Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams

The Good
For those of you that have been living in a submarine for the past years you should know that the Silent Hill series are the "serious" survival horror games, the ones big, brainy fellas like to point at as being the finest games around horror-wise. Hype notwithstanding, the original game had a lot going for it, and it's sequel is even more impressive.

First of all the production values for the game are on a league of it's own. The graphics are incredibly detailed, sporting some of the most impressive texture work around. Seriously, things are just downright gorgeous with clean, smooth models and stellar dynamic lighting to increase the quality. Yes, the fog and general darkness are still there and help "cheat" things quite a bit, but there's no denying it's an amazing game to watch nonetheless. The PC version allows you to increase the resolution to stratospheric levels and I believe the textures have also had some worked on them to increase the detail, so that's more glitz for you. Of course, that's only considering the in-game graphics, the cutscenes are simply incredible and belong at the top of the line in terms of quality, though the discerning eye might notice some problems specially in the character animation (check out how "Robo-Mary" moves in her cutscene as she looks through the window!! You go girl!!). Thankfully for us, the port to CDs hasn't suffered from the video degradation in the same way as other PS2 DVD games and you can see them in all their original glory, showcasing some of the best CGI animation for a videogame ever.

The sound department is open to debate, considering the voice acting seems to have been recorded with the same shitty "5 words at a time" concept as in the original which still results in fragmented dialogue that's about as artificial as a soy hamburger, but the audio quality of the game is undeniable. Owners of a surround-sound setup are in for a threat, as the game supports every positional audio possibility out there, from a pro-logic -like setup to EAX, 6.1 EX Dolby digital and even more. Really, playing Silent Hill 2 with no lights and a fully cranked 5.1 system is one of the most intense experiences you can have, with each one of it's incredibly moody sfx and the kickass Ringu-like soundtrack giving your nerves the ride of their lives.

But aside from technical achievements, from a design and storyline point of view, the game also made steady improvements and takes on a much more mature note than the original. The narrative is much tighter thanks to the loss of needless sideplots and while the resulting game ends up being much shorter than the original it's also much more interesting and focused. The story is completely independent from the original game. Sure, James looks exactly as Harry with different clothes, and he's also a grieving widower, but instead of going for a vacation to Clive Barker's-Ville with his daughter he receives a letter that tells him to go to Silent Hill for a visit. Thing is the letter is from his deceased wife Mary....yikes... Right from the start the premise gets the game going in the right tracks, as it's much more powerful and driving as an emotional goal for our character than the original's "being stranded on freak-town and losing daughter"-premise. Also on a more subtle note, the game takes the emphasis away from the "Escape from the haunted town" vibe the original had and turns towards a more Twilight Zone-esque "Tales from Silent Hill" one where the game dedicates itself to telling you James story, with Silent Hill being merely the backdrop. This approach might sound disappointing to some, but the cocktail works perfectly, as James provides the human touch with his traumas, secrets and his quest, but Silent Hill doesn't mess him up with overcomplicated plots about demon summoning, medical corruption and assorted crap, and simply works as a supernatural means of bringing James itty, bitty skeletons out of the closet and assaulting him with psycho trips to the Hospital from Hell(tm) and the usual "disturbed version of an everyday location" that the original SH was famous for and which takes you to Cliver Barker-esque versions of several locations in the town as you search for your beloved Mary and avoid the many gore-friendly monsters that seem to have replaced the town's population.

Speaking about monsters, the developers got the message from the original and removed it's collection of Resident Evil rejects, giant moths and generic zombie dogs, and instead replaced them with much more disturbing, abstract creatures that seem part-human, part-uh... freaky things. After all, what else would you call a mannequin-like creature whose body ends at the torso and then continues into another pair of legs as if mirrored?? Or how about a menacing butcher with a crimson pyramid for a head that stalks you around like the "Nemesis" from Resident Evil? The creatures in Silent Hill 2 are both disturbing and appealing in their weirdness, with some standouts like the final boss that seems ripped straight from Clive Barker's "Tortured Souls" action-figure collection and which make each encounter with them much more tense than in the original not to mention interesting also in a way, as you struggle to comprehend how a thing with no arms or mouth can hurt you until it ...aARRRGHH!!!

Sure, as in the original James can fight back, but also as in the original fights are better left for another day as James fights as fiercely as a snail and it doesn't take many hits for his day to be over. A clever touch taken from the original that enhances the level of desperation inherent to the desperate fights you take part in. Thankfully, those of us with reflex-problems can now switch between camera-relative and character-relative controls that finally allow you to handle your character in a more natural way when placed under the game's kickass but often awkward camera positions. You can also individually tone down the combat difficulty making the baddies less numerous and easier to beat, and also giving James more health and decreasing the chance of him tripping over as he runs for his life. Isn't that a cool detail? That James... Falling on his ass as Pyramid-Head looms over him... what a doofus!!

The Bad
Unfortunately not everything is rosy with SH2, as some of the problems of the original can't help but creep their way back in due to the strange narrative fetishes of our beloved Konami folks. What I'm talking about here is the assortment of bogus twists and turns the story takes just because the designers felt that common sense is an alien trait to the characters in the game.

Just as before, the game seems to take place in a seemingly "trance"-like reality where people just don't question what they do or what the hell goes on around them. I mean, either James is a real badass mutha that's seen and done everything out there or he reads too many Clive Barker novels, as his reaction to the monstruous horrors of Silent Hill is about as sedated as it can be without drugs involved. Once again, this is not a singular "choice" or some clever mature thing Konami pulled off from his sleeve, it's just plain shitty storytelling, if we see this in a movie we scream foul at the sight of plot-holes, inconsistencies and lousy scripting, but since it's on a Silent Hill... Ahhh!! It must be art or something then....

Shit, I really don't know wether the game isn't actually worse than the original here, since they removed the mostly retarded moments (like the charming "cop-giving-a-perfect-stranger-her-gun-and-leaving" moment in the original) and they drastically cut down on the stupid tendency for the characters to meet, chat a bit and then disappear for a while (guess they never heard of that "safety in numbers" concept) to the point where a character actually hangs around with you for several parts of the game! Unfortunately, everything that was corrected was replaced by even more bogus character interaction that will leave even the most ardent Silent Hill fan scratching his/her head. Case in point: (this is just frigging incredible) midway through the game you follow a charming lil' character to a room, only to discover that she locks the door behind you and leaves you to die at the hands of two freakish monsters as she laughs and goes away. What does your character do later when he meets her again in a cottage by the lake?? Slap her around and break her legs? Shout at her? At least cock his gun and prepare himself for another surprise? Noooo, that would make too much sense, and since the story needs to go in another direction let's just settle with James going "Hey gorgeous! How you doing? Better be careful with those things out there!" nudge ...geez... I'm not trying to spoil things for you but Konami must think we are all retarded if they expect us to accept how they just force James to do what he does in the "good" ending with this character as a perfectly rational reaction. then again, what's another plot-hole gonna do to this game, uh?

As for the gameplay, while the game leaves most of the stupid puzzling around from the original, there are still places were the game weakens and slips in on of those lovely "collect the 45 coins of the moon, sun, stars, and whatever" puzzles in a place where it makes absolutely no sense. Or takes you for a walk as you check every room in the hotel/hospital or whatever looking for the golden key to the exit, Yay!!

Moving on, while extras are always welcome additions, I have to express my utter disappointment with the "Born from a wish" bonus scenario, which billed itself as the "inside story" of sorts for the game as it allowed you to play with Maria prior to James's arrival to Silent Hill. First of all, I believe we start off on the wrong foot with the premise and choice of character. Maria is one of the supernatural (or not?HmmMMMM???) characters that came to life in SH and is the one most closely related to Mary's mistery as it becomes obvious once you meet her and realise they both look exactly the same and have pretty much the same name (that's Konami's kind of subtlety for ya in case you were wondering). Thing is, outside of that Maria is a pretty boring character all around, with all the interest that surrounds her being simply because of our lack of knowledge of the character's past, and because she acts like a completely stoned babe at a frat-party while in the midst of a veritable nightmare. Angela would have been a much better choice for a "bonus scenario" extra, as she's the only other character outside of James that has also come to Silent Hill drawn by a supernatural event that relates to her past, a much more traumatizing and sadder event whose resurrection has unfortunately taken it's toll on poor Angela's mind (hey, we can't all be stone-cold macho men like James). All through the game she appears in hauntingly disturbing cutscenes that due to their more linearly scripted nature often become clearer and make more sense than the main game's plot! It's no wonder after all that she became one of the poster moments for the game (the one where she lies on the floor clutching a knife) and I would have preferred to crawl into Angela's little disturbed head much more than Maria's. Then again Maria IS the skanky stripper in the game with a glassy, stoned gaze and perpetual smirk that just scream "fan service" as the Japanese say, and regardless of how "serious" Silent Hill considers itself to be, it's always gonna go with the skanky stripper... Gameplay-wise, the extra scenario adds practically nothing, just two new weapons (a meat cleaver and a revolver) and the whole thing revolves around a shitty ghost-story that Maria has to solve by doing the good 'ol "check-every-room-for-the-key-and-solve-the-completely-ridiculous-puzzles-in-the-way" routine. Well, at least it comes for free.

I also should mention that there's a nasty lip-synch bug that pops up on every game-engine cutscene ported straight from the X-Box release and the fact that you really need some badass polygon-pushing card in your system to get Silent Hill to run without problems, as the textures alone are enough to slow most systems down to a crawl.

Oh, and I'm still waiting for Pinhead's cameo.

The Bottom Line
While still suffering from bogus storytelling and uneven gameplay fit for plenty of bitching, Silent Hill 2 tighttens the package by removing much of the slack from the original game, placing the focus on a more personal story, loosing the needless subplots and assorted elements stolen from the RE games, and dealing with much more unique and human elements that make the horror moments in the game even more impressive and haunting. The result is a game that towers over it's predecessor and rises as one of the best survival/horror titles around.

Aside from that this is THE game to show off your gaming rig, showcasing some of the most impressive graphical and aureal work in a videogame. A definitive must for anyone that enjoys quality mature gaming.

The Good
everything in this game was great :) when i first played it i was sitting in front of the tv waiting on the FMV sequence finishing at the begining where he was standing in the road side toilet cubicle. and i waited for about a minute thinking when is this going to give me control of the character cos i just saw him standing there so i tried to move him and he started to move and i thought to myself i`ve been standing here like a fool and i could have moved all along that was how god the FMV sequences were just like the graphics i couldn`t really tell the difference i had never seen anything like that before.

the story line is the best one in any game so far it touches your emotionaly at times or tries to while still keeping its horror feel to it which was really good i thought. atmosphere was and is second to none ill wait till res evil comes out on the cube to see if it can match SH2 for atmosphere .

great game far superior to the original in every way the start of the game was well done you started at least a couple of miles away from the town and had to run all the way there when you left the road side toilet and ran down the stairs into the forrest and down the path you heard a loud noise as if something was coming through the trees at you but nothing happened its things like that that i love about the game pure genius so it is they have to be to think of games like Silent Hill 2.

roll on Silent Hill 3 cant wait to see how #3 turns out.

The Bad
there is nothing to hate about this game if you like survival horror games<br><br>**The Bottom Line**<br>if you like survival horror games then you have to play this even if you did not like the original you will like this because it`s far far superior.

The Good

James Sunderland watches his own face in the mirror of a filthy roadside bathroom at the observation deck overlooking Toluca Lake. He had to make a stop here when he found out Nathan Avenue, the only road leading to the resort community of Silent Hill, is blocked by some sort of construction work.
James sighs, then mumbles to himself: "Mary, could you really be in this town?"
He takes a map of the area out of his car and decides to enter the town on foot, making his way through the forest around the lake.

His reason to be here is the letter in his pocket, a letter he just received, in which his wife Mary wrote she's waiting for him at Silent Hill, in their "special place".

The thing is, Mary's been dead for three years.

In the polarized and belligerant gaming community, there's a long standing bloodfeud between the minions of two horror/survival titles: Silent Hill is the game (and subsequent series) with which Konami answered to what's considered THE classic of H/S: Capcom's Resident Evil. The main distinction between both is that, whereas RE consists mostly of class-B zombie-hunting journeys starring a bunch of iron-willed, gorgeous-looking heroes in tight, brightly-colored, sexy outfits that already made a career in the Army AND the Police before they hit their mid-20's fighting the evil "Umbrella Corporation", which is hellbent on perfecting the resurrecting of the dead for a purpose that probably beats even themselves, where they have monsters pouncing on you all of a sudden to give you the "boo!" type of scare; SH leans towards a more psychological kind of horror, putting rather everyday next-door type of characters to deal with supernatural situations that constantly tilt between the unveiling of a darker side of reality and allegories of the character's way of dealing with his own inner demons. While Konami also resorts to the "boo!" resource to make you jump off your seat, the true strong point of a SH game is its dark, gloomy, dreamlike atmosphere, where just about everything could happen. In Silent Hill, you drop into a hole and you appear at the reception office of a prison camp from the early 1800's.
That's how we do things here at the Hills, foreigner.

And yes, you just did figure out on which side of the this fanboi wars I stand, you smart thingie, you.

Anyway.
Silent Hill 2 is a rare beast even in its own series. The other SH's are connected plot-wise, all of them mostly centered in telling different bits of the story of a cult that preyed upon the children of the tourist resort of Silent Hill, pursuing the ultimate goal of resurrecting an ancient demon-god and turning the town in some hellish demon-infested no man's land; but SH2 puts that story on the background and focuses in the main's character personal quest, which ultimately turns in an interesting study of the way human beings deal with the feeling of guilt.

The story starts more or less as a typical horror story, with a clueless character lured and trapped in a ghost town of sorts infested by demonic creatures, by some obscure entity that promises closure to a particularly painful chapter of his life. As he makes his way through the nightmarish settings, determined to uncover the truth behind the ghostly letter that drove him to the town, he meets a few characters seemingly brought to the town in a similar fashion, each one of whom having received a call related to their own ghosts from the past, and thus involved in their own personal quests.
And this is where everything starts getting really odd.
Instead of teaming up against a mysterious threat, each character wants to keep going on their own. Each one of them seem to be hiding something. Every time James runs into one of them he learns a bit more about their secrets, but they seemed to have learned about James too, and as well as they unwillingly fill the main character in with details about themselves and their quests, they also uncover some rather obscure aspects of Jame's own story, ultimately teaching the player that there's a lot he needs to know yet, up until the point in which he ends up wondering whether Mary is even dead AT ALL.
Halfway into the game James meets the only character that will join him in the quest: the mysterious Maria, an impossible carbon-copy of his late wife, but whereas Mary was the low-profile, housewife kind of woman, Maria is a daring, sarcastic seductress, and she's probably the most puzzling of all the characters; at times it looks like her true identity is a mystery even to herself.

And then it starts getting even stranger, because there's the town too. Silent Hill is deserted, it seems to have been abandoned for a long time. Every exit of the town is blocked by either construction work or unexplainable chasms that engulfed the streets. Inside the buildings there are obvious evidences of either bloody struggles or paranoid inhabitants having vanished while trying to shut some unimaginable threat outside.
A thick mist covers the town, preventing from seeing anything far past a couple dozen feet and turning daytime into an eerie, claustrophobic, experience where death could be hiding right in front of you. And then it gets dark, and darker still, because Silent Hill shifts at night: the familiar locations change, become even more decaying, as if a hundred years took a toll on them overnight.
And the town has a backstory of its own. As we progress in the game we gather pieces of information about it, from the fragmented written testimonies of the people who succumbed to whatever it was that emptied the town, to newspaper pieces speaking about missing children, gruesome murders and religious cults trying to break the barrier of death, to historical documents that delve further back into the past, to the days of a plague, the victims of a shipwreck in Toluca Lake that were never found, the brutal, medieval-style crimes committed in a Prison Camp in the early 1800's, further back to the days where the town was built on the ground which settlers previously abandoned all of a sudden for unknown reasons, and even further back, to the days when early inhabitants called the land "The Place of the Silent Spirits".

There's something wrong with Silent Hill, something that looms over the town, entangled within the very mist that perpetually covers it, but has deep roots in the ground as well. The land is sick, and apparently it has always been.

Now, there's been a lot of criticism towards the rather bizarre storytelling, mainly to the way characters make so seemingly incoherent decisions that defy even the most generous laws of common sense; you need to look no further than some of the reviews in this very website. However, call me a fanboi, but I believe this bizarre storytelling is not incidental.
You see, if you come here expecting the Clive Barker type of horror story, where everything no matter how crazy ends up having a perfectly understandable, and, however supernaturally wacky, rather reasonable explanation, you sure have another thing coming. I, on the other hand, tend to compare this story to the likes of Adrian Lyne's "Jacob's Ladder" or David Lynch's "Lost Highway"; the kind of story where the authors have no fear to drive over any storytelling conventions whenever the story demands it, for the sake of the dreamlike atmosphere. Not only I don't criticize that kind of thing, but I even applaud it. Normally, a horror story will start with a number of questions you will figure out piece by piece as you progress, until the final revelation strikes and you finally get it. My problem with this storytelling structure is that the final answer is never as fulfilling as the questions were enticing. There are a few honorable exceptions, sure, but most of the times I receive the typical Final Revelation of a given story with a "so this is what all that was about..." and either a shrug or a yawn. In fact, I rather be left with a lot of unanswered questions and a few hints to try and make any sense of it all by myself, than to have it all blown up by being told it was all the works of a paramilitary company with an obscenely stupid name.
SH2 starts with a rather conventional horror story, what with the ghost town and the monsters haunting the derelict apartments, but somehow seems to GROW as it progresses, and while at the end you ARE given a bunch of answers and a major revelation to complete the puzzle; the whole experience, the JOURNEY towards that end changed the way you look at it all. By the moment you reach the conclusive encounter you're no longer wondering what is the secret hiding behind the impossible letter, but rather whether any of what you just experienced was real or you were just doing a bizarre trip inside James' own subconscious, somehow influenced by this undeniably cursed town.

To top it all, you have the possibility to reach three different endings, depending on the way you played through the game, each one of which giving a whole different meaning to James' quest and his way to deal with the truth he ultimately uncovers. This not only enhances gameplay nicely, but actually manages to change the meaning of the entire story; a device that, storytelling-wise, is nothing short of impressive.
Furthermore, in a replay game you also have the chance to get A FOURTH ENDING, one more related to the town and its obscure damnation, which is a nice bonus.
And then you have two more endings, two sick, sick, sick Easter Eggs of joke endings that just have to be seen to be believed. Suffice to say, one of them follows the infamous SH tradition of the "UFO" endings, while the other one has a dog playing the puppetmaster of all the mystery.

Sure you can still bitch about a few particular weak sections of the story, or about how outrageously stupid the main character can come to be; but the storyline itself, and especially the way it's told, is great in its own oddball, niche style.

- OK, genius, so you defended the arbitrary and capricious storytelling against all those unforgiving badmouthers by basically saying that they don't get it, thus not-so-subtlely called some of our own fellow MG reviewers a pack of flaming morons. Sweet. Now were you planning on saying something about THE GAME, or is SH2 just some interactive book?

Fine.
The first thing that pounces upon you is how astounding the game looks. The whole "thick mist" thing is sure a convenient way to place the far clipping plane suspiciously close, but instead of leaning on this feature to justify their own laziness, the developers took some serious advantage of it, packing the characters and the general gameworld with the most amazingly high poly-count to ever grace a videogame. You might not see far past 20 feet away, but what you do see, looks jaw-droppingly beautiful. The character bodies alone are more detailed than even most games released today, some 4 years later.
The design of the monsters deserves a special note, there are only about 3 or 4 different classes, but they're more than enough, and they show a huge deal of imagination from the developers. And quite a twisted mind, too.
Among them, a special-special note must be done about "Pyramid Head", hands down the coolest and most disturbing villain to ever not do good things. Not to spoil too much what we're dealing with here, but in a few occasions you'll see him sexually abusing some of the other monsters, so you do the maths on how much of a villain he is.
Also, it's really interesting to read further about the ideas behind the creatures, since it turns out their appearance and the relationship between them is not casual, tying up to the main storyline with some classy symbolism.

To push the graphics bar even further up, the textures are drop dead gorgeous, the animation is so lifelike I don't think I've seen more believable characters until Half Life 2 came out, which enhances especially the dramatic scenes to heights you wouldn't believe, and the implementation of the lighting is a masterpiece in itself, especially if we think this is a DX-8 generation game, meaning no HDR lighting or any of those fancy F/X we have now.
Once you get a hold of the flashlight, it becomes not only your best pal in the game, but also one of the main atmosphere-building factors, with every single object in the scenery casting dynamic shadows. We all know how scary the shadow of, say, a chair can be when only lit by the dancing beam of a flashlight, and SH2 nailed the idea beautifully.

Next, we have the sound department, one of the main reasons why I re-wrote this review.
The thing is, the voices are fairly decent, the sound effects are very good with some truly memorable moments of sudden noises or unidentifiable whisperings that come to nicely fiddle with your nerves, but the last time I said something like "the music score is not ground breaking", for which I stand corrected and apologize. The first time I played the game, I didn't pay much attention to the music, other than recognizing how good a job it did to match every scene in which it was used, working as a very effective atmosphere-builder. Then I played the game a few more times, and the tunes started to stick in my head, and I found myself enjoying them more and more. Then, thanks to a fellow MG'er, I got to hear the full soundtrack album, and boy, did that thing hit me hard. Not only listening to the tracks takes me back to some of the most intense moments in the game, but they are all so beautiful on their own that I -not precisely much of a soundtrack kind of guy- bought the album and to the day it remains one of my top-3 favourite music albums of all times. Basically, we are talking about a mix between elaborated, oddball Angelo-Badalamenti-style experimental sounds with some fresh, radio-friendly, cutesy pop sounds; resulting in an unimaginably effective product, extremely likely to be enjoyable by anyone, be it a snotty, overly demanding musician looking for daring and innovative sounds or a lighthearted, casual, top-40 kind of listener.
On a side note, the albums for all the other SH games are also worth getting. Akira Yamaoka is undoubtedly one hell of a gifted musician.

Finally, the PC version of SH2 is the one sub-labeled "Restless Dreams" in the XBOX, which means we get to play a 30-minutes sub-game with Maria; getting a new and interesting perspective of a rather relevant part of the story.

The Bad

No good can come without drawbacks, and when it's THIS good, sadly it makes the flaws look worse.
In the first place, I was annoyed to see that as much care had been taken in every little detail in every aspect, while some things were just left aside. They are mostly little stupidities, but being so "small" makes them even more annoying, as one can presume they could've been taken rid of quite easily. First, the way James swaps weapons. There's no animation at all, the weapons just appear/disappear in his hands like magic. That's simply awful, considering the details at other levels (you can even see the movement of James' feet when he runs, Goddamnit!).
There are more of those, like the way the character turns around like if he was standing on a giant record player, without even moving a foot, or the HORRIBLE animation given to the roaches, not only the worst animation of the game, probably the worst animation EVER.

The AI does not exactly shine, and while that would be expected since we are fighting mostly zombies and their brains are probably rotten and all, then there comes Maria, who as I said joins James for a long part of the game... and what a BURDEN of a NPC she turns to be! I've never suffered a sidekick this idiotic in my entire videogaming life, not even the prisoners in the coin-op "Missing in Action" were this STUPID.
First, Maria won't defend herself at all. Oh OK, that's good, we can play the knight-in-shining-armour and protect the girl... but the girl not only doesn't fight back when attacked, she doesn't have any survival instinct at all! SHE WON'T EVEN RUN WHEN ATTACKED! SHE WILL JUST STAND THERE LETTING A GIVEN CREATURE JUST KILL HER WITH A BLANK EXPRESSION IN HER FACE! Even worse, in this kind of situation she will be most likely standing in your way, preventing you from killing the monster without hurting her. Because you can hurt her too. And you WILL, as the girl just seems to love to stand in the way of swinging melee weapons and flying bullets.

The action parts of the game can almost always be bypassed, and it is recommended to do so a couple of times, since there are way too many enemies around (especially on the streets), but one of the main reasons why you will rather do this is because how badly James sucks at using weapons -especially melee weapons. Hitting a creature with a wooden plank involves an animation that takes up to 2-3 seconds, that's not only annoying to withstand but more often than not gives the enemy enough time to attack before being hit.
Something similar happens in most of the boss fights. They go from stupidly easy to impossibly hard, passing through ridiculous situations like two guys standing face to face firing guns at each other without moving, for 30 seconds or so, until one dies. The "hard" difficulty mode just makes the enemies impossibly tough, resulting in the last boss battle taking no less than 40 minutes!! to beat.
Your worst enemy in this kind of situation -as in every H/S game- is the control interface. I know it has to suck because it comes from a console and all, but after the freedom of movement that games such as Oni gave me, getting stuck with this clumsy interface is VERY frustrating.

There's yet one more gameplay problem, and it's the camera: sometimes it will stand in front of James, preventing the player from seeing the enemies he's facing. You can switch it to James' back with a keystroke, but the animation is so painfully slow, that you can die twice before you even see what killed you.
And it will happen. A lot.
In this area, the first SH was WAY better.

In fact, while we are on the subject of comparing, I must say that while SH2 is in lots of ways superior to the first game, there are some things I really miss from the original, like the snow, the rain, and the effects of the original "Reversed Silent Hill", which looked MUCH more creepy than SH2's (with the streets becoming rusty grating over bottomless pits, and the monsters themselves getting "reversed"). I wonder why those kind of things were kept apart, it's a pity.
Also, the first game had A LOT of "little scary moments" that worked out GREATLY (remember the locker room in the school?), while SH2 barely has any.

Although I think the way the game decides which ending you are getting is brilliant, the problem is, there's no really a clear clue to what you should do in order to get each ending. If you don't have a walkthrough to guide you, it could turn pretty tricky to figure out, as none of the choices you make is any clear. Again, this was MUCH clearer in the first game.
For example, there's one ending in which James commits suicide (come on, you know this has to happen in at least one ending from the get-go). In order to get that ending to happen, the game will account whether or not you readed certain documents and examined a certain item. Now, it may be (and it was, actually) that I readed those documents just to find out what they were about. Not knowing what was written in there, I couldn't possibly figure that they would lead me to that ending.
Bluntly, the game decides that just for being curious about the contents of a piece of paper, I have suicidal tendencies.
Way to make a snap judgement.

Finally, there's a glitch that appears in every scene involving lip-synching that, however relatively small, IS noticeable. As I said, when a given scene looks this wonderful, a small persistent glitch looks much more annoying than ever.
It happens in the faces when the characters talk: "dots" and "lines" that flash every now and then around the lips in motion.

Ah, one last thing, dear console-to-PC porters: please be aware that there are PC monitors that can easily work at definitions well above 1024x768 and still have their refresh rate set at 75Hz and sometimes more, and DON'T CAP YOUR GODDAMNED GAMES AT A MAXIMUM OF 30 FRAMES PER SECOND!!! That's fine and maybe even necessary in a console because of the output of a normal TV, but you're killing the PC gamers forcing such a lame and nonsensical limitation. Some people have complained about arbitrary fraction-of-a-second stops during the game that are nothing else but the framerate suddenly dropping because of a given camerawork, and any drop below 30, however small and brief, means one thing: stuttering.
This is really annoying especially when you KNOW your hardware could very well run the game at 60 FPS or more, if they even gave it the chance.

The Bottom Line

One would think (although I know people that don't) that the most important part of a game is its gameplay. To quote OldManMurray's Erik, if you're looking for a story, go read a book, they have that field pretty much covered up. However, SH2 manages to effectively tell a story that I imagine wouldn't work out so well in any other media. This is one game in which the (many) gameplay issues (some of them inseparably related to the very genre the game belongs to) can be bypassed for a greater good.

I'm an unbearably snobbish bookworm. I'm even more unbearable with my picky choices of movies. I'm the kind of guy you don't want to be with when watching a popcorn flick or a comedy, unless you think you'd have enjoyed going to the movies with Ignatius Reilly. That said, I often dare to refer SH2 as the greatest story ever told.
It might (it does) have its share of flaws, and many of them manage to cripple the experience seriously (you can't possibly be immersed into the dire need to save a girl who doesn't even bother to look at the hellish abomination that's mercilessly beating her dead), but in the end, it remains a masterpiece in storytelling. It's simple but it's deep at the same time, it's clever, it's disturbing, it's emotional, and -above all- it doesn't crumble down in the end by resorting to adolescent class-B-movie type of explanations -a flaw so painfully common in videogame stories- but rather it treads a narrative path that even many big-time movies don't dare.

I recommend this game to anyone looking for gorgeous graphics, immersive horror atmosphere, and -very especially- a GREAT storytelling.