Silent Hill is one of my favorite franchises, not only regarding video games, it´s a franchise which I have a lot of appreciation and respect, which is not weird at all, since its importance in the videogame industry is undeniable. I almost completed every game on the franchise, that was a time ago, so I decided to replay the franchise again. I replayed the first Silent Hill game and I shared my thoughts on the plattform, I have to admit that it was a pretty good experience replaying said game again. This time, I decided to replay Silent Hill 2, one of my favorite video games of all my life, and replaying it again was a most interesting experience due to certain factors.
To be honest, I've completed Silent Hill 2 more times than I'd like to admit so in order to make things more interesting, I've opted this time to play it on the highest difficulty, which is quite masochistic but I wanted to try something new. Well, even though I love Silent Hill 2, I have to admit a couple of things, Silent Hill 2 tends to be pretty easy on normal mode, once you get used to it, the game becomes a chill walk through the park, considering how easy it´s to find ammunition and medicine kits in this game, which breaks a little bit with the fact that it´s a survival horror game.
The enemies hit very hard, a single touch and you already have your health in red, now it's more difficult to find medicine kits so easily, I don't know if I played badly or didn't search well, but it´s really hard to find medicine now. As soon as an enemy hits you, your health is greatly reduced, so you have to use the aid kits, which leaves you with nothing, unless you are Rambo and evade the enemies in the best way possible all the time. You have to think often if it's really a good idea to kill an enemy or if it´s better just to run, I was forced to run away from encounters where there were three or more enemies in the same room.
Personally, I have never given much importance to the small flashlights in Silent Hill, when I am given one, I keep it on until the end of the game, it´s well known that when the flashlight is turned on, it attracts enemies and tells them your location, in normal mode, that never affected me. The nice thing about playing it in hard mode is that I was forced to follow the rules of the game and play with the flashlight off, only turning it on at certain situations, the game is way scarier like this, it´s hard to see when there is no light.
Not everything is that cool, personally I felt that due to the level design and the limitations of the time, some parts of the games are hellish when played it on hard, this is coming from someone who is pretty tolerant with retro games, in order to be understood, I am going to give an example.
There is a part of the game where you escort a character called Maria, through a narrow corridor, a monster called Pyramid Head is chasing both Maria and you, your task in this particular situation is to take Maria and yourself at the end of the corridor, where there is an elevator. When you play this on Normal mode, well, it's not a big deal, all you have to do is to run to the end of the corridor with Maria and that's it, Pyramid Head isn't fast enough to catch up with them (if you're careless, it does), this totally changes in hard mode....
Pyramid Head transforms into Sonic itself, it becomes so fast and in less than a second it´s already attacking Maria, this would not be a problem, but you have to take into account many things, you have to shoot Pyramid Head a certain number of times to make it a bit stunned, in that little time, you have to run as far as you can, until Pyramid Head chases you again. I think it's obvious to mention but shooting Pyramid Head in this small space is awful, first of all, James doesn´t aim well, you are going to kill Maria by accident a lot of times and get a Game Over, just with a single bullet. Also, if Maria gets hit by Pyramid Head 3-4 times, she´ll die, which means game over.
Maria's AI sucks, when she sees you're going to shoot and she's in the middle, she doesn't do anything, she just waits there to get shot, sometimes she just moves for no reason and takes a bullet, I know maybe it doesn't sound that complicated but this section on hard mode is the worst thing ever because of the corridor and Maria's AI. When you play this part on normal mode, it really feels a lot of tension and fear, but on hard mode...I couldn't help but feel stress and frustration.
Silent Hill 2 on hard mode was a nightmare (and I absolutely loved that xddd), I had a pretty bad time, especially in the initial areas like the Apartment or the Hospital, then I got used to it, but even so, it continued to be a complicated experience, despite everything, I don't regret playing it this way, I had a lot of fun and honestly, Silent Hill 2 seems more like a Survival Horror game when you play it this way, I'd say it's the perfect way to play it. Apart from this, I also played Born From a Wish, I wanted to finish it but to my bad luck, the game crashes near the end, so too bad for me. I really liked the house´s designs and there are certain frames that I really liked.
I decided to play it again to get the Leave ending, because in my previous run I got the In Water ending, I lowered the difficulty to normal this time because I didn´t have to lose the small mental stability I have, but I challenged myself to finish the game in less than five hours and just saving once, I was able to do it tho, partly because after finishing the game once, you are given a chainsaw, which is slow but insta kill enemies.
Silent Hill 2 is a video game that has aged like wine, I won't say it's the perfect game but it´s playable for today standars and it looks pretty good, the sound design is spectacular, as the art direction, its atmosphere is amazing and I personally loved that the game gets darker the further you go, there is a certain part of the game where you have to descend into the depths which is like a metaphor for the player falling to the depths of James Sunderland's psyche, the deeper you fall, the darker and more sinister the game gets, as well as how spectacular the narrative and its characters are. The best survival horror in history, they don't make games like this anymore nowadays.
All of the screenshots were taken by me