Silent Hill 2

A Video Game Review

by Mighty Doom

           It’s not an easy thing to scare Doom.  However, the prospect of horrible cleaver rape by a guy wearing surgical gloves and a giant red pyramid on his head has always been a personal phobia of mine, and lo and behold, Konami has made a game chiefly concerned with this very concept! I speak, of course, of Silent Hill 2, available for about a year now on PlayStation 2, recently available on Xbox and more recently than that on PC CD-ROM, the version upon which this review is based.

            I can honestly say that Silent Hill 2 is genuinely frightening, tense and disturbing as all fuck – so much so, in fact, that you may find it difficult to play for more than an hour at a time.  There are simply some situations we’d rather not find ourselves in.  For instance, we’d rather not be stuck in a run-down hotel with an awful slimy potato monster flailing its legs at us from the shadows.  We’d rather not be hospitalized – well, ever, but it’s much worse with acid-spewing mutated patients trying to devour you.  Unpleasant as all this sounds, it’s what our hapless hero, James, is fated to endure during the course of Silent Hill 2.

            James bears a marked resemblance to Mark Hamill – thereby decreasing the amount of sympathy we might otherwise feel for him – and has spent the last three years in mourning for his wife Mary, who died of a debilitating and unspecified disease prior to the game’s outset.  James is taken aback when he receives a letter from his wife suggesting that he return to their favorite vacation spot, the lakeside town of Silent Hill.  James is a normal man (read “idiot”) and decides to check it out.  That’s when the fog thickens, and all hell breaks loose.

            The town appears to be deserted, but James quickly realizes this is not the case when he is assaulted by a truly disgusting aberration that splits open down the middle and vomits a corrosive fluid all over him.  James beats the horrid thing to death with a board and spends the rest of his stay in Silent Hill running from other monstrosities and, in particular, the aforementioned pyramid-headed surgeon, who seems to enjoy buggering smaller, weaker monsters and then dispatching them with a massive cleaver he carries around with him.

            James also encounters a motley group of oddballs, each in Silent Hill for their own reasons.  There’s Laura, the most obnoxious child ever to walk the face of the Earth, and after a while you wonder why James doesn’t simply shoot her whenever he runs into her, as she shuts him in with the monsters on numerous occasions.  Eddie is a fat-ass apparently on the lam from the cops, though why is not readily apparent.  Then there’s Angela, a manic depressive first seen wandering the local graveyard in search of her mother.

            And, most importantly, Maria, a skank ho who dresses in shiny leopard-print miniskirts and who we may assume is a stripper, as she has the key to the local strip club (you have to take a quick detour through the place due to a roadblock).  Maria is a dead ringer for James’ wife, though her clothes and her generally whorish demeanor offset James’ initial impression.  She also closely resembles Cameron Diaz, down to her deathly pallor, weirdly staring eyes and toothy, freakish smile.  James and Maria become friends, traveling together until Maria is apparently killed by Pyramid Head while James makes his escape in a hospital elevator.

            Anyone who claims not to be thoroughly freaked out by Silent Hill 2 is lying through his teeth.  This is disturbing in the vein of Clive Barker, H.P. Lovecraft and David Lynch – physical mutilation, a hint of sexual perversion, reality subsumed by something darker and more ancient.  There’s a decent variety of weapons to be found, though more often than not you’ll be inclined to run rather than fight.  My favorite is Pyramid Head’s knife, which is obscenely powerful but limits your character’s movement to a slow crawl, as he has to drag the knife behind him with every step.

            If the controls are somewhat awkward – movement is relative to James’ position on the screen, and weapons do take time to fire and reload – it is a small price to pay for such richly dreadful atmosphere.  The graphics are excellent, though the characters all look a little dead, and the sound design is formidable.  I enjoy the Resident Evil series, being a fan of George A. Romero’s Living Dead trilogy, but where the RE games often rely heavily upon stupid sci-fi monsters and giant crocodiles, SH2 keeps it tight and often truly horrifying.  Moreover, the PC version is essentially the Xbox version – two playable characters, more plot – with better graphics and numerous keyboard shortcuts that render gameplay considerably easier, including health, weapons, flashlight and radio power and search mode.

            In short, Silent Hill’s technology has finally, after a frightening but uneven PlayStation entry, caught up with its atmosphere.

THE GOOD: Monumentally disturbing.  This game will cost you hours of sleep.

THE BAD: Despite keyboard shortcuts, the controls remain slightly awkward.

THE UGLY: Plenty.  This game is not for the squeamish.

DOOM’S FINAL GRADE: A-