What Made Silent Hill 2 Great and Why the Devs Don't Get It

[Evonisia]

Silent Hill 2 is the amazing game? It was simply an extension of the greatness that was Silent Hill 1, which I considered one of the best designed horror games of all time. Because despite never playing it when I was young, despite the extremely outdated graphics trying to damage my interest, it still is able to scare me.

I'm currently playing through Silent Hill 1 (well, now that I got myself a PS1 memory card anyway) and I have to say that while I'm not scared by this franchise (I just think they're good games with good pretty much everything but graphics and combat), Silent Hill 1 was the closest one to scaring me. I think there's something about the monsters and how some seem not interested while others try to hunt you down. It gives me the impression that this world is conflicted with even what it wants to do because Harry isn't the focused on person in this scenario.

 

[V4Viewtiful]

Recently I watched a couple videos of PT and it honestly never scared or even startled me. As someone who watches a lot of horror games it was basically all stuff I'd seen done before in those indie horror games. There were mildly disturbing parts but that's all they were, nothing made me jolt in my chair or put me on edge....it was just a lot of "ah yeah, this old trick".

That's not always the case, horror isn't just about scares but making you feel uncomfortable or just uneasy (wait, doesn't that mean the same thing). if either is achieved the horror works, Alien never scared me but it made me uncomfortable.

Sometimes its a matter of perspective but neither has to be right.

 

[ObsidianJones_v1legacy]

Silent Hill 2 is done.

The thing that developers are failing to understand is that you can't recreate an amazing experience. The best you can do is hearken back to Nostalgia.

Playing Silent Hill One first and then Two, what made the game revolutionary for me that it wasn't a Sequel to me. It brought about ideas that were more substantial to me than just "Spooky Town has my daughter"

It made "Spooky Town has a mind of its own and it's fucking with me"

Through my playthrough, I literally wondered if my Wife in the game was even real. So many conflicting ideas about what was happening made me wonder almost anything about the game. If these people (Eddie, Laura) are wrong and the town is showing them different things, why should I believe my thoughts are real? What if this was just a large game (no pun intended) for the jollies of the newly Sentient Silent Hill? That messed with my mind hardcore.

We can't be messed with like that any more. We have definitive answers of what happened (Thanks Silent Hill: The Room! YOU ARE TEARING ME APART!!!!). There is no more guessing. That's it.

When Developers set their sights to recreate, they look away from Innovate. That's what the Silent Hill Series did best, I feel. Resident Evil is where I cut my teeth on Survival Horror. Then Dino Crisis, Clock Tower, Parasite Eve... the stock trope of "There is a big bad thing, avoid it" of survival horror ran old. Silent Hill... Silent Hill 2 made everything feel new. Not Silent Hill 1, mind you. It was creepy, but I had the overall arc of get my daughter. From the get go of Silent Hill 2, the first thing you face is the question "How can I recently get a letter from my dead wife who passed on 3 years ago?"

Then questions and uncertainty and conflicting information drove you more and more to find out the truth while really being unclear what is it that you're actually seeing. That is an experience that I had once. It's an experience I do not know if I'll have again. That's why re-create needs to be put to rest, and now we need to innovate again.

 

[DirgeNovak]

Excellent write-up, except for the fact that you forget all post-SH4 developers (until now) have been small unknown western studios. It's not the original SH devs that don't understand SH, it's the newer ones. (Though I'll agree making 3 and a bit of 4 about that stupid fucking cult was a mistake on Team Silent's part).

I agree with all your points on what made Silent Hill 2 so amazing, but I don't want Silent Hills to be another SH2.

On the "inner demons" bit: it would be unbelievably dumb if Silent Hills made it about personal demons, because we're all expecting it. Especially if they undersand how to make good monster design, we could just take a look at the monsters and guess what horrible thing the protagonist has done to deserve getting Silent Hilled. I want the game to surprise me. Since it's (most likely) a complete reboot, they can do whatever they want too.

The rest of your points is perfect, though. Don't bring the fucking cult back, focus on atmostphere rather than difficulty, make combat a last resort thing you won't want to do, and lets QTEs die in a fire.

 

[WickedLordJasper]

I'll be honest: I won Silent Hill 2, but until I read this I had no idea this was what it was about. It was all a big confusing blur to me, and I ended it without knowing what had happened. Maybe after playing the original I'd gotten a bad impression of the series: Silent Hill 1 purposely obfuscated its story and confused the player for the sole purpose of making things seem confusing. All I remember was "mysterious" characters flapping their gums and refusing to give me a straight answer to anything.

 

[Callate]

I agree with most of what Shamus has to say, but I feel a need to note a couple of things.

While the "nurses" in SH2 seem to be what's become iconic for the series, it's the "patients" that actually creeped me out. It's not the visual design, per se, but the way they move and the sounds that they make when they do- like some sort of wigged-out wind-up toy being filmed at a different frame rate than anything else, making them erratic, unpredictable and unreal. There are some decent monster designs throughout the series, but that's by far my favorite.

Also, given the history of Silent Hill that gets explained, I'm inclined to think of "Pyramid Head" as something a little more than simply a monster conjured out of James's unconscious. They're executioners out of some sort of strange Civil-War era prison. I certainly grasp that their presence is tied into his need to punish himself, but I also have to imagine that they could have taken another form if his presence was all there was to their existence.

...Which is not to say, having themselves become "iconic", that they haven't been handled in an incredibly ham-handed manner by other entries in the franchise.

As far as the combat goes, yeah, it wasn't hard, but it had a wonderfully sickening sort of "Oh, are you sure they're dead? Maybe you should hit them again. Yeah. Feel better about yourself, now, tough guy?" sense to it.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'd like to point out that Silent Hill always had health bars, maps and ammo count... all you had to do to go check on them was hit pause. And with the exception of Silent Hill 4: The Room, which displays a health bar (complete with a power gauge and an on-screen inventory), every other game has been completely HUD-free. Likewise, the only game I recall having anything close to a QTE scheme was Silent Hill: Origins, and even that was pretty unintrusive. And last but not least... Silent Hill 3, 4 and Shattered Memories are good games. Not "as good" as SH2 and SH3 is somewhat bogged down by the cult thing, yes. But still good games.

 

[Therumancer]

Shamus you can get a look at what the Kojima/Del Toro team's style is going to look like through "P.T." or "Playable Teaser".

Here is a Let's Play of it if your interested

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0B7rgDikl0k

Their style seems to be a little different, and their big finale was a rather obtuse puzzle that has some people concerned about where the game might be going. But basically you can see their take on Silent Hill there.

-

That said, on the subject itself I'm going to have to disagree with Shamus on most points. The overall storyline of Silent Hill revolves around that cult and the original empowering force they set loose (the primary manifestation of which is destroyed at the end of SH1). The beauty of where they went with this is that "Silent Hill" can manifest in different ways, it can be a psychological torment aimed at the people who wind up there, or it can be someone caught in someone else's psychological torment, or it can be general malevolence leftover from the energies gathered there. Silent Hill is basically a giant pit of darkness where it can be used to tell almost any kind of a story.

The thing about Silent Hill 2 is that it was developed largely before the game industry became concerned about being politically correct and not offending anyone or pushing things too far. When the PS-2 was new and the Demo for "Silent Hill 2" was released it got a lot of criticism because of the continued use of the rogues gallery from the first game, including the flayed killer kiddies, which you could bludgeon to death. SH2 was edited for the sake of moral crusaders screaming "oh think of the children" (literally), but a good portion of the storyline and set up remained more or less untouched. Later games in the series were apparently developed from a business perspective where they set out first and foremost not to offend anyone, and the result was to continually recycle the same basic stuff, and take as few risks as possible, turning it into a sort of kiddie spook house in video game form.

It should also be noted that some of the rogue's gallery from the first game was still recycled (after all, why wouldn't these creatures still be around?) and not as totally psychological as many people seem to think, what's more there is no real reason why what it drew from a specific person that worked, like say Pyramid Head (who is huge and intimidating) wouldn't be kept around the same way other monsters were. A lot of people not thinking things through and who overrate the second game, tend to be dismissive of the third+ game for re-using past elements without realizing that the second game reused them as well.

I honestly do not think combat is what hurts horror games, indeed, I find that not having combat in many cases actually tends to reduce the experience and the tension because it becomes increasingly silly, a forced stealth section or whatever is even worse than being able to kill a monster, and frankly if a monster has a physical prescence (ie it's not an intangible spirit or whatever) by rights you should be able to kill it. The trick is to make everything freaky enough where simply killing a monster doesn't change how messed up the whole situation is. The problem of course being that game developers don't want to take the risks in actually trying to do something creepy and bizzare enough to get horror-experience reaction from jaded fans... and really that's part of the factor as well, if you already played "Silent Hill 2" and are a genera fan, you've already become used to their brand of creepy, with nobody raising the bar due to already having slammed into complaints by moralists and not being willing to push ahead anyway, everything just kind of stayed at the same basic level and it's all become about re-presenting the same exact stuff.

At any rate, it remains to be seen if "Silent Hills" and "The Evil Within" will succeed in creating a new generation of high-budget horror games. A lot depends on whether they are made for horror fans, or if they are created for a general audience and setting out to do the expected things without offending anyone.

At any rate, as I pointed out above, if you want to see the new version of Silent Hills check out the link above (apparently P.T. is on PS-4). I used that particular let's play link because the final solution is in a second link under the video which shows that obtuse puzzle being solved (how you would ever figure that out is beyond me) and then the brief trailer that the whole playable teaser leads up to.

 

[lacktheknack]

That's why I liked Silent Hill 3's approach to the monster design. It wasn't based around Heather, it was based around motherhood and sexuality (Heather was just the unfortunate person who was deemed to be the mother).

To be fair, heavily using a terrifying rendition of motherhood and sexuality in a game featuring a 17-year-old girl is no accident.

One of the reasons I love SH3 so much is because it took a bunch of fears that I had as a teen (getting locked away from the rest of the world, getting lost and unable to find my way home, sexual maturation, being abused by my religious affiliation, etc) and played with them. SH3 struck really close to home with me, and I can't imagine that 16-year-old me was really much different than 17-year-old Heather.

Plus, well, most theories think the monster/world design WAS based around Heather, what with her being Alessa's essence and all.

 

[Nurb]

This makes some good points.

It also hints at why Silent Hills won't be the game we're looking for either. A film director, the least subtle writer in games, and a TV presence aren't going to fix the problems, they're just name recognition.

The Playable Teaser that was released had some good atmospheric horror elements in it, but the convoluted puzzle to "finish" the teaser turned into a checklist you had to focus on, which immediately makes the horror turn into an annoyance and takes you out of the game.

I was watching Kim and Hannah play it on Yogscast, and they enjoyed it up until they had to find a way to get to the end, which required looking up a list of tasks from the internet and searching for items and cues in game, so whenever the wife's goans started playing it annoyed them. Kim even got slightly frustrated at it and shouted "JUST SHUT UP, LADY!". It was funny, but demonstrates how quickly devs forget what makes good tension and horror.

 

[Evonisia]

Snip

Yeah it makes sense, though personally I think the monster design is based around sexuality and motherhood, and the world itself and the major encounters are built around Heather and her role in the plot, especially the prelude to the final boss

Spoiler

where Heather enters a cracked, forcefully opened hole to enter a large round area in which she kills the creation she has been harbouring in her womb for most of the game before it can grow into something worse.

Well I say this in comparison to Pyramid Head being James' desire for self punishment or the Nurses representing his sexual frustration due to the illness. The penis/vagina hybrid monster probably wasn't meant to represent what happens to Heather early on in the game or her status later on. Though I guess the Nurses could be

Spoiler

Alessa's carers, like in the first game

And the missionary type monster is obviously meant to be like the boss from before when dribble dribble dribble.

But I won't go further into the list of monsters.

 

[Therumancer]

I guess it always comes down to what the developer understands as horror. It could be that revolting and uncomfortable feeling induced by violent, loud and gory imagery, or that disturbing and panic inducing feeling from your mind simply not knowing what's happening and filling in the blanks with the worst it can come up with. I've never played Silent Hill 2, but it clearly went for the second version. I think in an interactive medium it's the most effective one, since you don't really have complete control of when and how the player will find your "horror setpieces" so you let them passively do most of the heavy lifting. However, it doesn't do great "trailers" to show off, so many developers go for the first version. It's not flashy enough. The down side is that for that "horror" to work you need heavily scripted and guided environments, which gameplay wise becomes limiting and boring.

For the record, I though the Sonic games 1 to 4 (or 3 extended, if you see Sonic and Knuckles as that) were great. They all shared the same design philosophy and overall feeling. It's aftwards that it all went weird. So it wasn't just one flash in the pan, it was a reliable construct that got levelled over the years.

I personally do not think it has to be an either/or relationship between "violent, loud, and gory imagery" and "fear of the unknown" you can have both of those things together. I've already more or less explained where I think the series went wrong. I think a good part of the problem is they became afraid to upset people, which is sort of the point of horror games, and as a result it became "mommy horror" so to speak, full of recycled spook-house tropes that largely do the expected, but don't go out of their way to be especially shocking, most of the "original" stuff are things they had developed from the very beginning and keep-reusing.

I've always suspected a big part of why the game industry pronounced that survival horror was dead was because it realized it wouldn't be able to make good horror games without offending people, and giving the anti-video games movement more fuel. We're seeing an attempt to bring them back, due to the way indie developers have sort or resurrected them, but at the same time indie developers are small enough to not get much fire, and there is only so much they can do with their limited resources. In bringing back horror games to the big time, it remains to be see if the industry is going to be willing to push the envelope, and of course embrace a niche genera that by definition will never be for everyone and cannot be judged by the success of titles like "Call Of Duty".

That said, I think all of the "Silent Hill" games have had something going for them, and that even includes "Book Of Memories" but the quality does vary greatly.

 

[Nazrel]

Silent Hill isn't about monsters, it's about inner demons

No, it isn't. Silent Hill is about being stuck in someone else's nightmare. The idea is that monsters are supposed to be just as foreign to the main character as it is to us. It is only until you understand the 'villian' of game that you understand what these monsters could be and what they represent.

You are in error.

Here is a link to the translation of the book of lost memories, the official guide to silent hill that was released after silent hill 3.

http://www.translatedmemories.com/

Here is a link to a page specifically saying you're wrong.

http://www.translatedmemories.com/bookpgs/Pg110-111.jpg

Only in the first one is the other world not the main protagonists (in the first three), and Alissa was not a villain.

As for 4, it was originally conceived as a non-silent hill game, but they decided to tack on the title and some superficial connections for name recognition.

In regards to that series you linked; I had started watching that series before but they kept getting stuff wrong. I know that they were wrong; the book say's so.

 

[Sylocat]

Interesting point about dying and difficulty and immersion. Death certainly carries more meaning when it hasn't happened yet.

As Don Juan said, "It is not death that matters, but the fear of death." Of course, he was talking about something completely different and I'm going to go to bed now because it's been too long of a day and week.

 

[Casual Shinji]

Turning the series into an 'inner demons' franchise with a new crazy person each entry would just get tiring and predictable. "Gee, I wonder if he/she has a dark secret which will reveal itself near the end."

The cool thing about the first 4 Silent Hill's is that they're different from eachother. SH2 was arguably the best, but that doesn't mean the more chaotic fear of SH1 and 3 didn't have their own merrit. I certainly wouldn't want SH2 to become some sort of template.

 

[Tarfeather]

Shamus, it is also possible that you don't get what SH2 is about, and thus you have the impression that nobody, even the original creators, "gets it". I don't really feel that SH2's story is all that impressive, it's actually very similar to other grim Japanese story-telling(a lot of which has found absolutely no appreciation in the west). I think, instead, what makes a lot of people like SH2 so much, is how much it leaves to the player's interpretation/imagination, while giving very solid building blocks with lots of careful atmosphere.

Take the "leap of faith" sections, for instance. I really think they're primarily a device of level design: The whole level is about "descending" and "entering ever more tight, restrained places". If the devs had then tried to tell the player specifically what this is supposed to represent, you'd probably have been disappointed. However, they didn't. They left it up to the player's interpretation. I think that's what makes it so great. Every player can associate this level with >their own personal< thoughts and life experiences.

In other words, the "good choice" that SH2 made, was the *lack of story*(to a large extent). I haven't played the later games, but I can very well believe that other teams didn't really "understand" this(after all, normally you can't expect the mainstream to come up with their own stories to fill in the blanks).

 

[Piorn]

Not a Silent Hill fan, but we see it more and more frequent how sequels just lift elements or motifs wholesale from the previous titles and apply them without realizing what they're about, I agree.
Whether it's Star Wars' overuse of Lightsabers, Bioshock Infinite's terribly out of place Vigors, or the Horror/stealth gameplay mechanics from RE6/MGS4 respectively, that are completely unfit for the kind of game they are i.e. 3rd person shooters.
It often feels like these things were not made by a human, but some cynical machine that takes a few good parts everyone says he liked, and keeps beating people with it until they've lost all meaning.

 

[The Feast]

At first, I was starting to agree. Then, I realize that Homecoming and Downpour are doing exactly what Silent Hill 2 have done, and the wanted list seems to completely missing the point. In my opinion, the concepts of the newer Silent Hill games can be great if the execution done right, but Homecoming feels like 100% copy pasting SH2 (Even the monsters) and Downpour doesn't feel like a game that wanted to top SH1, 2 and 3. Feels like a DLC to be honest.

Even Silent Hill 4 did something different from three early Silent Hill games, but of course, that clunkyness seems to be the problem of SH4. Safe to say, the brains of the original need to be applied if they wanted to have that FEEL again. The damned Silent Hill movie adaptations does not even get the point. They need to make a female protagonist to replace Harry Mason? Come on, even guys need to be afraid and that's not the only reason why the movie sucks.

In the end of the day, if they can make a better Silent Hill game, they need to look like they put an effort to it. That's what the first three games feel like.

 

[NemotheElvenPanda]

The P.T. demo answers this article best. For the past six iterations of the Silent Hill series, its all be reattempts on trying to get the same experience with different technology, people, characters, and themes. It's time for something new and different from the past three generations. Silent Hill 2 is an amazing game, but so is Silent Hill 1, Silent Hill 3, and arguably Silent Hill 4. They all had their own interesting mechanics, story, characters, and take on the town that worked and gave people what they were looking for. Trying to hit the same feel over and over again is just carbon copying. It limits creativity and any new life into the franchise. Obviously there should be a common thread tying all the games together such as vulnerability, psychoanalysis, radios and flashlights, etc., but you just can't expect to create a original experience. That's what makes it original.