Letter from Silent Heaven: A Love Letter to Silent Hill 2

In the early infancy of the PlayStation 2, Team Silent, a small development team within Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (KCET), created a vision more so than a game. Celebrating its 20th year on 24th September, Silent Hill 2 is still an important piece of horror media and videogame history. There’s a reason for that.

To fully understand the picture, however, one must not go back to the game’s release on 24th September 2001, but instead September 1996, when Silent Hill began development under the then-unnamed Team Silent. Rumoured to be made of employees who had failed other projects, Team Silent had a rocky start and were tasked by Konami to create a Resident Evil clone for the PlayStation in an attempt to appeal to American videogame audiences. As time went on, the project made little progress until the small team made the decision to ignore Konami’s original orders and create a game of their own, a game beyond a clone.

To go beyond that of a normal horror game, Silent Hill had a focus on psychological horror. The goal was to make the player think, as well as fight. It was here that Team Silent first implemented the “fear of the unknown,” something that would lead to much bigger things in 2001. Silent Hill was released for the original PlayStation on 23rd February 1999 and would go on to be highly reviewed as well as high selling.

But this isn’t about that game.

Coming off of the high of the shocking success of Silent Hill and upping their numbers from around 20 to approximately 50, Team Silent quickly started the development of a sequel in June 1999. With times changing and the team not knowing about the upcoming and unannounced Xbox and GameCube, the decision was made to develop the game for the not-yet-released PlayStation 2; a good decision as the PlayStation 2 became and still remains the best-selling console of all time.

Silent Hill 2 would have a deeper connection with psychological horror while still heavily relying on “fear of the unknown,” the goal to leave the player clueless but also invested in the game’s plot and story revolving around a man receiving a letter from his late wife. The game would also keep its plot separate from that of Silent Hill, only sharing the same town as its predecessor and instead focusing on a more personal and emotional storyline instead of supernatural.

That isn’t to say Silent Hill 2 didn’t carry any supernatural elements, however. The game still kept the horrifying staples of the first, including mental monsters, the Otherworld, and the town’s magic itself, even adding more to the lore. The game carried a good mix of psychological and supernatural, as well as a mix of new and old. Paired with the higher graphic quality of this entry, these things built the recipe for commercial success. And it was a success! Silent Hill 2 received high critical acclaim, some even calling it the greatest game of all time (an exaggeration, but not a far off one), and eventually sold millions of copies.

But that’s not what made it important.

Spoilers from this point on.

At its core, Silent Hill 2 is a love story (or a “Love Psalm,” if you will-- I got you, Akira Yamaoka stans), despite how wrong it may be. The player plays as James Sunderland, a man who would do nearly anything to see his wife again, as proven by his actions. After receiving a letter from his late wife, Mary, three years after her death, James finds his way both to and through Silent Hill, a town he and his wife once visited before she was diagnosed with a mysterious terminal illness.

While the town was pleasant in their previous visit, Mary even thinking of it as one of her favourite places and asking James to take her back one day (“But you never did…”), it’s clear from the start that the town is not the same… At least, not for James. Following a long walk to Toluca Graveyard, James meets Angela, a skittish woman who warns him that there is “something wrong” with the town. James, however, simply does not care. He has a goal, after all. He barely even wants to be alive without Mary. He continues to the town of Silent Hill and begins to notice how wrong things truly are as the player comes upon the first enemy in the game.

Of course, the town holds nothing good for James and since you’ve read past the spoiler warning, I’ll assume you know why.

James isn’t brought to Silent Hill by his wife but instead by his guilt and Mary Shepherd-Sunderland doesn’t die from an illness but instead a pillow held by her husband only a few days before. It’s harrowing. It’s shocking. It’s even painful, because you, the player, have been controlling this kind of goofy, well-meaning widower just to find out he’s been a murderer all along. And that isn’t to say there aren’t hints! In fact, a second playthrough of the game is almost necessary once you have this information.

But the important thing to also recognise is that somehow James isn’t a bad man. A conflicted man, a man who made mistakes, a murderer (of his wife, no less), but he isn’t a bad man. He’s human and this videogame contains the shades of grey that one only sees in human life and rarely in media. James certainly isn’t the hero in his story, but he isn’t the villain either. In fact, no one is. Every character in the game is neither good nor evil, all teetering the fine line in between for a variety of reasons.

That isn’t an exaggeration either. Each character possesses realistic traits, good and bad, and is dealing with situations that there are few answers to, with the exception of Laura, an eight-year-old girl who can be relatively annoying but isn’t dealing with such situations and cannot see the monsters in the town. Angela, whom we met earlier at the cemetery, is dealing with her own guilt after murdering her father and brother while they were sexually abusing her. Meanwhile, Eddie, a man in his twenties with an itchy trigger finger and a slight knack for murder and denying things, is dealing with the psychological effects of being bullied his whole life.

Even Mary, the object of James’ affection, had turned to verbally abusing and emasculating James towards the end of her life due to the stress and fear that comes with terminal illness, something the player gets to hear themselves both in the long hallway at the end of the game and personally through the dialogue with Maria, who is hinted (but never officially stated) to be a physical manifestation Silent Hill has made of James’ subconscious feelings regarding his wife. One could say Maria was Born from a Wish. Despite being a manifestation, however, Maria carries her own feelings, including jealousy and the pain of being quite literally made for someone who isn’t looking for her but another her.

Silent Hill 2 truly excels in this area, creating humans instead of characters and putting them in real-life situations while still placing them in a monstrous town. The game handles topics like abuse and suicide with care while still giving the player a large stick to hit monsters with and a gun to shoot. The ability to mix psychological and physical horror perfectly is such a rarity to see in both videogames and horror as a whole, yet this game managed to do it in the early PlayStation 2 era, an era where some games might as well have been PlayStation 1 games and a time where the full capabilities of the PlayStation 2 were still unknown. That’s a miracle. Silent Hill 2 is a miracle.

Silent Hill 2 is a masterpiece.

Do you have any opinions on Silent Hill 2? I’d absolutely love to hear them, so feel free to voice them in the comment box below!