Psychological Discomfort
It’s more sexual and human.
All the monsters are human-shaped. It might be mannequin parts, or a human torso with legs above and below the waist. It’s a nurse with a pipe. It’s a human with something like a skin over the top half of its body. It’s a giant human with a pyramid covering its head.
First introductions.
The controls were weird. It was much easier to move around than before, and to aim, target, and shoot was done with automatic ease. The action button, used to search or to run, is also automatically linked to targeting and attacking. It might’ve been some defaults to do with my computer, but it sure makes my experience with protagonist James Sunderland trying to steer around a trigger-happy killer though.
The locations you explore are an apartment building, a mental hospital, a prison, an underground maze with wallpapered walls, and finally a hotel. There’s less biological horror and more psychological horror. The Grim Reaper’s List is replaced with the scrawlings of the prisoners, filled with typos and obsessive remarks, and doctors’ notes monitoring them. You unlock a chest secured with a combination padlock, a combination padlock, a keycard lock, and a lock, and inside is a strand of hair. The otherworld is moldy and dilapidated, but not as ruined as before. There are many holes to jump down.
There are a few other people. Your obsession is your dead wife, and you won’t stop to find her. Maybe that’s a thing with Silent Hill – the only people that come here are obsessed with something. There is:
- Eddie, who is fat, which is relevant because the game won’t shut up about it, to the point that he goes crazy after soaking in the memories of being bullied that he kills a bunch of people while feeling persecuted until you kill him.
- Maria, who looks and sounds like Mary, but is definitely not her, who is very interested in you, while James is NOT HAPPY about touching her chest to confirm that she’s real and not a ghost.
- Laura, a child, who was friends with your dead wife while she was dead, who calls Eddie a fatso and locks you in a room with monsters.
- Angela, who has been/is attacked by a monster who she calls Pa. Sometimes she reflects upon problems with a knife in her hand, considering suicide. When it dies, she throws a tv on it.
I feel like it’s easy to lose things sometimes, to see how things are and forget how things felt before. There’s no sense of safety in this one. There is no relief between escaping segments of otherworld horror into soft fog. At some point you dive into a hole in the ground that’s so deep it should kill you, multiple times.
A radio host plays a special broadcast just for you, James Sunderland, in the elevator. Get the questions right or receive a punishment. Maria reminds you of the videotape you made together with her. She’s waiting for you to come to her. The hotel manager leaves you a note saying the videotape James Sunderland left behind was put in the office.
If Silent Hill is about the fear of abandoned places and monsters and finding safety in people, Silent Hill 2 is about how humans are something to be afraid of.
The prison is in a sublayer beneath the historical society. There is a gallows in the courtyard, with three nooses from it. Beneath, there’s some executed corpses hanging from the ceiling, each accused of a different crime. Justice and revenge have been served. The inscription’s text only condemns the killing of an innocent criminal, while the other executions are justified.
Later, James talks about the monster with the pyramid for a head: I was weak. That’s why I needed you…. Needed someone to punish me for my sins…
