The Darkness That Lurks In Our Mind

Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams (Xbox)

Playing Silent Hill 2 does something to me that I've never been able to fully explain. It's the sort of experience that defies me to put it into words without being reductionist or overlooking something. To put it as best I can, Silent Hill 2 terrifies, fascinates, confuses, and engages me in a way that even the rest of the games in the same series don't.

If I were to compile a list of games that proved videogames were art, Silent Hill 2 would be on my list. The atmosphere of the game--the environments, the sound design, the music--is probably the single most memorable and affecting in recent memory, and is every bit as good as the material that influenced it. That is to say, David Lynch movies (particularly Blue Velvet), David Cronenberg movies, J-Horror, Jacob's Ladder, and many psychological philosophies and texts. Wandering through the first 20 minutes of the game, you are making your way into the town itself--fog and snow obstruct your vision, but you keep thinking you see things in the distance or in the very fog itself. You hear odd noises that never repeat or make another appearance. You meet a woman in a cemetery who seems far more afraid of you than the bizarre world around her. And from there, the game just gets more frightening, mind bending, and surreal as it goes.

Jaywalking is punished with...unique methods in Silent Hill

It would ruin the plot to discuss almost anything, but suffice it to say that Silent Hill 2 has one of the most complex, multi-layered, and ultimately ambiguous stories in any game I've played and yet still feels satisfying even if all your questions about James, his wife Mary, the character Maria, and the town/monsters themselves are not fully explained. This is the sort of videogame you will be thinking about as you play it, between sessions of playing it, and after you're done playing it. The sights and sounds--oh, the sounds!!--will stay with you, from the first appearance of Pyramid Head that mirrors a scene from Blue Velvet to the subtle and terrifying ambient noise to the brilliant and always appropriate music by Akira Yamaoka to the various endings you can get which each offer a unique ending to the story.

Employees shouldn't bother to wash their hands

The problem I have with the game is this: it's not that much fun to play. This may sound odd coming from someone who absolutely adores it, but hear me out. The experience, in sum total, of Silent Hill 2 is one of the greatest videogames have to offer. But that said, it's not that much fun to play. The combat isn't the focus of the game, but it does make it "not fun." It's clunky and awkward, and just doesn't feel right. Also, depending on the difficulty you play on, it can feel baby easy or pointlessly hard--the only difference between the two extremes seems to be an increase in the number of enemies, how much damage they take before they die, and how much ammo/health restoring items you get. All of this is, ultimately, poor game design because there are ways to make a game more or less challenging beyond "you can die more easily because enemies take more hits and you have less firepower." However--and this is a big however--it doesn't ruin the game. That's because you don't, and shouldn't, play Silent Hill games to have fun. It's the equivalent of an art film or a horror film versus a summer action flick. Criticizing Silent Hill games for bad combat kind of misses the point, really, since it's like criticizing, I don't know, Taxi Driver for having poor taxi driving scenes.

No, this little girl isn't supposed to be scary, and yet...

There are other minor quibbles one could make about Silent Hill 2 with more than half a decade behind it, such as the uncanny-valley-creepy looking cutscene character models, but for the period it came out, the game looked amazing. Anyway, this also misses the point, because it has looks where it counts--art design and aesthetics. Silent Hill games have a very unique look and feel all their own that transcends the console generation each is from. By today's standards, the "graphics" aren't impressive, but the way the town and monsters look and behave is still genius. You really do become engrossed in the game to the point where you don't sit there thinking critically about everything. I have always hated the idea that a videogame is just the sum of its parts, and if certain things are off or bad--it's too short, too difficult, has technical problems, and so on--then it is automatically a lesser game for it. Silent Hill 2 has its flaws, but they're easy to overlook and forget about when one sits down to play.

"There was a hole here. It's gone now."

Some videogames you play for fun or as entertaining escapism--the Marios and Halos and World of Warcrafts of the world. But some games really do try something new and succeed, and show you things, make you feel things, make you think things, just like any other piece of art can, like an album, a book, a movie, or a painting. Judging such games by the "is it fun or not, and why" standard of criticism misses the whole point entirely. Silent Hill 2 is a game you'll return to over time, discussing it with friends, seeing new angles on it each playthrough.

Nurses: not always hot