Picture this: You pull up to an old, dilapidated roadside bathroom at the shores of a fog-drenched lake. Stepping into the abandoned place, staring into a grime-encrusted mirror at your own reflection, you wonder why exactly you'd come there to begin with. A letter from your wife, dated post-mortem, asks that you come and visit her at your "special place", beside the lake in the quiet resort town of Silent Hill.
From the very beginning, and seeing protagonist James Sunderland question his own sanity upon entering the town, you can feel a subtle and gnawing unease about you. Not a single thing about the town you are stepping into feels right, and you get the sense that you are the only person left in the world. All you can do is trudge forward through the fog, not able to see more than ten feet in front of you....and then you seize up, hearing a noise that can't be real; a screech-click-scratch noise. Something the size of a man, lying on the cold concrete in the posture of a roach, scurries away from out of the corner of your eye. All you can find to defend yourself is a plank of wood, rusty nails jutting from one end of it.
Despite knowing you aren't crazy, and being surrounded by an unnamable *something*, you push forward into the unknown, all to find a woman you know is already dead.
This is Silent Hill 2, the second in a line of survival horror games by Japanese developer Konami.
The game itself follows a very typical survival horror mold set forth by games like Resident Evil, where a character must make it through a series of horrifying events, equipped with little more than their wits and a gun with limited ammo. The interesting thing about this, and where this series of games tends to veer away from the more visceral nature of Resident Evil, is that the entirety of Silent Hill 2 is geared toward the psychological.
Being psychological in nature, the game is somehow able to present to you a world where ammo is not a problem, where keeping health drinks and medical kits is no big deal...and yet you are still afraid. You could take a bullet and put it squarely in the heads of every single creature that comes after you, and yet the fear doesn't die along with them.
This is where the game crosses that indefinable line between entertainment and art, at least in my eyes; every single facet of this game has been built to make you feel uncomfortable. The graphics have a kind of "film grain" effect that gives the impression of an old movie. The soundtrack is filled to the brim with either strategically-placed silence, or desolate, lonesome tunes that make the world feel gray and lifeless. Some rooms are filled with nothing but the sound of crying, others have no sound at all. The architecture is built in a manner meant to confuse, to disillusion and give the suspicion that the further down the rabbit hole you go, the more twisted it all becomes. The storyline is fueled by metaphor; the kind that does not become apparent until, with a curious eye, you begin to connect the dots and find out why things are the way they are.
This existence of metaphor did not actually hit me the first time through the game, but only after repeated viewings and frequent trips to Silent Hill fan websites that have spent more time than is probably healthy to pick apart the meaning of every little thing that happens through the story. Everything, from the monsters, to the environments, to the characters encountered during the journey, have some significant and important metaphorical underpinning.
A great example, and one that is considered the defining element of this game, is that of the character "Pyramid Head". We, as gamers and fans of Silent Hill, simply do not know what else to call this...creature.
This is the cutscene first depicting Pyramid Head. James is exploring an old, run-down and empty apartment building with little more than a pistol and a flashlight when he comes across the scene depicted in this video. At this point in the game, the only thing the player can tell about this creature is that it is something resembling a man, dressed in a butcher's outfit, and wearing a large, metal pyramid-shaped structure over its head.
Only later in the game do you find out, through looking at hidden bits of artwork depicting Silent Hill's tormented past, that Pyramid Head is representative of Silent Hill's past as a civil war prison camp. Traditionally throughout history, executioners, including those during the American civil war, wore triangular hoods while condemning those they put to death. Pyramid Head is thus the embodiment of punishment and execution, and he stalks the main character, James, for an extremely good reason...to say more would be spoiling!
This is only one piece of the metaphorical smorgasbord that is Silent Hill 2. It is only one little part of what makes the entire game a beautifully tragic nightmare.
The fact that it is a video game, as opposed to a movie such as Jacob's Ladder (Which the Silent Hill series has taken heavy inspiration from), means that you experience every moment of James's torment. You are there when he is attacked, you are there when he is at his weakest, and you feel every bit of the pain he does as you both discover, at the same time, why the entire city of Silent Hill has decided to draw James in and punish him.
If the entire point of art is to evoke feeling from an object that by itself cannot feel, then I am proud to be able to personally proclaim Silent Hill 2 as a work of art.
PS: Listen to some of the game's music! An enormous part of what makes Silent Hill 2 so genuinely moving is the work of the game's sound director, Akira Yamaoka. Here is a sample of his music...the song, The Day of Night.
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