(Originally published to Glitchwave on 5/9/2022)
[Image from glitchwave.com]
Silent Hill 2
Developer: Konami/Team Silent
Publisher: Konami
Genre(s): Survival Horror
Platforms: PS2, Xbox
Release Date: September 24, 2001
Silent Hill 2 had some goliath-sized shoes to fill upon its initial release. How does one go about exceeding a horror game that is considered the scariest title in the medium? Silent Hill caused more anxiety-induced insomnia in 1999 than the Y2K scare. A sequel to any video game is inherently supposed to build upon the foundation of the previous games and compose an objectively superior product. As I discussed with the first Silent Hill, the game was effective enough where all of the rudimentary elements of its presentation and gameplay made the game disjointed and more effective. That, and the narrative of the first Silent Hill did not warrant any further exposition. The story of Silent Hill wrapped up succinctly (whether or not the player received the true ending or one of the bad ones), and there weren’t any unanswered questions pertaining to the town, its residents, or any unfortunate visitors. The developers, however, were a crafty bunch that wisely chose to formulate Silent Hill 2 as an indirect sequel, giving the game more leeway to construct its own identity. It proved to be a success as Silent Hill 2 is consistently lauded as the quintessential Silent Hill experience. It worked so well that Silent Hill 2’s zealous fanbase associates the game with unusual adjectives relating to its high level of quality, namely describing the game as “beautiful.” Beauty is a subjective matter, but it’s perplexing that someone could describe something twisted, grotesque, and macabre like Silent Hill as being beautiful. After pondering this notion while considering Silent Hill 2’s understanding of emotional horror, the fans might be onto something.
The most integral deviation Silent Hill 2 takes from the first game is removing itself from the narrative of the first game. As stated before, the first Silent Hill did not leave itself open to explore the story even further. We learned enough about the dastardly cult plaguing the town, and Harry’s harrowing journey was finished regardless of if he succeeded in what he set out to accomplish. One of the biggest mistakes a sequel to any media can make is attempting to expand on a story that has already been completed, exposing the industry’s initiative to bank on shallow familiarity rather than taking a risk with a new idea. Team Silent, however, was a group of people assembled specifically because their collective acumen could only produce something off-kilter, making every collective decision inherently risky from an artistic standpoint. The direction Team Silent took to deviate from the first game’s narrative was to include the town of Silent Hill as the only recurring character and not only to upkeep the franchise's namesake. The player may have been treated to a crash course lesson on the disturbing history of how this quaint little resort town was adulterated into a force of pure, maddening evil and the people who caused this. Still, Team Silent thought to expand upon the town’s supernatural capabilities. The “otherworld” seen in the first game was a horrific projection of Alessa’s cognition, so what happens if Alessa’s presence is longer relevant because she and all of the relevant characters from the first game have been omitted from the game?
Silent Hill 2 answers that question with a whole new slew of people who are just as fucked in the head as Alessa. Enter James Sunderland: a young, tall, blonde man who dons a green army jacket. Like Harry, he’s Team Silent’s depiction of an average American schmuck who is unprepared to approach the unholy terrors he is about to encounter in Silent Hill. Unlike Harry, the catalyst to his “adventure”, for a lack of a better term, is not by happenstance. James receives a letter from his wife Mary claiming that she is located at Silent Hill and eagerly awaits his arrival at their “special place,” implying that the couple was privy to the town’s festive era before it became the dreadful hellscape that we know it as. The odd aspect of this letter is that Mary has been dead for quite some time, a problematic factor of this scenario that complicates things. Nevertheless, James makes his way to Silent Hill with the hope that he will reunite with his estranged/deceased wife and rekindle their love.
Another element that separates Silent Hill 2 from the first game is the difference in tone. The first Silent Hill bombarded the player with ghastly imagery and tense pacing, but its sequel is comparatively more dismal and dreary. The opening sequence sees James looking at a reflection of his dour visage in the mirror of an off-road bathroom, which is as grimy as one would expect from a bathroom located in Silent Hill. He exits the restroom to where he parked his car to contemplate what he’s doing here over the serene, misty lakefront. After being lost in thought, James’s first inclination to Mary’s whereabouts is to search through Rosewater Park. Before he can search the park, he must trek through the dilapidated apartment complex off the beaten path, beginning the first “dungeon” of the game. As James is galavanting throughout the town, the player might notice that Silent Hill feels more barren than usual. Except for encountering Angela in the graveyard and the first enemy in the dark alley, the long walk/run to the apartment is fairly uneventful. James breezes through the town despite the typical blinding fog and makes his way to the apartments without too much turmoil. Once he arrives at the complex, all that greets him in the foyer is the dark vestibules, and a save option. The main reason one might keep their guard up is because of the first game’s pension for using nightmarish surrealism to plunge the player into a frenzy until it becomes too overwhelming to bear. This opening sequence that reintroduces the player to the town's layout is comparatively tranquil, only because they expect things to go south as they move forward. It gives the player the impression that Silent Hill 2 is taking a different approach to setting the tone for the series. The desolate, ghost town atmosphere set by the first game is amplified to make the player feel the crushing loneliness. One of the most explicit examples is later in the game, where James is rowing a boat on the lake waters with nothing but the semi-rhythmic sound of the paddles and the dense fog to set the scene. Besides a faint light in the distance, the long boat ride feels almost aimless, so the player can bask in absolute solitude. Moments like these and many others greatly aid the overall somber, melancholy tone the game exudes.
Silent Hill 2 is another sequel from the original Playstation library that made the jump to the Playstation console’s own sequel, the PS2. As one would anticipate from a new console generation, Silent Hill 2 had the clear advantage of being on a superior piece of hardware. Silent Hill is, however, not a series that is synonymous with presentational or technical prowess compared to the next-generation sequel of fellow artful, well-received Konami franchise Metal Gear Solid on the PS2. I’ve already explained how Silent Hill is more effective because it looks like shit. While these factors are not an integral aspect of Silent Hill 2’s quality, the developers add some improvements to the first game with the frills of next-generation gaming. For one, the characters are much less blocky than the ones seen in the first game, and their mouths move consistently to a surprisingly realistic degree. The AV cutscenes seldom seen in the first game are now implemented more frequently, and while they may look awkward, they are just another case of something jarring-looking enhancing the creepy experience. The voice acting is still wooden and inexpressive, but this works in Silent Hill 2’s favor as it fits the disoriented characters. The most apparent graphical change that Silent Hill 2 makes is the look of the fog. The entire point of having the fog in the first game was due to the technical limitations of the PS1, and its effectiveness in making the game more ominous was merely a lucky coincidence. One could assume that since the PS2 fixes these technical limitations that the fog would no longer be needed, but removing the fog would be a travesty. Thick fog has been such an essential staple of the Silent Hill franchise to the point where one could argue that it’s the only returning character other than the town itself. The graphical and technical improvements to the game have simply given the fog the same treatment as the characters. Instead of the white, wintry fog found in the first game, the fog in Silent Hill 2 is a smokey, gray force of nature that violently blows in James’s face and most likely irritates his eyes. It’s almost as if there is an immortal fire burning somewhere beneath the town, engulfing the entire area, similar to the town in Pennsylvania that Silent Hill is loosely based on. As for the lighting, Silent Hill 2 doesn’t offer the same consistent pitch-black darkness as the first game did. Rather, there are narrow streams of light that permeate through the jet-black void to balance the moody and frightful aura. The more intricate lighting scheme presented here most likely wouldn’t have been possible on the PS1, so the advancements brought about by technical progress have aided the franchise.
Silent Hill 2’s gameplay is an aspect that hasn't changed even slightly from the first game. Tank controls may have gone out of fashion after the first 3D era, but they have remained a key principle of control in the survivor horror genre. Moving with the nimbleness of an android is ostensibly what accurately emulates the natural motion of American schmucks like Harry and James to these Japanese developers. I don’t know whether or not to be offended by this notion as a fellow American schmuck. Still, I completely understand and support the continuation of tank controls for the franchise. One of the vital components of an effective horror game is feeling trapped and less capable, and the rigidity of tank controls perfectly captures this. James controls the same as Harry did, with the only minor exceptions of running more gingerly and not reacting to accidentally careening into a wall. James also fights the exact same as Harry with an almost identical arsenal. The holy trinity of Silent Hill firearms are all here and are obtained in the same order at the same pacing as the first game. Besides brandishing a steel pipe, the other prime melee weapons take different forms. James receives a knife from Angela upon coming across her in the apartment complex but feels as if using this bloodied kitchen utensil gift would be distasteful or something. Instead, he wields a plank of wood with a nail as his weak, base melee weapon to combat enemies in desperate measures. The juggernaut melee weapon that looks difficult to employ for the noodle-armed schmuck protagonist isn’t a hammer but a sharp cleaver so gigantic that Cloud Strife would blush. At this point in the game, the player will know exactly who this knife belongs to and gasp that James can use it, but we’ll get to that. Disposing of enemies still requires the same method of dealing enough damage to where they fall and double tapping their wounds while they vigorously writhe on the ground to put them out of their misery. Health and ammo seem much more plentiful in Silent Hill 2, but the player will still have to search every nook and cranny and squint to discern the microscopic items. Under a certain perspective, Silent Hill 2’s gameplay might be objectively flawed and need improvement, but it wouldn’t be as hair-raising without all of its quirks.
Given that Silent Hill 2 is also primarily set in the series namesake and this abandoned resort town hasn’t undergone any construction or gentrification, is there any undiscovered land in Silent Hill for James to explore? Upon looking at the new town map, the land hasn’t changed at all. Notable locations from the first game are still on the map, but now they are out of James’s reach. Apparently, Silent Hill 2 takes place in an entirely different section of town, most likely on the other side of the closed-off roads that inhibited Harry from traveling in the first game and vice versa with James. This southern district of Silent Hill holds many unique sites in the overworld, such as Pete’s Bowl-O-Rama and Heaven’s Night, a strip club where neon signs still illuminate the inside after years of inactivity. More importantly than the new settings of the overworld are the new “dungeon” areas that make up the substance of the survival horror game design. These new areas include a series of connected apartment buildings, an underground prison, and a grand hotel overlooking the lake. A hospital is again the second “dungeon” area of a Silent Hill game, which may indicate a kind of franchise fatigue that may be used to argue against using the town again as a setting. However, this is an entirely different hospital located in another part of town. Silent Hill apparently has (or had) an outstanding number of casualties that warranted building two hospitals in town (gee, I wonder why).
While these structures might be new to the player, their inner design is exactly like the “dungeons” in the first game. Traversing through them involves the same survival horror progression where some doors are permanently fused shut while some are locked, and the player needs to find keys to open them. Some keys are locked behind puzzles, while some need to be collected among the scattered items. The puzzles in these circuitously-designed establishments still follow the same cryptic chicanery as in the first game. The difficulty of the riddle-based puzzles can now be determined by a setting that is now separate from the combat difficulty, but that does not change some object-oriented puzzles. In the first apartment, James will come across a 12-pack of unopened juice. Consuming a hefty amount of vitamin C most likely won’t bolster his defense against the various monsters in the apartment, so the player concludes that it must be used for a puzzle. Juice doesn’t (or shouldn’t) corrode body parts like the chemical found in the school, so what is it for? It turns out that the player must drop the entire pack down a laundry chute to unclog the debris and uncover a coin. How is the player supposed to conclude unless they worked in the laundry room and administered beverages and other items through the chute? While this still follows a kind of obtuse puzzle logic, there is one “puzzle” in particular that irks me. In the underground prison, James will enter a room that not only locks on him upon entry but ousts the battery in his flashlight. Rejuvenating the flashlight with a fresh battery will uncover a swarm of bugs that will gnaw at James’s legs as his health slowly diminishes. A door locked by a keypad is the only means of an exit, but the button code will be a random combination of the two or three slightly incandescent buttons on the pad. The player, of course, does not know the code, so they will most likely hear the error noise many times until they get it right by chance. The player will waste many health items lest the bugs chew until they hit a vital artery and cause James’s untimely death. The game can be as oblique as it wants to be, but this is entirely unfair. All of these puzzles simply solidify that nothing in Silent Hill is apparent.
“Nowhere” from the first Silent Hill received my prestigious honor for being a highlight component in the game that made my brow sweat and my organs tense up with utter discomfort, so do any of Silent Hill 2’s dungeons match up to this quality of sheer terror? They are still consistently dim and claustrophobic, with scary moments dispersed in between progress, but the “overworld” is underutilized here in terms of gameplay. The only dungeon that is relatively flipped is the hospital, but only for the last section of an almost completed dungeon. I didn’t think so before replaying this game because of Silent Hill 2’s dissimilar tone that also seeps into the dungeons, but there is one contender. The labyrinth found beneath the prison exudes the same discomforting, otherworldly surrealism that “nowhere” did, and it might be even more effective. “Nowhere” was a mapless extension of the most harrowing parts of previous “otherworld” sections, but the labyrinth’s aesthetic and design are harder to decipher. Its empty walls aren’t as deteriorated as the other dungeons and have a disconcerting peach color. Traversing underneath the empty, wooden foundation of the labyrinth looks like James is wading through the gastric juices inside the intestinal walls of a giant, unfathomably horrific creature with a dark engine room at its center. There is a map to assist the player, but its lack of illustrated boundaries will only help the player to a certain extent. This is the first and only dungeon in Silent Hill 2 that bewildered me with an avant-garde design that made me feel uncomfortably lost and confused like “nowhere” did.
All of the consistencies jumbled with the changes make for a solid Silent Hill experience once again, but what makes Silent Hill 2 so special? Why does this entry move so many people where the first one didn't? The meat of the game that separates the first and second Silent Hill games is the themes and story that are saturated in obtuse symbolism that will likely swing over a majority of players’ heads. They’ll have to ponder over what they’ve just experienced, a telltale sign of a substantial piece of art. Silent Hill 2’s story is less of a traditional story of a hero overcoming forces of evil and more of a character study. Contextualizing the horrors presented in Silent Hill 2 will slowly unravel James’s layers and reveal that this unassuming man has a sick, perverted center with a psychological profile so corrupt that Sigmund Freud would ejaculate at the thought of analyzing it.
To effectively untangle the mind of James Sunderland, Silent Hill 2 adds more inspiration from other artistic mediums. The same aesthetic and design inspirations that sculpted the first game are still present, but Silent Hill 2’s themes are carved from two specific literary sources. The first and most obvious inspiration is the classic Dostoyevsky novel Crime and Punishment. In short, the plot of Crime and Punishment involves an impoverished man murdering a wealthy but avaricious pawnbroker to usurp her money. He tries to justify his actions but is ultimately subdued by the immense, grievous feelings he experiences after committing the crime. Silent Hill, with its supernatural powers, plays the role of judge and executioner in the cases of all the people in the game. Angela has found her way to the town because she murdered her father. A heinous crime indeed, but the justification for this act is because her father chronically abused her both physically and sexually. The negative feelings she has for her father conjure up a boss called Abstract Daddy, a moving hump of rotten flesh supported by a bedframe with a gaping orifice underneath. Besides the inner context, the name alone makes it one of the creepiest boss battles in the series, and the room James fights him in with its symmetrically penetrating holes makes it even more disgusting. Eddie is a gluttonous young man James meets in the apartment while vomiting in a toilet that rivals the worst toilet in Scotland. He claims to be innocent of the crime of killing a dog and a child, but his quick mental deterioration unsheathes his true lack of remorse for his crimes. Eddie has a long history of being bullied for his weight, and the pent-up feelings of humiliation is the reason why he took those lives. What about James? What did he do to warrant a visit to Silent Hill? Once James uncovers a video and watches it in a familiar room in the hotel, we learn that Mary didn’t die from succumbing to her illness. Sure, she was terminally sick, but the videotape reveals that she died of asphyxiation at the hand of James smothering her with a pillow. This is a shocking revelation to both the player and James, but the question of justifying James’s crimes still lingers with the overall themes. Ultimately, Angela is engulfed by flames, and James has to subdue the crazy Eddie. The game seems to imply that no crime should go unpunished in a way only Team Silent could think of.
Another clear influence is Solaris, another Russian novel written by Stanislaw Lem. Some scenes may also be inspired by the notable film adaptation of the novel directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, but the premise directly stems from the novel. In Solaris, a psychologist named Kris Kelvin visits a station presiding over the surface of the sentient planet Solaris to investigate the unusual phenomena of why all of the crew members have gone mad and or killed themselves. Once he arrives, an apparition of his dead wife that he longs for comes alive, which overwhelms him with feelings of longing, and succumbs to the same madness as the rest of the crew. Solaris is not an influence often referenced in the makeup of Silent Hill 2, but it is nevertheless obvious. The other victims of the town’s maddening powers seem to speak to James eloquently, but there is little connection between their perspectives and his. While James isn’t as alone as the game might exude through its atmosphere, this lack of conciseness between every human character adds to the sense of alienation under the same methods as the ones portrayed between the characters of Solaris. Maria is obviously the same apparition as the protagonist's wife in Solaris, but the further connection is how her visage torments James. The wife in Solaris becomes too human and attempts to kill herself out of existential dread. After ingesting liquid oxygen, she still retains her life after a short upset. The underlying point of abusing the figment of Kelvin’s wife is not to extinguish her character but to further torment Kelvin’s sensibilities. The same can be said when Maria is brutally murdered by a certain monster in town, which greatly upsets James. However, she is still seen intact after these events. Constant scenarios like this prove to torment James for the crime of murdering his wife. Crime and Punishment may bring the ethos to Silent Hill 2’s themes, but Solaris brings the execution of them.
Illustrating these themes is essential in dissecting the game’s symbolism, but they’ve been documented before by others who have taken the time to divulge the game's substance. I’d like to think that I’m not a lazy critic and will not waste your time elucidating the game’s themes that have already been discussed to death. After pondering over the Silent Hill 2 experience, I’ve come up with my own unique interpretation that connects all of these themes. I’ve concluded that Silent Hill 2’s story is a roundabout journey through the process of grief. The five steps associated with grief are not conveyed in their concise order, but there are still many elements that represent them.
Denial is a pretty easy step to decode if the player is paying even the slightest bit of attention to James. He knows that his wife has been dead for years, yet he does not think that someone is pulling his leg upon receiving the letter allegedly written by her. The letter is a beacon of hope that gives James hope that she is still alive and yearning for his presence, clouding his sense of judgment and rationale. Laura, another visage conjured up by James, represents a sense of James’s innocence in the form of a little girl. Laura claims to know Mary, and factors like her age make James do a series of mental gymnastics to affirm his theories. It’s almost cute that James is holding onto hope to see his dead wife again until we learn how she died, of course. Laura is also bratty and confrontational like one would expect from a little girl, and she has a certain sense of hostility towards James, like his innocent side is upset at what James has become. In the hospital, Laura leads James astray and locks him in a dark room with two dangling cage monsters known as Flesh Lips, another boss with an extremely repulsive name and design. It’s almost as if James’s innocent side is trying to punish James for what he did, which becomes more deadly as James indulges his delusion.
Mr. Sunderland’s anger is a certain type of rage and frustration in the sexual variant. Let’s just say that during Mary’s hospice, there wasn’t a lot of bumping uglies in the Sunderland master bedroom. This dormant sex life was a huge factor in his decision to accelerate her dying process. As a result, the uglies that James bumps into in Silent Hill resemble his sexual frustration. The hospital in the first game had enemies that resembled both doctors and nurses, but notice how there are only nurses in Silent Hill 2’s hospital? Notice how the same nurses and manakin enemies are vaguely sexy (as sexy as a Silent Hill enemy could be anyway)? A lack of rational human anatomy on the manikins with only a series of four legs connected on a torso and the unbuttoned blouses on the nurses signifies that our dear James Sunderland is nothing but a rampant, woman-objectifying misogynist. There is an extremely clear character that further represents James’s true nature, and he’s one of the utmost requisite characters in discussing Silent Hill 2. I’ve been careful to allude to Pyramid Head to prevent discussing him in an airy fashion because the character has transcended his placement since the game’s release. Pyramid Head has become the de facto mascot of the series, implemented in other Silent Hill media by those who do not understand Pyramid Head’s role in the game, sullying his initial stature. I can’t say the boom of Pyramid Head-centric popularity is a surprise. He’s incredibly effective as Silent Hill 2’s boogeyman, hunting down James like a glowing, geometric terminator. However, the true substance behind Pyramid Head is as a cog for the whole machine rather than the centerpiece. Pyramid Head is James’s toxic, uber-masculine side, complete with pure, animalistic lust. Did you think the colossal knife he swings around was merely an intimidating weapon and not a glaringly obvious phallic symbol? James’s first encounter with Pyramid Head in the apartments shows a distressing scene involving Pyramid Head raping a manikin enemy and making pleasure noises reminiscent of a climaxing grizzly bear. He’s doing the same to another one in the stairwell before facing him for the first time. Pyramid Head is the personification of the sexual id that every man possesses, and that’s why he’s so scary.
Bargaining comes in the form of Maria, the mirage meant to resemble Mary. More appropriately, she’s the idealized fantasy of how James perceives Mary, which makes her look like she works at Heaven’s Night. Upon encountering her at the park, James is delighted to see Maria as she resembles his wife. He attempts to relish in Maria’s presence, but he can’t shake the nagging feeling that comes with her uncanny nature. Maria should be ideal for James, but that certain element of fabrication makes James disillusioned with her. Maria being in the presence of James as she follows him through the town gives off the impression that James has settled with Maria to appease his unrealistic wish fulfillment, and it just isn’t the same.
Silent Hill 2 emanates the feeling of depression out of every crevice of its being, but there is more to express this than in the game’s overall atmosphere. James is certainly a depressed character, but to what extent? Considering nothing is tying him to staying in Silent Hill, I’d wager that Mary’s letter provided the first burst of serotonin James has felt since Mary's passing. Harry was stranded in Silent Hill due to his car being in shambles after the accident, and he had to brave the unspeakable elements of the town to save his daughter. On the other hand, James can drive off at any time without losing anything of value but chooses not to. His life figuratively died when Mary did and has been flatlining with nothing else to live for since then. A more overt form of symbolism regarding James’s depression is the few times that the “otherworld” rears its head. The otherworldly dimension is no longer marked by Alessa’s occult fusion of blood and industrial rust but by James’s solemn disposition. Whenever he is reminded of Mary’s death, it starts to rain indoors as it starts to erode the interior of the building, signifying James’s personal decay. The rain in the hotel starts to flood the basement as James mucks through the knee-high water, detailing the severity of James’s emotional state.
As for the most challenging final part of the grieving process, acceptance comes to James in the form of three different endings. Upon witnessing what he’s done to Mary in the video, James comes to a moment of clarity that helps him face Pyramid Head without caving in at the sight of Pyramid Head impaling her with another method of sexual symbolism. He then climbs to the roof of the hotel to confront the visage of Mary and renounce her supplementary status as the woman he loved, which results in the apparition fighting back in the form of what is essentially the Flesh Lips fight with extra steps and a more spacious battlefield. Coming to his senses is only half of the equation. Specific instances of how the player treated the game will unlock a certain result for James’s final decision. If the player healed often like James’s will to live was revitalized, it will trigger the “Leave” ending in which James’s conscience is cleansed, and he can live his life anew. If the player treated James’s life with detachment, the “In water” ending will result in James committing suicide by driving his car into the lake with Mary’s body in the trunk so he and Mary can rest peacefully together in the same vicinity. If the player was especially considerate to Maria while she followed them around, James will start a relationship with Maria in the “Maria” ending, which I think is a cop-out that lets him fester in a fool’s paradise rather than a feat of inner strength. “In Water” might fit the Crime and Punishment ethos, but “Leave” is a better example of acceptance and how it pertains to finalizing grief. Overall, it doesn’t matter what I think because the game is nonpartisan to any of these outcomes. None of these are “bad” endings, but simply a logical outcome the game comes to depending on the player’s choices.
Silent Hill 2 perfectly exemplifies my definition of a perfect sequel. Like a skilled plastic surgeon, Team Silent meticulously spliced the rudimentary blemishes present in the first game with superior technology while staying loyal to the foundation that made the first game effective to a fault. The result is fairly indiscernible in many ways, but the differences are apparent enough to hold the game on its merits. It’s not an oxymoron but a pinpoint level of quality that many other developers fail to deliver. The real question that determines Silent Hill 2’s place in the game that came before it is this: Is Silent Hill 2 scarier than its landmark predecessor? Considering how different the two are, that question entirely depends on one’s definition of fear. I think the first Silent Hill is more effectively jarring and relentless, but Silent Hill 2 makes the player want to wash away the disturbing events of the game with a hot shower. There is something more intimate about James’s journey through the gauntlet of unmitigated torment known as Silent Hill. The horrors presented to Harry were the product of someone else's despair, but all that James experiences is his own mind assaulting him with his own repressed thoughts and feelings. Using clever metaphors under the direction of a survivor horror game, Silent Hill 2 conveys the mental and emotional blitzkrieg of struggling with grief or acute mental illness. It’s an arduous journey most people will take at some point in their lives, but overcoming it is a gratifying sensation that rewards those willing to undergo the cleansing process with a new, glimmering light once absent in their lives. This purifying resolution is utterly profound, and Silent Hill 2’s depiction of this through its sublime, awe-inspiring presentation is a thing of pure, unmistakable beauty.
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