Spoilers are coming for this 24-year-old game, so, uh, be wary (I'll put a cut before we get to it).
I was thinking about the survival horror genre. I'd thought that Alan Wake II was my first foray into it (the first game is horror-themed, but really ultimately more of an action game, most notably in that you get to heal up to full whenever you find a light and you don't need to worry about ammo and batteries between chapters). But I suppose Bioshock might actually have been my first - you spend a lot of that game scrounging for ammo, eve, and money to use at vending machines.
The presence of a melee weapon in Silent Hill 2, first our "board with nails" and then our heavier big pipe (which I think does hit harder) is kind of a necessity, because I think the game mostly wants us to fight the monsters.
While the first "major level" of the game takes place in two separate apartment buildings, one in the rusty Otherworld while the other is in what passes for the real world (I may have gotten something spoiled for me, but I think it's possible that the "fog world" is actually no more our own mundane reality than the "world of rust" as I'm coming to think of it,) the second major level, the hospital, has us actually just go through the same building again, though this time there are bottomless chasms and fully different routes we have to take through it.
The rusty hospital is the first time in the game where I've truly felt out of resources. There was a good stretch there where I had literally no ammo and no healing items, and I was low enough on health that I had the little medical cross in the corner of the screen. It was rough. I only died I think once during that state, but I think it wasn't until I'd fully completed the area and gotten out that I found some healing items (ammo was a bit more abundant once I got into the basement).
The rusty version of the hospital is built around a complex puzzle box, which is truthfully three separate puzzles to find combinations and a key for its three locks. The imagery in these puzzles is unnerving: we have to simulate a lobotomy on a mannequin (including breaking one of its arms to get access to its eye) and deploy electric chocks on an upright gurney.
It's all well and good, though I think this was the one area where I started to feel like the game was playing for time slightly - I think it was very clever to have us clear Woodside Apartments first in the real world and then go to a different apartment building, Blue Creek, in the rust world, but here go through all the same rooms, so that feeling of having opened up, explored, and fully understood a place just feels kind of ripped away from you, like you have to do that level all over again, but with a more monochromatic color palette.
The Nurse enemies are a new enemy type. I actually managed to take down the first two I saw with peak efficiency - three handgun rounds to the head will put them down, though you need to be precise in your aim. I don't know if this happens with any method against them, but they always seem to rise up after falling the first time - something that hasn't been much of an issue for me because I've always half-RP'd James as beating the crap out of any monster he's killed in a panic and rage anyway, so this need to "double tap" them was already what I was doing anyway.
The nurses are scary, and I particularly like the Jacob's Ladder-style ultra-fast-head-twitch they sometimes start doing mid-fight (which also, conveniently, gives you some time to get in a cheap shot or open up some distance. In terms of actual monster design, though, I suppose I lament that they're a little more human than the body-bag foes or the mannequins. (Evidently the body-bag foes are called Lying Figures - which is a fun play on words if intentional.) These guys will do multi-strike attacks on you, so it's a little riskier to take them on in melee. A shotgun blast will take them down (minus the double-tap) but of course, James' aim is pretty wavering, and especially as they close in on you, you risk panic-firing without proper aim. At my best, I can take them down in three shots if I have time to line up my shots and enough distance that I can get the three off before they reach me, but it's tricky.
The radio, which I think I've commented on before, is kind of brilliant (and on a PS5, it plays through your controller, making it physically the closest source of sound in the game). It will let you know when monsters are near - except for Mannequins that are hiding. Sometimes, you'll shine your flashlight into a room and actually glimpse one, perfectly still and waiting to jump out at you. Attacking it will alert it, but you can get a free shot off if you're lucky. Generally, unless I'm being swarmed by lots of enemies, I will melee these down because you can start to learn their attack patterns and kind of Dark Souls them, dodging as they strike and punishing them.
Light is interesting: you can turn off your flashlight, but I don't know if there's any good reason to do so. In Alan Wake II, extinguishing your flashlight can be a way to sneak past monsters, and sometimes is the best option to avoid the drain on resources. Indeed, I tried going dark in the rust hospital only to find that I was unable to see anything in my environment. And in better-lit areas, I didn't seem to draw any less attention from monsters. So, for now, light stays on.
Ok, let's get more spoilery: (Also, spoilers for the movie Jacob's Ladder)
Trying to find Laura in the hospital, we eventually face off against a monster called Flesh Lip - this thing is like a bag of flesh in a metal cage with a thick-lipped mouth coming out of the bottom. It stomps around the ceiling of the room that Laura locks us into, and bursts through the panels of the ceiling to swing and swipe at us. As we do damage to it (one side of the cage has a metal panel, so like Pyramid Head, we need to be sure we're striking it in the correct place) the frame of that cage bends outward to become sharp, swinging blades.
As Flesh Lip comes at us, however, there's one benefit, which is that the panels in the ceiling fall away and we can get a better sense of where it is. Eventually, though, it falls fully from the ceiling and we have to face it as it skitters around on its rusty metal legs.
This is still in the "real world" hospital," but our good buddy Pyramid Head knocks us down a shaft and into the Otherworld hospital. So, interestingly, our boss fight is kind of halfway through this level.
Interestingly, Maria is here in the Rust hospital as well, and so, it seems, is Laura, so I don't quite know if we've "gone" somewhere else or if the Otherworld is simply overtaking this region (in our previous experience, we never see what most of Blue Creek Apartments looks like in the real/fog world).
As mentioned above, we have numerous puzzles to solve and lots of scary monsters to fight. The big mystery box in the center of the room where we first arrive (which in the real world is a kind of forgettable upstairs lobby) turns out to be empty, but opening it reveals a three-dimensionally-carved door, and our last challenge is to descend into the basement and get two rings to put on her fingers.
Maria comes with, and she feels some trepidation in going through the door.
Turns out she's right to feel that way: when we go through the door, into a bizarre twisting passage that I'd guess doesn't fit geometrically with the rest of the hospital, Pyramid Head begins to chase us. While in gameplay, she's ahead of us the whole time we run, we get to a cutscene where James enters an elevator and tries to hold a door open for her to get through. But they struggle to push it wide enough for her to pass through, and in the agonizing seconds that they work on this, the efforts are ended with a sickening, slick thud, as pyramid head stabs Maria through the abdomen. Her face goes neutral, blood spattered, and the doors close, sending James back up to the first floor.
I'll note that Maria sends a ton of sketchy vibes, but largely in the way that the only people we have met do as well: Eddie's dead-eyed apathy in the movie theater, Laura's cruel games, Angela's violent unpredictability, and Maria's weird femme fatale vibes have all made me question why it is that we're seeing these particular people here. I know from pop culture osmosis that James is consumed with guilt over what he did to his wife (I know that he killed her, though I don't know whether this was more like euthanizing her to spare her the pain of her disease or if it was that he couldn't take the burden of taking care of her. Both are murder without explicit consent, of course, but the former is at least a sympathetic motivation, the latter being something I suspect is the case given the degree to which James seems almost to accept that he deserves all of this.)
Maria's death, though, closes off (at least for now - again, I know that she might reappear later in the game) what we might learn about her actual nature.
I also still don't really know what my read on Pyramid Head is - he's the most iconically scary monster in the game, but he seems to vacillate between being a genuine, violent threat to us (such as in the boss fight in the apartment building) and oddly helping us move forward (like when he throws us down through an elevator shaft).
I mentioned Jacob's Ladder earlier, and given that it's really in the canon of psychological horror movies, I would not in the least be shocked in the makers of this game had watched that movie as research. In it, Jacob (played by Tim Robbins) is a Vietnam veteran who awakens after a traumatic experience during the war years later. He and members of his platoon are tormented by disturbing, demonic images and seemingly hunted down.
However, the film's grand reveal is that the seemingly demonic entities are actually just trying to help Jacob let go - that he's actually on the threshold of death, and that the whole post-war experience is really just a kind of purgatory, trying to coax him to let go of his mortal life and move on. The movie ends about as happily as it could, with Jacob led into the light by the spirit of his late son, who died years earlier.
I do really, really wonder if Pyramid Head might actually be playing this kind of psychopomp role for James. The movie quotes a 14th century Christian mystic named Meister Eckhart, who claims that the fires of hell are only that which burns away worldly attachments, and that a soul might view benevolent angels as horrific devils because they are trying to remove those parts of a person they're not willing to let go of.
Consider, for example, that Maria has been giving me all these sketchy vibes. She looks like (I think) James' wife Mary, and while a straightforward reading of her clinginess to James makes sense given they're in a horrifying situation, there's also this sense that she might be kind of pulling him back, keeping him from completing his journey. If Maria is a real person, then yeah, Pyramid Head stabbing her is, you know, bad. But if she's actually just a far more cleverly disguised monster, then might ridding James of her actually be for the best?
Granted, I don't know how to explain the boss fight back at the apartment building. So perhaps I'm wrong. Maybe Pyramid Head represents James' unconscious misogyny, or some other deep, ugly side of him. While I think you could really argue over how gendered the Lying Figures or really any of the monsters are, I believe that, canonically, Pyramid Head is the only male monster in the game, and the rest are female, which sure is an interesting choice. I don't know if that trend continues in future games (or the previous one,) though I feel like if that's the case, having a game like this with a trans lead writer and trans player character could be really potent.
Anyway, of note as well is that when we leave the hospital, we don't return to the real/fog world. Chasing Laura down the streets, we have a starless midnight sky above and rust all over the place. While the open streets give us a little space to breathe, we're still under siege from monsters (I did manage to die once in this section, because I ended the hospital section basically running on empty).
This is as far as I've gotten as of this writing.
But yeah, it's real bad. I know I'm being kind of the guy who has only ever watched Marvel movies and going "oh, this is a bit like Captain America" but my natural point of comparison here is Alan Wake II. That game breaks up the horror a fair amount: you have safe areas to go to, like downtown Bright Falls (at least on Saga's side of things). Tonally, the game also goes in very different directions: Alan Wake II has a ton of humor to it.
Silent Hill 2 is pretty relentlessly bleak. I don't fault it for that: its consistency in tone will give you the game's primary vibes throughout. I do think that this forces me to take periodic breaks from the game - I get spookied-out. That said, there's a pretty great gameplay loop - you get through one of the game's major puzzles, and the reward for that is to peak behind the door you just unlocked, which leads to your next puzzle. There's also something kind of satisfying about slowly annotating your entire map (I love that James actually has an animation when he writes something on the map). I wonder if the 2001 original version of the game had this feature, or if you really had to have a big notebook while playing.
I don't think enemies respawn, except at particular scripted moments, so another thing that feels really satisfying is when you render parts of your environment safe to traverse. Survival horror gets very efficient use of its maps (which is part of why doing the hospital twice felt a little cheap) because the first time you enter a room, you need to sweep it like a one-person SWAT team, searching for both monsters and resources. Thus, just being able to run through a series of rooms you've already cleared without worrying is a liberating feeling.
I know that Bioshock had an adjusted resource rate: the worse you were doing, the more generous it was with items. I believe that was original to that game, and so I don't know if this game (it is a remake, of course) has an equivalent system, or if you really, truly need to be careful because the game will never go easy on you. I certainly felt screwed when I was one hit away from dying with zero ammo or healing items and having to get by a room with, like, a nurse, lying figure, and mannequin all together. But I guess I made it. This is a game where every hit can be dodged, which is great and arguably necessary, but it means that you're less likely to forgive yourself when you miss a shot or take a mannequin's strike to the face.
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