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Silent Hill Anecdote #27: We were rummaging around a new and used games/comic shop in Tokyo last summer, one with lots of action figures on display, 'swimsuit' calendars and looping videos featuring the virtual cheesecake of Dead or Alive Volleyball, and a large and somehow arrogant-looking fellow working the counter. You just knew he was a jaded, hardcore gamer nerd, the kind of guy who'd sneer if he caught you playing a demo game on easy. We somehow got talking about the merits of Silent Hill 2. He looked at us, shook his head a little too slowly, and said (in surprisingly perfect and colloquial English): "No. No, I couldn't hang with that game at all." We were a little shocked - enough, in fact, to sort of blurt: "What, are you kidding? You thought it sucked?"

"Oh, no, it was very good." he said. "I just had to stop playing it. It was giving me all these really messed-up dreams."

If you haven't yet played the console versions, here's the setup: Silent Hill 2 puts players in the shoes of James Sunderland, a 30-something man whose life is upended when he receives a letter from his wife Mary, urging him to meet her in the resort town Silent Hill - a place of many memories and emotions shared between the two. The brief, intimate urgency of this reunion-summons would be the stuff of bittersweet love songs if it weren't for one near-unspeakable fact: Mary Sunderland has been dead for three years now, victim to an unspecified wasting affliction which James can only think of as "that damn disease." James is heartsick, and certainly confused, but not completely stupid; at some level, he knows that to believe the letter is a sick folly, to answer it a form of madness. And yet -- torn, desperate and numb -- he makes his way to Silent Hill anyway.

But something has gone eerily and horribly wrong in Silent Hill. The town is deserted (save a scattered handful of troubled people James can encounter). Roads are blocked, surreally shorn off, or in some cases disconnected from reality altogether. More-or-less complete town maps are available -- no minimap though; you must constantly pause and peruse the inventory screens to reorient yourself, but at least James makes handy marks to notate points of interest -- and although many of the town's buildings are simply locked, many others are not.

Silent Hill 2 requires serious exploration, and in fact one building is an entire three-story complex, with individual apartments to check out on each floor. The fog-shrouded streets are alive and crawling with things that aren't, and shouldn't be. The town's pervasive silence is broken only by James' echoing footfalls or the teeth-grating shriek of his malfunctioning pocket radio (which inexplicably blares warning static whenever some monstrosity approaches from the mist); before long, even the player's own sense of time and location begin to misfire, landing James in a bleak and nasty place where the town's dark past begins to bleed through into the canvas of the present.

And we do mean "bleed." They don't call it "survival horror" for nothing, and soon James has two choices: get busy killing or get busy dying. James has, well, Things coming after him - some of them look a little like inside-out dogs and some of them look a bit like wet mannequins with too many legs. But some of them don't look much like anything at all, which can be its own special kind of disturbing. Between the somehow hysterical shriek of James' kaput radio and his attempts to bludgeon, stomp and shotgun things than often cannot even be identified, Silent Hill 2 has a uniquely nightmarish feel.

Gamers spoiled with first-person combat interfaces may find the removed third-person combat "nightmarish" in an entirely different way, but the game's aiming scheme allows James to constantly realign himself with gun drawn to any incoming threat. In the game's Hard puzzle/action modes -- which is the only proper way to play the game -- ammunition is scarce and the rounds you expend early in the game you will sorely miss later on. Happily and logically, Silent Hill 2 seems to hinge on a basic philosophical stance on danger, which we find supremely sound: RUN.

Even with such clear thinking, there will be times when you're cornered and have to fight - but before then, why ask for trouble? True, this approach does make you a sissy... but if the sissy in question is still alive when all the blood dries and the dust settles at the end of the game (and with a few rounds left in the clip to boot), he can make up whole-cloth the saga of Silent Hill any damn way he pleases, can't he? Damn straight.

Unlike Resident Evil, Silent Hill 2's camera is not fixed, and it follows James as he makes his way down Silent Hill's streets or through the interiors of its buildings. The control scheme translates to the PC, but it's not ideal - if you've got a console-style controller for use with your computer, Silent Hill 2 is the place to use it.

Also as with the Xbox version, the PC version allows players to disable the game's noise filter effect from the get-go, instead of forcing the player to beat the game first. It's a coin-toss: With the filter effect off, the game's great visuals become cleaner, more distinct; with the filter enabled, everything in Silent Hill takes on a slightly scratchy, grainy look that adds to the game's already nightmarish feel.

Convenient key-binding saves a lot of repeated trips to game-pause screens for inventory purposes. On the whole, Silent Hill 2 has survived the trip to PC Land in excellent shape. The voice acting in the excellent-looking cinematic bits still often tends toward the wooden and stilted, but it maintains the mood; in other words, there's none of that drama breaking unintentional hilarity that plagued the first Resident Evil. In fact, there just aren't a lot of yucks to go around in Silent Hill; even the game's one moment of definite humor is rather sick and visceral. Again, trust us - you'll know it when you see it.

As an added bonus, albeit a small one, the PC version includes a mini-scenario, separate from the main game, playable as... well, as somebody who's not James. We don't want to ruin any more good bits than a decent review forces us to. It's not a very long addition, but it's a nice touch taken (again) from the Xbox version. In fact, there's really nothing at all new here, except for the fact that PC gamers can finally explore Silent Hill 2. Only SH2's relative lateness and nothing-new status keeps it from getting our highest score.

But don't worry about any of that. You're not here for the humor, or to whine about having a minimap, or to quibble about how a few lines of dialogue could have been improved, or to worry that you have to take an extra second to aim your gun. You're here, presumably, to be creeped out by evocative visuals, very wrong-looking monstrosities, a couple of good old-fashioned cheap-jack scares, and a dark, disturbing, mature story that more sensitive gamers may find themselves reviewing in their heads long after the PC and the lights go off. If Silent Hill 2 is your first PC horror game, then congrats -- and woe -- to you.

Pleasant dreams.

Review By GamesDomain