Silent, But Deadly: Silent Hill 2 Review (PS5)

Main Review - by James

If you played this game back in the olden days on the wonderful PS2 you’ll probably know everything there is to know about the backstory, the characters and the ‘charming’ Silent Hill itself.

However, if you’re like me and knew nothing about the game at all, let me set the scene for you. Buckle in… So, let’s start with the main protagonist – James Sutherland. Sporting some fetching 90s curtains, James has recently ‘lost’ him wife from some form of disease after what appears to have been a long illness. Nothing too unusual there, right?

Well this is where it gets odd – James receives a letter from aforementioned dead wife telling him that she is waiting for him in their favourite place in Silent Hill, a place they apparently haven’t been to for a while. With this in mind, James decides to very rationally drop everything and head to Silent Hill to find the (former?) love of his life. On arrival in Silent Hill, James discovers that it has become a bit of a dump. Oh, and it appears to have become overrun by monsters, from human-like creatures that slither across the floor towards you, to things that appear to be wearing some kind of straight jacket / gimp suit that runs towards you vomiting acid at you to nurses dressed in PVC outfits that come at you with knives or pipes.

The monsters are very much like something made up in the mind of a sadistic pervert who has been through a particularly stressful few years and has gone a little bit crazy! Anyway, back to the game…

Aside from the constant terror, the permanently unsettling environment and the abject misery of Silent Hill, the main thing that jumps out at you is the fog. The original game was famous for its fog, potentially in part to disguise the PS2’s graphical limitations, so it’s only natural that the remake is also a bit of a fog-fest. From your first arrival in Silent Hill everything is foggy, dirty and generally knackered meaning that you can never quite see what’s coming round the corner – particularly what’s coming to attack you! It’s a really effective mechanism that keeps you constantly trying to look for things that you can’t quite see, building that fear of the unknown. Even outside of the fog, the ‘fear of what you can’t see’ mechanism is used EVERYWHERE. One particular monster, effectively a pair of legs that walks, deliberately sneaks away from your sight and hides behind things ready to pounce on you when you least expect it.

Pretty much every boss also takes every possible opportunity to disappear from sight between every attack – either retreating into the ceiling or running behind rows of hanging dead animals. Everything feels designed to make the player feel constantly unsettled and there’s no more than a few minutes in the game when you can relax or catch a breath.

Graphically, I was quite impressed. Some of the previews looked awful, but when you start playing it does look pretty good. Not AMAZING but definitely good enough. The sound is great at setting the mood, and also important as you carry a radio around with you that crackles a bit whenever a monster is nearby, which helps you get ready for battle. I would also recommend being called James in real life because it definitely adds to the immersion when they keep referring to you by name in the game!

The controls are fine when you get used to them – no particularly complex sequences are required and most actions are undertaken with the same button.

Obviously I won’t spoil the story too much for you, but you wander round Silent Hill from location to location finding things (ammo / health / collectables etc), evading / killing weird things whilst making your way closer and closer to your formerly alive spouse. Some locations are pretty compact, whilst others are massive in terms of the number of rooms you need to battle your way through. As mentioned previously, every location is grim, packed with baddies and generally dark and dingy. Some enemies die after a few whacks / shots, whilst other respawn after a while and others let us a plume of acidic vomit just as they lay on the floor to die, so you’ll quickly need to work out which monster does what.

The plot isn’t massively deep, but you’ll get the occasional short cutscene to guide you through a bit and help you figure out what the hell is going on. You’ll also encounter some other humans, although even they are a bit on the odd side and each one appears to be engaged in their own horrifying journey through Silent Hill.

And then there’s Maria. She looks suspiciously like the former Mrs Sutherland, but is a touch more strippery and appears to have quite the thing for you. She also has the knack of dying a few times…

To break up the constant killing there are quite a few puzzles knocking about in the game. Some are more complicated that others and require a lot of exploration and collecting different objects to complete, but all make sense and none leave you desperately hunting out the various internet walkthroughs. In fact, it was probably the puzzles that I enjoyed the most in the game as they gave me a nice pop of achievement whenever I completed one and always opened up a new area of the game. 

One last thing to note is the number of times you are required to stick your hand into something unpleasant to find a hidden object. Each time James isn’t too sure and you have to press the button a few times to convince him to stick his arm into something or somewhere a normal person wouldn’t tend to stick their arm! It’s an interesting feature…

Overall I really enjoyed Silent Hill 2. I don’t know exactly how it compares to the original in terms of gameplay, but it definitely feels like it was set in the past and it definitely lacks a lot of the blockbuster grandeur and epic storylines of some recent games. However, what it does really well is immerse you very quickly into a world of misery, suspense and horror that never stops until the final credits roll. It’s non-stop, constantly driving you forwards to the next area and has just enough variety through the puzzles and locations to keep you gripped until the end. Even then it’s not really the end as you can enjoy up to 8 different endings depending on how you’ve played the game, so you can always pop back to a previous save and try for a new one. For me, one play through was more than enough, as the game is genuinely knackering!

Knackering, but really, really good. So if you enjoy dark, knackering, terrifying games with a heavy smattering of decent puzzles and a plethora of vomiting creatures in gimp suits you’ll love this one. It appears to greatly improve on the original in terms of graphics without making any massive changes to the gameplay – and given the original was hugely well received that’s no bad thing!

If I had to describe Silent Hill 2 in one word it would be ‘relentless’. If I had 3 words it would be ‘relentless, unsettling and disturbing’, so if you enjoy being relentlessly unsettled and disturbed you will love this game! Fortunately I’m quite a fan of being relentlessly unsettled and disturbed so this was right up my alley. Definitely recommend (for most people).