It Sounds Both Safer and Scarier Than Raccoon City

I know, Halloween was last week, but permit me to go back to another spooky game fave of mine. See, Silent Hill 2 holds a special place in the lore of games I've owned. it's the only game I've bought, traded in to get a reduced price on another game, bought again later, then traded in again later. Quite the storied history.

I'm not one of those terrified into submission by Silent Hill 2, unlike some of my friends who can't play the game with the lights off. Scarewise, it pales compared to Fatal Frame 2, probably because with SH2 at least you can shoot the enemies with guns, or beat them with a blunt instrument. There's a solidity to them, that makes it less terrifying than ghosts you fend off with a camera. Plus, I find it kind of hard to take the recurring foe, Pyramid Head, seriously (he's in the picture in the screen shot there, with the spear). He's so slow and shambling, and frankly, kind of ridiculous looking. But that's me looking at it from the outside.

From within, where the main character James is, it's probably so odd as to be terrifying. And the solidity of the enemies, that you can fight them off, probably only makes it seem more grounded in reality, less easily dismissed as a bad dream or hallucination. And it's that aspect that makes Silent Hill 2 interesting to me. James came here in response to a letter from his (dead) wife, only to step into a city almost void of humans (except a handful of weirdos) and filled with horrifying monsters. he meets a woman that looks like his dead wife, but doesn't seem to act much like her. Or maybe she does.

James goes into a hospital chasing a little girl who seems to know his wife, only to eventually fall unconscious. When he wakes up, everything is different. The hospital isn't the same as it was. it's dirtier, bloodier, the rooms are in different places. the town is dark, and in certain places, there are now ominous messages addressed to James, that weren't there before. He starts having to leap down pits where he can't see the bottom, and everything keeps getting dirtier, and as for the ending, well that depends on how you play it. Things can end well for James, or poorly.

I have no idea what it's all supposed to mean. It seems as though Silent Hill confronts each of the people there with their deepest horrors, and it's up to that person to make it through somehow. But that doesn't explain what happened to the town. It was a real town once, that's why James and Mary went there, but now it's this, and I don't really understand it. It is fascinating, though.