Having missed out on 2001’s original game, I pulled up to the foggy outskirts of the town of Silent Hill practically pipping my car horn with glee. Here, finally, was my chance to experience a lauded horror classic I was too young for at the time. As protagonist James Sunderland, I was all ready to search this spooky 90s American Anywheresville of a town for signs of my presumed-dead wife. James has received a letter, you see, from said presumed-dead wife, telling him to meet her in Silent Hill – and hope springs eternal.
Before even reaching the town, James comes across a woman in a graveyard. Success! Wife achieved! But alas, no: this is Angela, also called to Silent Hill to look for a missing person or some form of closure, and to needlessly slam doors in our protagonist’s face to extend the game’s duration.
This is where, rather than under my skin, Silent Hill 2 starts to get on my wick. A small, sad troupe of bit-players wander dazedly in and out of James’s journey through the town, but never say or do anything helpful or interesting because they are defined only by the numinous, euphemistically referenced “bad thing” for which they are here to atone. I don’t have time to care about Angela or her missing mum. It’s already taking all my combined energies just to care about James and his mono-dimensional possible-ghost wife.
It is a fatal problem, in a game as long and slogging as this one, that a bunch of one-dimensional characters do not add up to a three-dimensional story. James mumbles sadly. He explores the town sadly. He bludgeons a monster that looks like a trawlerman’s catch got rolled together in glue – and for just a moment you can tell he’s stopped being sad, because of all the shouting and the grunting. But then it’s back to sadly plodding about the town, bumping up against a Wickes showroom’s-worth of locked doors.
The town is really foggy – the kind of fog you could lose your wife in even if she weren’t dead – and clues, keys and puzzle pieces are to be found in the most unlikely of places. It may not be obvious to you why James is taking time out of the manhunt to repair a jukebox in the town bar using two pieces of a snapped LP, some glue and a button he found rummaging shoulder-deep in a scary hole at the top of an apartment building, but this game first came out in 2001. That’s just how people fixed things before YouTube.
The sexualised monstrosities roaming the streets, meanwhile, suggest James is a man living life with Incognito Browsing set to default. The not-quite-zombies start out as giggling acid-vomiting sacks of giblets in thongs and platform heels, and then evolve putridly through different archetypes of female sexiness until pairs of thighs in stockings are chasing James across the ceiling and hooting like howler monkeys.
Silent Hill 2 isn’t a graphically pretty game – to the developers’ credit, it now looks 10 years old, rather than 20 – but the monsters get special mention for being as stuck in the past as James is. The models look crude and jagged when they’re not hidden in fog or darkness, and defeating them is almost always a case of bravely running away until they get stuck on the scenery, or just sort of forget about you and wander back to where they first appeared. When you’re the one chasing after the monsters, something’s definitely gone wrong.
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Silent Hill 2 doesn’t feel refreshed. It feels like what it is: a game from the early 2000s, with the monsters and the puzzles to match. Resident Evil still makes sense in glorious remaster-o vision, but I imagine this slow-paced psychological horror would have felt more unsettling in PS2-era blunt polygons. What happens in Silent Hill is, I suspect, supposed to play out with a twisted nightmare dream logic – but with new voice acting and buffed-up visuals, it loses some of the pervasive weirdness.
For players of the original, this should get a steady nostalgia drip going. But coming to this series fresh makes for an overlong, dated and tedious experience.