Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams

"Attention Jaded Silent Hill Fans..."

A Masochistic Need

Silent Hill 2 is the reason I bought my XBox. My initial intention was to wait out this generation of consoles and catch up with everybody else after the obligatory price drops had taken place. But when October 31st rolled around, and with it my annual trip through the original Silent Hill, the idea that I needed to acquire the second installment to the series anchored itself in my mind. It only took me a week to decide that I had to get my hands on Silent Hill 2. As for the console, the obvious choice for me was Xbox. Was Silent Hill worth the 400+ dollars I spent to play it? Well, not really (though in the end, I definitely don’t regret joining the next generation console scene at all). The very night I got my console and freshly shrink-wrapped copy of Silent Hill 2, I tin-foiled my windows and prayed for fear. Real fear was something new in video games that I had experienced for the first time with the original Silent Hill. Ultimately, I was too focused in my search for this commodity, and I never felt like I got my fix. Aided by hindsight, I see that my expectations for Silent Hill 2 were unrealistic, and that that’s just what prevented me from enjoying it as much as I should have. Quite simply put, the original Silent Hill jaded me.

This town is what you bring to it…

A critical evaluation of Silent Hill’s gameplay can take many valid turns, subjective to what you expect from it. If you judge it as a game in the same way you’d judge Super Mario 64, you’ll probably see it as severely lacking. If you consider story and atmosphere important and acceptable points on which to judge gameplay, Silent Hill 2 is a five-star gem of a game. I’d say that the most objective point of view rightly lies somewhere in the middle of these. Silent Hill 2 is not a particularly spectacular or innovative example of “Survival Horror” by way of puzzles and enemies, but the story-line, atmosphere, mood, and design are all top notch. It’s not the innards of this game that you’re meant to enjoy; it’s the final execution of the gameplay and the superficial outer layer that makes it great. Is this such a bad thing? Not really. Perhaps it lowers the replay value for some, but the scarcity of games with this effective a mood are rare enough for me to cherish Silent Hill 2 for its sense of immersion and fear factor alone.

You start Restless Dreams alone in a bathroom on the outskirts of a fog-enshrouded town called Silent Hill with James, your protagonist. Via a handy monologue, James explains just what you’re doing there. You’ve gotten a letter that appears to have been written by your dead wife, Mary. She’s beckoned you to come and visit her in Silent Hill, in “our ‘special place’ ”. James seems pretty insistent that the letter can’t really be from Mary, reassuring himself that “A dead person can’t write a letter.” He’s simply come because he feels compelled to discover who or what’s behind this mystery.

As soon as you start to make your way into the town via a dirt path through the woods, you get the feeling that something’s not quite right. Did you just hear something rustle, or was it your imagination? From the outset, Silent Hill 2 manages to make even the hardest of us paranoid, and it continues to increasingly throughout the game. This is the games selling point. Technically, you’re just finding keys and weapons, opening doors and shooting things, and performing simple arithmetical calculations and logical deductive exercises to solve equally simple puzzles. The enemies won’t exactly test your skills either, but that’s not the point. There’s something to make you uneasy every step of the way.

GAMEPLAY: 9
_____________

Who Turned Out the Lights?

While not as flawlessly pulled off as those of some other games on the system, this game's graphics are definitely not bad. Silent Hill 2 has a moody look that pushes the fear factor along from the get-go. Emphasizing browns and reds give the nervous hint that you’re traipsing about someplace from the second half of a Sunday school lesson. The cut-scenes are a treat, but nothing to write home about. The characters look marvelously real, and the monsters all move creepily enough, though there’s something lacking in the variety of designs.

From a technical standpoint, the game looks nice in spite of a few glitches that, while marginally noticeable, aren’t really worth mentioning. Most of the environments are extremely realistic, while a few aspects, such as the trees and fog, aren’t quite up to Xbox standards. But on the whole, most will be satisfied and immersed. James’ pocket light deserves special mention, as well as the jaw-dropping light/shadow effect it produces. Traversing the pitch-black corridors with it on, a circle of light shines in front of you, illuminating whatever it touches and casting realistic shadows at the appropriate angle. And if you choose to try to sneak around without the light, you can see your “vision” slowly adjust and the room start to look brighter. I’d say that attention to detail is worthy of mention.

It looks like Konami’s artists have gotten “scary” down to a science.

VISUALS: 9
__________

The Second Most Effective Sounds Ever

Regardless of its size, a television set is not the ideal medium for immersion. In the world of video games, a combination of several design factors help draw you into the cathode universe more than and more efficiently than movies or other television-based media. The most apparent of these are point of view and graphic realism. But one of the often-overlooked pieces of this equation is the sound. As I stated in my review of the original Silent Hill, Akira Yamaoka has the honor (in my book) of having created the most effective video game music in history. The music and other sounds in that game were just as important as the visuals when it came to scaring the crap out of you. The audio of Silent Hill 2 comes very close to living up to or even surpassing its predecessor in this field. In a way, the statement regarding ‘jadedness’ above is applicable again here – the fans are trying too hard to be scared, and the designers are likewise probably trying too hard to be scary, making the overall experience less appreciated. But examined overall and objectively, the audio in Silent Hill 2 returns in grand form and doesn’t disappoint.

The “real” music in Silent Hill 2 is nice and soothing most of the time, with the exceptions of the somewhat harder rock in the opening and ending scenes that caters more to the ears of modern Japanese Pop (though not in a bad way). There are relatively few of these tunes, and most of them are comprised of piano music in saddening keys with soft percussion accompaniments. Then there is the bulk of the game’s soundtrack, the “non-music” music. By way of volume (of course this means volume of number, not decibels, and don’t bother pointing out that it should be obvious – I know it should be…), these tracks vastly overshadow the formerly mentioned music (a ratio of about ten to one, actually), and this is precisely the prescription that another Silent Hill game called for (Dr. Kaufman would be proud). Most of these “songs” are non-Euro-American successions of seemingly random notes, ambient sounds, and innovative percussive beats. For example, to give the feeling of impending doom hot on your ass, the game pumps out three measures that sound like demons beating on tin trash cans, followed by one measure of a person (or maybe an artificial respirator) exhaling. Sometimes this all sounds totally random and pointless, but one can’t deny its effectiveness, and upon closer examination (buy the soundtrack for the most comprehensive examination – and you might could even open a successful haunted house with it) they show a method behind their madness. While I still proclaim the “Nurse Attack” from Silent Hill 1 the king of effective video game music in non-exclusive perpetuity, Silent Hill 2’s music deserves the same level of acclaim.

While the sound effects themselves aren’t quite as exceptional as the music in Silent Hill 2, they do their job well. Sometimes deliberately overdone in order to drive you crazy (like with the constantly emitted sounds from the enemies), and sometimes slow and ominous (can anything match the fifty pound rusty sword dragging and scraping on the ground?), the sounds will have you questioning your real-world surroundings if you’re not careful. The designers didn’t consider it above themselves to do the “something crashing through a window out of nowhere ala Resident Evil” trick, but they were very selective about it. They also included some indiscernible sounds whose origins are mysterious, from enemies lurking in dark, unreachable areas to small clicks and whispers that you really might consider to possibly be coming from your own head at some points. Sound fun? I recommend headphones for the maximum experience. And as always, take your blood pressure medication and maybe a half-dose of aspirin before play, kids.

SOUND/MUSIC: 9
________________

I Missed You, My Beloved D-pad.

Not so much has changed in the control department since Resident Evil. Sure, there have been complaints, but it hasn’t really seemed to keep people from playing the games. You still press up to walk in the direction your character is facing, and you still hold down a button to ready your weapon and another subsequently to shoot. Silent Hill2 can be commended for trying to give us a “3D Control” option, which basically has James darting about like Mario, but I feel sure that most will agree with my contention that the original style is best suited for this type of game. What I really like is the addition of a strafing feature. It’s not that this game has enemies that particularly require it; I simply enjoy having it when I need it. Strafing makes the controls feel much less confining.

The layout on Microsoft’s controversial controller takes a bit of getting used to, but you are given the option to customize your layout fully and in any way you want, so there’s not much point complaining about the arrangement of the buttons. The only problem I had was having to press two buttons at once in order to spin around, since the position of these two buttons could well be impractical depending on your configuration. One other thing I don’t like is the pressure sensitive buttons giving two distinct attacks with melee weapons dependent on the amount of force the action button is pressed with. Nowhere in the instructions is this feature mentioned, and I had for a short period decided that the attack was being randomly determined, which was inconvenient to say the least. Even when I did happen upon the solution to my problem, I still wasn’t able to accurately get the response I wanted. Personal qualms about presser-sensing aside, I feel that it isn’t needed in this game. The point of Silent Hill 2 is immersion, and I can’t feel so immersed if I’m worrying about how much force I’m applying to a button with my hand. Just because console-specific features are there doesn’t mean you have to use them, Konami…

So, taking the good with the less-than-good, the controls are adequately manageable in Silent Hill 2, and more-than-so if they happen to be your cup of tea. The complaints that have followed the genre for the better part of a decade are still valid here, but I think we’d all better get used to this style, ‘cause it ain’t going anywhere.

CONTROL: 8
_____________

As I Ponder Whether I Should Make a Reference to that Aerosmith Song I Hate…

Let me close with a note to fans of the original Silent Hill who, for whatever reason, haven’t played this sequel.

Silent Hill 2 is like the long-awaited Christmas present you’re almost too excited to open. That’s the problem with a game whose main appeal was its originality. Silent Hill was great because it was so mind-bogglingly different than anything before it, so it only makes sense that a sequel can’t have the same effect. The problem is that you know what to expect. In order for you to enjoy this game as much as possible, you have to approach it as if there never was a Silent Hill 1.

OVERALL SCORE: 9
=================

RUNDOWN:

GAMEPLAY - 9
VISUALS - 9
AUDIO - 9
CONTROL - 8
REPLAY VALUE – 8
OVERALL – 9

[ + ]
The second scariest game I’ve ever seen
Unrivaled atmosphere
Involving storyline
[ - ]
Less than perfect controls
Not as original and exciting as its predecessor (naturally)

If you like this, try:
Resident Evil
Silent Hill (Dear god, if you haven’t by now, DO!)

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 10/05/02, Updated 11/15/02