Silent Hill 2 (2001)

Silent Hill 2 is a 2001 survival horror game developed by Team Silent, a group in Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo, and published by Konami. The game was released from September to November, originally for the PlayStation 2. The second installment in the Silent Hill series, Silent Hill 2 centres on James Sunderland, a widower who journeys to the town of Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his dead wife informing him that she is waiting there for him. An extended version containing an extra bonus scenario, Born from a Wish, and other additions was published for Xbox in December of the same year. In 2002, it was ported to Microsoft Windows and re-released for the PlayStation 2 as a Greatest Hits version, which includes all bonus content from the Xbox port. A remastered high-definition version was released for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in 2012 as part of the Silent Hill HD Collection.
Development of Silent Hill 2 began in June 1999, soon after Silent Hill had been completed. Its narrative was inspired by the Russian novel Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and some of the influences on the game's artistic style include the work of film directors David Lynch and Adrian Lyne (specifically Jacob's Ladder), and paintings by Francis Bacon and Andrew Wyeth; cultural references to history, films and literature can be found in the game. In contrast with the previous title, whose narrative concerned cult activity, Silent Hill 2 focuses directly on the psychology of its characters.
Silent Hill 2 received critical acclaim. Within the month of its release in North America, Japan, and Europe, over one million copies were sold, with the greatest number of sales in North America. During release, it was widely praised for its psychological horror story, use of symbolism and taboo topics, overall atmosphere, graphics, monster designs, soundtrack and sound design. However, it received criticism for its controls and voice acting. It is considered to be one of the greatest horror games ever made and among the greatest video games of all time, as well as a key example of video games as an art form. The game was followed by Silent Hill 3 in 2003. A remake was announced in October 2022.
== Gameplay ==
The objective of Silent Hill 2 is to guide the player character, James Sunderland, through the monster-filled town of Silent Hill as he searches for his deceased wife. The game features a third-person view, with various camera angles. The default control for Silent Hill 2 has James moving in the direction that he is facing when the player tilts the analogue stick upwards. Silent Hill 2 does not use a heads-up display; to check James' health, location, and items, the player must enter the pause-game menu to review his status. Throughout the game, James collects maps, which can only be read if there is sufficient light or when his flashlight is on. He also updates relevant maps to reflect locked doors, clues, and obstructions, and writes down the content of all documents for future reference.
Much of the gameplay consists of navigating the town and finding keys or other items to bypass doors or other obstructions, with less focus on killing enemies. Occasionally, puzzles will be presented, often with riddles left for the player to interpret. The difficulty levels of the enemies and the puzzles are determined independently by the player before starting the game. James keeps a radio with him, which alerts him to the presence of creatures by emitting static, allowing him to detect them even through the thick fog or darkness. He also tilts his head in the direction of a nearby item or monster. For combat, he finds three melee weapons and three firearms over the course of the game, with another two melee weapons unlocked during replays. "Health" restoratives and ammunition can be found throughout the game.
== Plot ==
=== Setting ===
While not focusing on the characters and plot threads of the first Silent Hill game, Silent Hill 2 takes place in the series' namesake town, located in Maine. Silent Hill 2 is set in another area of the town, and explores some of Silent Hill's backstory. The town draws upon the psyche of its visitors and ultimately forms alternative versions of itself, which differ depending on the character. The concept behind the town was "a small, rural town in America"; to make the setting more realistic, some buildings and rooms lack furnishings.
=== Letter from Silent Heaven ===
James Sunderland (Guy Cihi) comes to Silent Hill after apparently receiving a letter from his wife Mary (Monica Taylor Horgan), who had been suffering from an illness and died three years before. While exploring the town, he encounters Angela Orosco (Donna Burke), a teenage runaway searching for her mother; Eddie Dombrowski (David Schaufele), another teenage runaway; and Laura (Jacquelyn Brekenridge), a brattish eight-year-old who befriended Mary and accuses James of not truly loving her. While searching a local park, James also meets Maria (Horgan), a woman who strongly resembles Mary but has a much more assertive personality. Maria claims that she has never met or seen Mary, and because she is frightened by the monsters, James allows her to follow him. Arriving at a bowling alley, Eddie and Laura are found inside, but Laura runs off.
Following Laura to a hospital and searching for her there at Maria's insistence, James and Maria are ambushed by the monster Pyramid Head, and Maria is killed while James escapes. Afterwards, James resolves to search the hotel that he and Mary stayed at during their vacation. On the way, he finds Maria alive and unharmed in a locked room. She claims ignorance of their previous encounter and begins discussing elements of James' and Mary's past that only Mary would know. James sets off to find a way to free Maria but returns to find her dead again. Later on, he rescues Angela from a monster, after which she reveals that her father sexually abused her, with a newspaper clipping implying that she killed him before coming to Silent Hill. James also confronts Eddie, who admits to maiming a bully and killing a dog before fleeing to Silent Hill. When Eddie attacks him, James is forced to kill him in self-defence.
At the hotel, James locates a videotape which depicts him euthanising his dying wife by smothering her with a pillow. In another room, a final meeting with Angela sees her giving up on life, unable to cope with her trauma. She then walks into a fire and is never seen again. Afterwards, James encounters two Pyramid Heads, along with Maria, who is killed another time. He comes to realize that Pyramid Head was created because he needed someone to punish him, and all the monsters are manifestations of his psyche. The envelope from Mary disappears and both Pyramid Heads commit suicide. James heads to the hotel's rooftop, and depending on choices made by the player throughout the game, he encounters either a manifestation of Mary or Maria disguised as her.
Silent Hill 2 features six endings; Konami has kept their canonicity ambiguous. In "Leave", James has one last meeting with Mary, reads her letter, and leaves the town with Laura. "In Water" sees James commit suicide by driving into Lake Toluca with Mary's body in the car. The "Maria" ending sees Mary as the woman on the rooftop, who has not forgiven James for killing her; after her defeat, James dismisses her as a hallucination and then leaves the town with an alive Maria, who briefly coughs, suggesting she will become sick just as Mary did, and the cycle will repeat. The other three endings are only available in replay games, including "Rebirth", in which James plans to resurrect Mary using arcane objects collected throughout the game, and two joke endings: "Dog", where James discovers that a dog has been controlling all the events of the game, and "UFO", where James is abducted by extraterrestrials with the help of the first game's protagonist, Harry Mason.
=== Born from a Wish ===
Born from a Wish is a side-story scenario in the special editions and re-releases of the game in which the player takes control of Maria shortly before she and James meet at Silent Hill. After waking up in the town with a gun and contemplating suicide, she decides to try to find someone. She eventually encounters a local mansion, where she hears the voice of its owner, Ernest Baldwin. Ernest refuses to let Maria into the room he is in and will only talk to her through its closed door. After Maria completes tasks for him, Ernest warns her about James, whom he describes as a "bad man". After Maria opens the door to Ernest's room and finds it empty, she leaves the mansion. At the conclusion of the scenario, Maria contemplates suicide once more, but ultimately resolves to find James. The side-story concludes with a voice-over of James encountering Maria in the park and her introducing herself to him, as it happens during the events of the main story.
== Themes and analysis ==
Some of the more apparent themes of the narrative are grief, guilt, and punishment. Other noticeable themes in Silent Hill 2 are mental illness, lust, love and abuse, including an exploration of how it affects people.
A prominent focus of analysis is the symbolism of the monsters present in the game, which seem to be manifested from James' guilty consciousness. One major example of this manifestation of guilt is "Pyramid Head", a tall, masculine, faceless humanoid figure, whose head is concealed by a large pyramid-shaped helmet that is made of rusted iron. Pyramid Head also wields a large blade titled the "Great Knife" that it heaves across the floor in almost all player encounters. Its design not only serves to psychologically frighten the player, as the sharp edges of the triangular head were intentionally illustrated to "suggest the possibility of pain" according to its creator Masahiro Ito, but it is also emblematic of many of the themes related to the narrative, as it represents the guilt that James experienced, the retribution he seeks for his actions, and the sexual frustration that he felt while his late wife, Mary, was terminally ill.
== Development ==
=== Influences and design ===
Development of Silent Hill 2 began in June 1999, directly after the completion of its predecessor. The game was created by Team Silent, a production group within Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo. The story was conceived by CGI director Takayoshi Sato, who based it on Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (1866), with individual members of the team collaborating on the actual scenario. The main writing was done by Hiroyuki Owaku and Sato, who provided the dialogue for the female characters. Around the time Silent Hill 2 was in production, the average budget for video game production has been estimated to be around US$7–10 million by Sato. The decision to produce a sequel to Silent Hill was partly a financial one, as it had been commercially successful, and partly a creative one, as the team had faced difficulties while working on the original game. The team was given a small window to settle on a platform. As it was unable to gather information on the then-unannounced GameCube and Xbox consoles, they began production of the game for the PlayStation 2. Producer Akihiro Imamura stated that the decision was also influenced by "a wish from the business section that we move rapidly on the PS2. You know, it is currently the market focus". Imamura read all comments about the original game and kept them in mind while working on Silent Hill 2. He estimated that a total of fifty people worked on the game: while the creative team from the first game remained, they had to bring in thirty people from Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo. Developed at the same time, the PlayStation 2 version of Silent Hill 2 and its Xbox port debuted at the March 2001 Tokyo Game Show to positive reactions.
Silent Hill 2 shared the same atmosphere of psychological horror as the first Silent Hill game. As the developers already had a rough sense of the game's environment, they focused on its plot first, in contrast to the process used with the first game. The PlayStation 2 hardware allowed the developers to create improved fog and shadow special effects. For example, as a monster approaches the player character, its shadow cast on the wall by the flashlight grows. When dealing with the game's camera angles, the team struggled with a balance between those that stayed true to the creative vision and those that did not hamper gameplay. Psychological elements, such as the gradual disappearance of Mary's letter and symbolic holes, were incorporated into the game. The team wanted Silent Hill 2's protagonist to "reflect [the] evil", against which the protagonist of the first game battles.
For the game's artistic style, the team drew on a variety of influences: the work of film directors David Cronenberg, David Fincher, David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock, along with films similar to the 1990 psychological thriller/horror film Jacob's Ladder, and painters such as Francis Bacon, Rembrandt and Andrew Wyeth. Early in the project, they studied the 1996 video game Tomb Raider's creation of 3D environments. Other influences on the game included the 1992 survival horror video game Alone in the Dark, the first Silent Hill game, and Japanese comics by Daijiro Morohoshi and Junji Ito. While working on the character designs, Sato and his team sketched human faces and various expressions. To gain a better sense of the characters' facial structures, they drew the characters' profiles from various angles, before creating wire-frame models, each consisting of six thousand polygons; they then completed the model with textures. Data for the character animation was taken through motion capture, and using Softimage, they animated the characters. Masahiro Ito designed the monsters in Silent Hill 2; "soured flesh" was the concept behind their appearance. The monsters were also to incorporate "an element of humanity". For the most part, the monsters reflect the protagonist's subconscious. For example, the monster Pyramid Head was based on the executioners of the town's fictional history and is intended to be a punisher for James. Two exceptions to this theme are the "Abstract Daddy", a reflection of Angela's subconscious and memories, and the "Creepers", which are also seen in the first game.
Silent Hill 2 also incorporates some references to real-life events. In the original scenario, the developers designed Maria and James with dual personalities: Maria's other personality was "Mary", a reference to Mary Jane Kelly, Jack the Ripper's last victim, while James' was "Joseph", a reference to one of the Jack the Ripper suspects. Eddie Dombrowski's name was taken from actor Eddie Murphy during the beginning phases of production when Eddie was originally designed with a pleasantly optimistic personality. The name of Angela Orosco was derived from Angela Bennett, the name of the protagonist in the 1995 film The Net, and Laura's from the 1970 novel No Language But a Cry by Richard D'Ambrosio. The developers satirized the perceived accessibility of firearms in the U.S. by allowing James to find a handgun in a shopping cart. There are also indications that the layout of Silent Hill was based to a certain extent on the town of San Bruno, California.