. That is compounded by the fact that the opponents in SH2 are extremely resistant to damage and have a considerable time to get rid of outright (though they might be knocked to the bottom for a short-term immobilisation). All of these elements incorporate to nurture a feeling of extreme reluctance to progress through the town's environs, and help generate a concern with the unknown course ahead. Unfortunately the game fails to find the right balance between concern and enjoyability with its combat.
Defeating the monsters in Silent Hill is far more wearisome than it is gripping. There is certainly much too little variety in the techniques of episode and too much time must kill each one which soon fight becomes a gradual and repeated affair of regularly swinging the flat iron club at low powered enemies to be able to save ammo. Furthermore once an enemy locks into battle with the player, it no more becomes necessary to reposition the main character, resulting in gameplay requiring forget about input than holding down the strike button.
There is not a heads up screen in SH2, and the ball player must access the start menu to observe how much ammo or health remains. If the player has used excessive damage the playstation controller will subtly vibrate alerting him/her to the condition they are really in. This basically adds to the frustrating mother nature of the fight in SH2, as no clear sign of how much destruction can be taken against an foe is ever before given. This results the participant frequently dying while preventing the numerous slight enemies, even with plenty of health packages in reserve. Problems given and received in combat are accompanied by a vibration of the controller which masks the alert vibrations when close to death and additional jeopardises health management. That is a grave shortcoming which detracts from the alternatively smartly designed puzzle element of SH2.
Puzzles range from fairly untaxing instances of collecting and merging what to extremely cryptic riddles requiring a good deal of considered to solve. The riddles show thoughts in their intricacy and leave the participant with a feeling of accomplishment for having resolved them. Unfortunately cases of these riddles are much less frequent than the incident of monsters in silent hill.
SH2 is the storyplot of Wayne Sunderland, a man looking for his deceased partner after obtaining a notice from her which says that she is waiting for him in the town of Silent Hill, a place where they used to holiday break when she was alive. James' better half was known as Mary, and he starts the overall game with a photograph of her combined with the letter authorized by her in his inventory. The game begins with James having influenced to Silent Hill only to find the entry road clogged. He ceases at a highway bathroom, examines his own reflection in the toilet mirror, reads the notice from his better half again and chooses to enter the city on foot. Wayne commences walking through the woods. The games atmosphere is established in early stages by heavy fog and weird disconcerting noises as he makes his way.
James eventually comes after a graveyard and we are launched to the video games first non-playable character: Angela. As Wayne finds her she actually is sitting among the tombstones. The chat between the two seems disjointed. This sets the tone for the dialogue in the overall game. A lot of what Angela says makes little sense, Adam asks her questions but she seems incapable of supplying him a upright answer, as if her thoughts aren't fully in the present. We accumulate enough from what she says to learn that she is looking for her 'mama' in Silent Hill. At a later point in the game we learn that Angela acquired an abusive youth and that has remaining her with a desire to get rid of her own life. Her dad was killed (it seems likely by Angela), and the house burned down. James proceeds to get into the city proper. Everything is protected in a dense fog. The town searches for the most part normal except that it's absolutely deserted and the autos, signage, and architecture have an out-of-date feel. We soon meet our first foe- a non descript grotesque humanoid condition which James dispatches with the aid of a real wood plank.
Soon James locates himself within an apartment building. The building is in an appalling express of repair, exhibiting many indications of decay with wall surfaces stained horribly with rust, mildew and blood. Here we meet our second persona, Eddie. The area we find Eddie in will not display such advanced decay. Eddie is along the way of vomiting into the toilet when we meet him, and your body of a human being can be seen in your kitchen unit. This isn't overly amazing in light of the monsters roaming the apartment, but Eddie is instantly defensive in his dialogue with Adam, and his frequent uncalled for denials that he murdered the person in your kitchen business lead us to think that he in fact did. It really is noteworthy that Eddie never mentions the monsters, which would easily explain the body. Eddie is apparently a man of limited cleverness- coarse, with a cruel area to his mother nature.
When James locates his way to avoid it of the apartment he discovers a little girl called Laura wandering the avenues by herself. Laura instructs Wayne that she shared a ward with Mary in a healthcare facility during Mary's health issues. This strikes Adam as highly suspect, Mary was supposed to have died 3 years earlier, when Laura would have been very young indeed. He will try to question Laura on the problem but just like the previous interactions with Angela and Eddie, it bears little fruit.
James proceeds on towards Rosewater Playground, one of the places which would fit Mary's description of an 'special place' from her notice. Instead of Mary James meets a woman who calls herself Maria. Wayne is astounded at Maria's appearance, as she appears almost similar to his useless wife Mary. Their personalities are less similar however; Mary is extraverted and bawdy whereas Mary was reserved and ladylike. Maria is dressed up in a suggestively low cut attire with a minuscule skirt and an incident later on in 'Heaven's Nights' strip club infers that she works as a stripper. Maria says she doesn't know Mary and will take Wayne' confusing of both women badly. It is significant that Wayne should meet Maria in the place he expected Mary, not to mention the similarities in appearance. Maria resolves to join James in his search for Mary. After an tv show in the hospital Maria is violently wiped out on entrance of James with a sinister pyramid going monster which is relatively impervious to assault. Later on he detects her inexplicably alive and prior to she actually is again killed on front side of him. This pattern repeats itself three times in the overall game, as James is forced to see his dead wife's doppelganger murdered in front of him. James gets no explanation because of this, or the manner where Maria seems to share thoughts of Mary with James; and though she becomes irritated when Wayne confuses both women, it seems that even she confuses herself with Mary.
James surmises that Mary's special place must be the hotel by the lake and makes his way there. He encounters Laura and Eddie at various times but their conversations reveal little in addition to the extent of these mutual confusion. In a prison on the path to the Hotel Adam satisfies Eddie in an area full of just lately murdered individuals corpses. This is peculiar as Silent Hill has been deserted for quite a while. Eddie has lost his mind, and starts discussing having to eliminate people for 'making fun of him'. Eddie becomes convinced Wayne is 'just like all the slumber' and will try to kill Adam but fails, sacrificing his own life in the process.
James finally extends to the Hotel. A peek in the games inventory screen reveals that Mary's take note of has gone blank. This increases the question of if it ever existed. James reaches the area where he and Mary stayed. The room is in perfect condition and is empty aside from a vcr and a television set. Wayne inserts a video he found in other places in the Hotel and watches in horror at video footage of himself placing a cushion over Mary's face in her hospital foundation. It finally becomes clear- Wayne killed Mary. He rests with his head bowed for some time until Laura gets into. We ask yourself how she made it into the hotel past every one of the monsters and traps. Adam says Laura he wiped out Mary. At this time the player realises the origin of Adam' bafflement. Mary was dying and Adam wiped out her and subsequently clogged out the storage. Now the chronology of the overall game makes more sense; Mary didn't die but merely received sick three years ago and James killed her much more recently. This explains how Laura had met her recently. It transpires that Mary's health problems badly influenced her appearance and demeanour, triggering her to lash out at Wayne. This goes some way to explaining why James have what he have. Just before the final boss Adam again satisfies Angela. She is consumed by despair and Wayne can do little or nothing to dissuade her from suicide. Adam is pressured to witness the death of Maria at the hands of pyramid head one last time before proceeding to the rooftop of the Hotel where an evil incarnation of either Mary or Maria (depending on the player's actions through the game) awaits. You will find four endings to SH2:
1: Inside the 'Leave' ending, the girl on the top is Maria just as before, disguised as Mary so that they can trick James. James refuses her and Maria transforms into a monster. After James defeats this Supervisor Maria, he discovers himself by Mary's bedside once more. He explains to Mary that he killed her to get rid of her hurting but also selfishly to get rid of his own difficulty in having to look after her. He reads Mary's notice in full and then leaves the city with Laura.
2: The 'in drinking water' ending is the same as above except rather than leaving with Laura we hear the looks of James' car driving a vehicle into a lake. We surmise that he cannot live without Mary and chose to drown himself. Mary's notice scrolls across a screen with a watery background.
3: Inside the 'Maria' ending Adam is reunited with Maria following the battle and the match leave town together. As he helps her into his car she begins coughing. It seems likely that Maria will fall season ill just like Mary did. Maybe it's construed as a punishment for James, or simply even a potential for salvation if he recognizes Maria's health issues to the end, just how he never have for Mary.
4: The rebirth stopping, which can only just be unlocked throughout a replay sees Wayne killing employer Maria, and then taking Mary's body out to an island in Toluca Lake via sail boat. It appears as though he intends to resurrect Mary using various talismans he within game at the church on the island.
SH2, using its multiple endings and abundant ambiguity has no sole reading or interpretation. Equally as Adam discovers his own true history after enjoying the video the gamer must put together his/her own definitive narrative predicated on the events they have got witnessed. Lots of the events negate each other, or have triggers and consequences that are mutually exclusive. These include Mary's take note of which disappears partway through the overall game, or Maria's frequent resurrections. It becomes apparent after some representation that if SH2 provides an account of the inconsistencies it isn't made explicit and it's left up to the player to seem sensible of events. The main one theme each one of the endings have in common is the fact someone across the line in the storyline, be it Maria or Mary, turns out to be a figment of Adam' imagination. Given that each ending allows for this possibility it appears likely that a lot of what Wayne' has experienced in Silent Hill was something of his own head. This reasoning is the only way to build a reasonable picture of the events of SH2. The ultimate way to take a look at this theory is to look better at Adam' encounters with the other people in the game.
The personas in SH2 speak to one another in a disjointed way, as if each inhabits a separate fact which only they have access to. It looks like the town reveals a subjective certainty to each individual who trips it. It also makes sense to feel that each character's fact can only be viewed when they meet in person. The evidence for this is quite strong when one examines how the heroes interact.
Eddie never once mentions the monsters that threaten James, for him Silent Hill is a location full of people who make fun of him. Adam never sees these people except lying dead in and around Eddie. The city is less dilapidated whenever we meet Eddie, such such as the apartment room, where sports activities posters adorn the wall membrane. It really is uncertain why Silent Hill drew Eddie to it but his experience there's a failure, he loses his mind and commences slaughtering everyone. His connection with Silent Hill ends when he fulfills a genuine person- Wayne, who kills him.
Angela provides an even more remarkable example. When Wayne rescues her she actually is being threatened by the monster that she identifies as 'daddy'. This field provides a good perception into how the town manifests itself to differing people. The room is packed with the decor of the domestic living room, though it occurs in an underground labyrinth. Angela seemingly recognizes Silent Hill through the eye of her years as a child. She found her father while all Wayne noticed was a monster. The very last time James meets Angela it is in the getting rid of hallway. This seems to be a representation of how her youth home used up down. James remarks that "it's hot as hell in here", while Angela replies "You see it too? For me it's always like this. " The fireplace only is accessible when Angela is near; when Adam leaves the room, the Hotel is back to its wet rotting self applied.
The town seems correctly normal in the presence of Laura, and this clarifies how an eight calendar year old young lady could run from destination to place without having to be harassed by monsters. Within the bowling alley we find Laura and Eddie jointly eating a pizza. This too is uncovering. The silent Hill Adam experiences is far too old and unsanitary a place to find food in, whereas for Laura and Eddie it appears just normal enough to find a pizza.
Now we have some idea of the way the town works for differing people we can make more sense of James' experiences. First of all the probability of Maria being a real person seam dubious. Unlike the other character types in the overall game Maria is the only person who shares Adam' encounters and can witness the things they can. This is data against her living outside of Wayne' thoughts, as none of the other character types seem to acquire any idea what Wayne means when he talks of monsters. Furthermore none of the other individuals ever see Maria, so when she and Wayne arrive at the bowling alley she continues outside, away from Laura and Eddie so as not to show her illusory characteristics by appearing on front of people who cannot see her. There is also the more apparent discrepancy of her many fatalities and resurrections; the other individuals seem much more conventional in this respect. Finally there will be the comparisons between Maria and Mary. She has the same body, and appears in the same area James expects to see Mary- all suggestive of the imaginary Maria hypotheses; a construct of Wayne' mind made up of elements of his dead partner.
Pyramid head, like all the monsters in SH2, is a further construct of James' creativeness. He plays a role in that he forces James to handle his own guilt by eliminating the image of his better half before his eye again and again. James admits this to himself prior to the final fight with the twin pyramid mind: "that's why I needed you, needed you to definitely punish me for my sins". Interestingly Wayne never actually harms pyramid head during combat. All of the encounters with him are survived by stamina somewhat than by defeating him. In the long run it is pyramid head that eliminates himself.
So the definitive narrative of SH2 is thus: Wayne, forced to look after what was kept of his ill wife, made a decision to kill her rather than have either of them suffer any longer. Once he had killed her however, he was filled up with feelings of guilt and started moving into denial, informing himself while others that she possessed died 3 years ago. In fact however; he hated himself, and had a need to face the reality of what he had done, therefore he was drawn to the city of Silent Hill where in fact the forces of the city led him over a journey to handle himself.
Aesthetically SH2 has an extremely unified and clear vision of itself. As an music visual experience the different elements tie together perfectly and form quite a cohesive 'sense' game of smooth stylistic integrity. Particular attention was given to the design of the monsters which indicate the type of James inner turmoil. Apart from pyramid mind every monster in SH2 is feminine in character. Even the indistinguishable humanoid styles that spit acid have high pitched female voices and long hip and legs. Some of the monster designs have erotic overtones such as the mannequins or the nurses. It appears plausible to learn this as a manifestation of James relationship towards womankind since he murdered his wife. It could even be said that the proper execution of the monsters derive from the nature of Marys disfiguring illness.
The sense of atmosphere in SH2 is superbly well constructed. To the end the designers have employed prolific use of heavy fog and darkness to make a concern with progressing forward in to the unknown. That is coupled with the use of a noise grain filtration system that lends an organic and natural feel to the textures and fits in with the static motif shown in the air. The noise filter plays techniques on the attention, making walls may actually crawl and increasing the sense of chaos and unease. All areas exhibits a very advanced of aspect, with various bits of rubbish, graffiti, and detritus making a thoroughly believable, lived in, (though forgotten) town.
The minimal soundtrack is no less appropriate, with Akira Yamaoka choosing more for industrial or ambient soundscapes when compared to a conventional soundtrack (although a conventional music was also constructed for the overall game). The imagination viewed in the structure of the soundtrack is impressive. Yamaoka applied very few classic devices, instead creating deeply unsettling otherworldly cacophonies of banging iron, bee-hives, saws, miscellaneous improvised percussion, sirens, wild animals, and heavy equipment.
It is regrettable therefore considering the quality of SH2 as an cosmetic experience, to find it marred by the camera. SH2 uses a third person point of view all the time with only a miniscule degree of control afforded to the player. The overall game has a very cinematic frame of mind to camera position and therefore the camera is tyrannical in its inflexibility. Study of the fine detail in the design is forbidden at all times by the camera, that will change position at the drop of a head wear to the other side of an area. Although camera positions are clearly deliberately chosen to provide the game an avant-garde and cinematic veneer they do well only in hampering activity, increasing battle difficulty and generally detracting from SH2's excitement on every level.
In conclusion the strength of Silent Hill 2 is based on its ability to see a powerful and intriguing story while efficiently evoking a palpably uneasy atmosphere. SH2 presents an move forward in the video game as form, as it redefines the areas when a game succeeds at amusing. By all traditional standards the gameplay is uninspired, even tedious at times, yet SH2 remains a deeply impacting and convincing experience. The attention to information in the 'feel' of the overall game, along with the subtle, older, and ambiguous story create a casino game of tremendous creative unity, which symbolizes a true formal step in video games.
