Silent Hill 2I made a spur-of-the-moment decision to buy Silent Hill 2 a while back and it turned out to be a great choice.

I made a page showing my progress through the game.

I had some complaints about the combat mechanics (by which I mean they sucked in boss fights), but the story is one of the most thought-provoking I’ve seen in a while. It’s right up there with best-of-all-time seminal classics like Bioshock and The Witcher 3 and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice.

I went into it with no knowledge whatsoever about anything in the Silent Hill franchise. I’d never played any of the previous games, or seen any of the movies. I only had the vague idea it would be similar to the Resident Evil remakes (which it was, because almost every horror game is in some way descended from Resident Evil). And of course I’ve heard of Pyramid Head before, in the same way I’ve heard of Mr. Blobby or The Shmoo.

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed trying to puzzle out the nature of the story as it progressed.

Unanswered QuestionsRarely do game stories prompt this much lasting thought. I think the story was cleverly designed to be open-ended enough to prompt these kinds of questions.

For example, my personal theory is that each character in Silent Hill 2 is dead (James, Angela, Laura, and Eddie), and they are each living in their own kind of purgatory. I haven’t seen that theory discussed anywhere online, but it makes more sense to me than “the town called them there” or whatever.

But I have questions. Based on the “In Water” ending, which I assume is the “true” ending (of the eight possibilities), only because it’s the one I got:

• Who left all those notes for James?
  • Or was it just a framework to reveal information to the player and propel them forward through the game?
• What happened to Laura? How did Laura get to Silent Hill?
  • (I think she was another terminal patient in the hospital with Mary.)
• What happened to Angela? It’s clear from that newspaper article that Angela killed her father, but what about her brother? What happened to Angela’s mother? In any case, why is Angela being punished??
• How did Eddie get to Silent Hill?
  • (To fit in with my theory that everyone’s dead, I think he was arrested and executed in prison since he’s got serious serial killer vibes.)
• Did James have an affair while Mary was sick? Is Maria a reflection of that infidelity? Or a manifestation of the witch/siren trapped on the island? Or maybe both?
• Why does James think his wife died three years ago when he has her body in the back seat of his car? If he just killed her at the start of the game, how did he get the letter Mary wrote, which was supposed to be held by a hospital nurse until after her death?
• How is Toluca Prison relevant to any of these characters? Why did we go there?
• What was the deal with that game show announcer in the elevator??
  • It’s such an abstract game that it’s difficult to tell whether it was supposed to mean something or if it was just a joke by the developers.
• Am I trying to read too much into this? It’s possible there’s no deeper meaning and it’s just a game.