In some rooms, the music will become frenetic and fierce for no reason, and you’ll hear whispers and semi-random sounds, like a glass smashing or a baby crying. There was no signposting to tell me she would be there.
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Even in the early apartments, you leap between windows and enter disorienting alternate worlds.Īt one point, you walk in on a disturbing scene of your sometimes sidekick Angela playing with a knife and looking at herself in the mirror, but what I found most frightening about it was that it was just a random room in a mostly vacant complex. Historical Societies became prisons which became labyrinths which led me to lakes. Physically, many of the environments and pathways you follow in this game don’t make sense, and this really started to scare me when I realised I was no longer in control of my journey and there was no way I could turn back. When you eventually make it inside, the game gets playful with its level design to create labyrinths of portals and holes. Never forget that David Lynch is a national treasure /ir1VHCz66v Usually, you just end up with more questions that are never fully explained, a fine leaf taken from the David Lynch playbook of storytelling. But they work so well, subverting typical narrative expectations of finding someone and learning more about a place or the story. Mid-conversation cuts work to disorient the player, but none of the scenes themselves are conventionally scary – most of them are just short conversations with weird entities in this tragic town. I found the way the game transitioned from gameplay to cutscene to be really disturbing too, as the pre-rendered filter descends onto the pixellated backdrop.
They talk to you dismissively about your own perceptions and understanding of Silent Hill, which ramps up the fear and curiosity. Perhaps the scariest thing about the rest of the cast is that as you encounter them, they don’t reassure any of your assumptions. It’s just a small town with believably empty buildings, but something is clearly wrong and you can never quite put your finger on it.Īny corpses that remain look like the protagonist, and the real humans you find are all deeply troubled and talk with a disjointed cadence. Just like Mary – the wife of player character James Sunderland and your reason for being in this hellscape – everything is waiting for you here, rather than trying to seek you out and scare you, and I think that is part of why Silent Hill 2 is so effective. It tricks your eyes into crossing and losing focus until you don’t know where you are.īuildings and assets appear out of nowhere, and the sour-fleshed Mannequins are eerily static until you approach them. It’s a visual effect that makes it feel like you have cataracts. You arrive at this town and immediately become acquainted with the looming fog. There are no jump scares in this game, and it still manages to be terrifying. Plus, with rumours swirling that Silent Hill games are coming back, it seems like a good time to try and figure out what made Silent Hill 2 so special, and what developers should try to keep in mind when they make a new one.įirst off, we need to talk about the game’s scare tactics. I’ve never played anything like it, and by trying to explain why, I want to spur some of you to go back and try it, especially if you were too young to experience it naturally, or if you’re bored of the shock jock state of modern horror games. It is untouchable in the way that it maintains its unnerving ambience.
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I understand why everyone is so desperate for a new game in this series because even 20 years after its release, I really do feel that Silent Hill 2 is a masterpiece. It was an immeasurable act of kindness, and it’s safe to say that I get it now. They added context where it was necessary, but purposefully kept quiet a lot of the time to allow me to make my own choices and experience the atmosphere of these games completely untainted. One of my friends is a huge Silent Hill fan, so they invited me over to play through the series. It was a blind spot that I’ve now corrected.
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