For the first two major "dungeons" of Silent Hill 2, we're given a sense that the town itself is where we're going to spend this game. While the journey into the Otherworld version of Blue Creek Apartments is, well, otherworldly, and when we do a second trip through the hospital, only this time in the rusty netherworld, they still seem to kind of occupy the same physical space.
As readers of this blog are surely aware, I'm a big fan of D&D. Dungeons & Dragons has, as part of its "meta-setting," a multiverse of different planes. While most settings are on the "Prime Material Plane," and are essentially just planets in a rough analogue of how we understand the world (with several asterisks,) there are also several other planes.
Among the relatively recent additions to the cosmos, debuting in 2009 with 4th Edition, were the Feywild and the Shadowfell. Both are about as close as you can get to the Prime Material Plane without being part of it, and function as mirror-worlds. For example, you might have the bustling city of Neverwinter on the Prime Material Plane, but in the Shadowfell, it's the dark and undead-filled city of Evernight.
That's largely how the first part of Silent Hill 2 works - when we step across the gap into Blue Creek Apartments, we also step into this shadowy otherworld. It's more striking, though, when we go through the hospital a second time, seeing its dark reflection, and then upon exiting, spend a fair amount of time making our way back through streets we'd already been to in the real world (though I suspect the "real" world is itself some other alternate dimension).
Things take a turn, though, after the descent into the Silent Hill Historical Society, which takes us down into the prison.
While I assume that the prison is supposed to have been real at some point, it's not clear where, spatially, it's related to the rest of the town. If anything, we seem to be below the lake. We dive down into multiple deep dark holes, making it feel (in a move I'm sure is intentional) that we're going deeper and deeper into hell. (I do wonder if the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice was one of the inspirations for this story: when Eurydice dies, her husband Orpheus descends into the underworld and bargains with Hades to let her come back to the land of the living. Hades agrees, only as long as Orpheus never looks at her until they emerge. Tragically, Orpheus has a moment of doubt at the end of their journey, fearing that Hades has used illusions of his lover's voice to make a fool of him, only for him to glimpse her and thus condemn her to remain in the land of the dead).
Interestingly, we don't really get a boss to the prison like we had at the end of the apartment buildings or halfway through the hospital. But we do get a boss after a kind of mini-dungeon that follows. Here, I suspect we're kind of going through the personal torment of Angela. Her own trauma seems to be on full display here: while the game isn't explicit about what happened to her, the lurching "Abstract Daddy" boss that we have to fight several times while navigating a maze of hallways and rooms that look like a residential home surely points to, well, among the most monstrous things you can imagine a father doing to his daughter. Angela's reaction to James, assuming that his patience and attempts to calm her are merely a ploy to sexually assault her, make it pretty clear what happened to her.
Abstract Daddy has a truly disturbing design: initially I thought that it was like a painting come to life, but I think instead what it is is a vaguely humanoid form that is reaching through a door - like an abusive father breaking into a locked bedroom door. We fight it off a few times before we finally have our last confrontation with it, where the facade of the domestic house-labyrinth we've been running around collapses away to show walls of flesh, pulsing with a heartbeat. It's a potent metaphor for domestic abuse: periodically we fight it off and get it to go away, but it's waiting there - we're still stuck inside its lair.
While it's probably dead by the time she does, Angela gets a cathartic moment where she smashes it on the head with a TV set. Truly, of the people we've met here in Silent Hill, she's the one I find most sympathetic, though I really doubt we're getting any real happy endings for any of these people.
The next section is the one that I feel the most mixed on: while the previous area was already called "The Labyrinth," this label extends to the area we visit next. Here, the specificity of the environmental design gets a bit... weird.
Spoilers, I guess:
First off, we go down some stairs and find a cell in which Maria is sitting, seemingly alive and well. She's rather blasé about everything, and claims that Pyramid Head never got to her. She's truly fucking up James' mind, and I get the sense that he's losing track of whether or not she's actually Mary, his wife.
We actually just draw our dungeon as we go, so in this "dungeon" we don't really get a sense of what rooms there are to explore. The central thing, though, is that we can use this very esoteric-looking stone to rotate a cubic structure with stairs. These seemingly always lead to the same intersection of green, brown, and red doors, but only one is open to us.
The areas we're in are... kind of generic? Halls and tunnels, furniture we probably saw in the apartment buildings. There are areas with grated floors and those hanging monsters, which were probably the biggest problem I had (should have just walked quietly and let them pass).
However, the big scare moment is when you come around a corner and Pyramid Head shows up, no cutscene, no warning. You need to run by him (a seemingly pointless U-shaped tunnel that came off the main one had made me suspicious that it was there to help us open up distance from an implacable foe, so I was honestly saying "I bet Pyramid Head is about to show up" about a minute before he did.
In another notable area, we go through a gauntlet of apartments where we first encounter a bunch of seemingly dead monsters, only for them to all rouse simultaneously - I think this is just a kind of forced combat section.
Finally, Pyramid Head begins chasing us again, but the weird arm-portal/tunnel thing that had blocked our way at the start of the dungeon recedes from him. Actually, this is a different portal, which allows us to go back out through the cell in which we had found Maria. Only she seems to be dead again. James is deeply affected, but I'm more of the "what the fuck is she?" persuasion.
Anyway, we find that the cube-face that we used to rotate the path to the different areas here has been smashed, and Pyramid Head has left his sword there. We can drag it (very awkwardly) to the weird portal to proceed.
And then we find Eddie again. Eddie's homicidal tendencies have become too difficult to ignore, and the part of the game I'm now somewhat stuck on is when he becomes a full-fledged boss fight.
Turns out, a dude with a gun is pretty dangerous. He hits very hard, luring us into a frigid meat-freezer with dozens of hanging sides of what I would love to just be beef, but who the hell knows? Taking advantage of the low visibility, he fires at us and then runs, and later stalks in close to attack us in melee. The biggest issue is that he takes a hell of a beating - there are three phases. The second phase, the visibility gets worse as he pumps freezing mist into the room, and then the third phase, the meat hooks are motorized and spin around. Whatever conservation I had managed in the dungeon leading up to this is drained significantly thanks to the fact that his bullets will do like half your health in a single shot. Actually, I just hope there are three phases, because it there's a fourth, it's going to take ages for me to take him down.
It's honestly a little crazy that he can take so many shotgun blasts to the chest - in theory, he's just a normal human. He is, also, I'd guess, at this point, some kind of serial killer. He has some sort of extreme inferiority complex, and convinces himself that the people around him are all out to get him, or at least hate him.
Oh, of note: before this fight, we find a weird indoor graveyard. There are graves for Angela, Eddie, James, and a name I believe is the player character from the first Silent Hill game. Notably, there's no grave (at least not one with a name) for Maria or for Laura.
I do wonder how far into the game I am at this point. I think I'm around the fourteen-hour mark, which is not huge for some genres of game, but I think particularly given this is a remake of a PS2 game, I wonder if we're getting to that point. Likewise, it feels like we're escalating the story - the reveal of somehow-alive Maria, Eddie's violent turn, even our kind of resolution with Angela.
(Just realized something: we first encounter Eddie near a body smashed into a fridge - at this point I assume Eddie killed him. When we find him in the prison cafeteria at the start of that dungeon, the body at the table is covered in frost, with a frost-covered ventilation duct above him. Now we're fighting him in a big meat locker. Just noticing that frigid cold is a motif with him.)
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