As I type this, I am eagerly awaiting the delivery of my PS5 copy of the Silent Hill 2 remake. I was skeptical when this was first announced, but after playing the Resident Evil 4 remake a while back — I still haven’t actually played the original — I have a bit more faith that a modern developer can do justice to a PS2-era classic.
I absolutely adore the original Silent Hill 2, and I have some vivid memories attached to it.
It was my third year at university, and I was living in a nice but relatively pokey house in the middle of “the Flowers estate”, also known as “the dodgy bit of Bassett” in Southampton.
The house was quite a find; its rent was incredibly reasonable (like, in the region of £30-something a week, compared to our previous year’s shithole that had been £57 a week) and the house was in, frankly, amazing condition for something that was being rented out to students. So I, my friend’s girlfriend and our perpetually absent housemate snapped it up. (Seriously. She didn’t stay a single night in that house during our entire year there. Her room just sat completely empty, but she dutifully paid her rent and bills on time every month from… somewhere. To this day I have no idea what the deal was.)
If you’re wondering why I was living with my friend’s girlfriend, it’s because she also happened to be my friend; I refer to her as “my friend’s girlfriend” because I knew my friend, the boyfriend in question, first. He was one of my best pals in the latter years of secondary school and sixth form, as it happens. He was studying in Reading and subsequently in the Netherlands, whereas she was studying in Southampton, so when it came to time for everyone to find a place to stay in their second year, we decided to team up and help each other out, since both of our respective groups of friends had sorted themselves out without us.
As it transpired, while he was in the Netherlands he got super into weed (like, proper addicted to it, to a degree it was severely affecting his behaviour) and became kind of abusive and horrible, so he stopped being both my friend and my friend’s girlfriend at some point during that period. You’d think this might have made things a bit awkward, but no, she appreciated having me as a non-judgemental confidant; she knew that despite chappy being a good friend from school days, I wasn’t going to side with him being a complete drug-addled tool to her. And this wasn’t a “nice guy” thing in the hopes of getting some either; I liked the lady in question, but just as a pal, and I’m sure the feeling was mutual. Just so we’re clear on that note. I did fancy our perpetually absent housemate, though, after meeting her once. But then I never saw her again, so that was that.
Anyway, this was supposed to be about Silent Hill 2. One day, some pals from back home — former school friends again — came by this very house to visit for a few days. We did the usual things you do when getting together with friends in your early 20s: we got drunk, we ordered takeaway curry, we repaired a Sega Saturn controller using only a cotton bud and a bottle of cheap vodka. You know, the usual.
One of these friends was someone who always bought the “big” new games the moment they came out, and this time was no exception; he’d brought his shiny new copy of Silent Hill 2 along with him. We’d all enjoyed the first Silent Hill while we were still at school, so we were excited at the prospect of the sequel, intending to play it through together.
What actually happened is that my two friends fell asleep, full of curry, vodka and alcopops, while I played through the entire thing in a single night, surrounded by the increasingly fragrant remnants of our takeaway and the dregs of the bottles we’d glugged our way through. I got the “In Water” ending. And I was blown away.
My friends and I had already become convinced that video games could absolutely be art after playing Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid, but there was something about Silent Hill 2 that even my undergraduate self could tell was truly special. This was a game that was about far more than just what was being depicted on screen and explicitly said. This was a game where the horror was not about scary monsters and loud noises — though both had a presence — but rather about the lurking horror and gradual realisation of psychological trauma.
It was around this time in my life that I first started learning about mental health, and particularly depression. A young woman with whom I was particularly intimate was the first person with depression that I’d really had close contact with, and she was happy to talk about and explain things to me. It helped me a great deal; it helped me to understand that I, too, had been suffering from it for quite some time and just hadn’t really had the words or the knowledge to be able to express that.
That might sound silly these days, when pretty much everyone on the Internet is self-diagnosing their own litany of mental health conditions on a daily basis, but this was 2001, we were still using dial-up Internet and social media hadn’t been invented. So it was all very new to me, and while it was a bit bleak, it was also interesting. The workings of the mind had always fascinated me — my creative writing projects for GCSE and A-Level English had always involved a heavy psychological component — and finally getting a sense that I was starting to understand why I sometimes felt the way I did was a revelation.
Silent Hill 2, dealing with a lot of heavy themes concerning mental health, came at exactly the right time for me. It came at a time where I was learning to understand and recognise these feelings and how different people deal with them, and living through James Sunderland’s traumatic experiences on the screen of my 27-inch CRT telly in the lounge was oddly cathartic. It was one of a few games from the period that I felt really spoke to me, and it’s continued to occupy an important space in my head ever since.
It’s a game that I’ve replayed and loved many times over the years, so I’m excited to see what looks set to be a genuinely interesting but respectful take on it with the new game. Whether it will recapture that same magic remains to be seen, but having heard some thoughts on it from people who have already played it, and whose opinions I respect, I feel positive about what I’m about to head into.
Now I just have to wait for the dang thing to arrive. Come on, Argos!
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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