One neat aspect of Boss Fight books is that despite their all having the same basic premise, the exact content of these books differs widely from author to author, and the Silent Hill 2 book by Mike Drucker is no exception. As expected, the book deals with the historical context and production of Silent Hill 2. But unusually for a Boss Fight book, the Silent Hill 2 text is mostly concerned with the game’s theoretical interpretation. Drucker regularly makes reference to articles in academic journals to discuss the psychological complexity of Silent Hill 2, a game with the admittedly bewildering premise of (spoiler alert)-
How you play a weird guy who apparently killed his own wife and is wandering around the nightmarish ruins of a town which might or might not just be a suicidal hallucination. It’s easy enough to see why Silent Hill 2, as opposed to the more crowd-pleasing survival horror of Resident Evil, or for that matter Silent Hill 1, has such a particularly strong reputation among more academically styled thinkers. Silent Hill 2 isn’t exactly a fun game. For the most part you’re just wandering around in an unsettling fog where everything just feels really…off.
Drucker offers some fairly convincing arguments here how the unplayability of Silent Hill 2 is often essential to the vibe. Sections at the end about the remaster are an especially well-aged description about how simply improving the picture quality of old games can actually make them a lot worse. Yes, the omnipresent fog in Silent Hill 2 was a technical limitation since the Playstation 2 could only effectively render so much of the game field at once. But it’s also one that the developers deliberately worked into the game’s greater vibe. Silent Hill 2 was as scary because of what you couldn’t see because of what you could.
Again, the metaphor of the text of the game being about how the protagonist killed his wife alongside this is, well, practically self-writing really. None of which is to say that the crude-to-modern-eyes graphics of Silent Hill 2 could not look plenty freaky when the situation called for it. While Pyramid Head may be a playable character in Krazy Kart Racing, in the Silent Hill 2 context, he, or it, can also be seen engaging in apparent violent sexual acts against other monsters. Silent Hill 2 is a scary game mainly because it’s never quite clear what’s going on, except that everyone in this town, whatever the reason they have for being there, doesn’t seem quite right in the head.
It’s all pretty cerebral stuff. Because Silent Hill is actually that psychologically intense, or just because Mike Drucker makes it sound that way? Well, it’s hard to guess. Not to mention ambiguous. Which is pretty much the whole point. Silent Hill 2 fans are really in a class of their own when it comes to thematic interpretation. There’s a reason why Silent Hill 2 is generally considered the high point of the series despite having little, if anything, to do with any of the rest of them. There’s no pretense of explanation as to why the town is covered in fog, monsters, and human representations of psychological trauma.
Silent Hill 2 existed in a fairly unique gaming moment where developers thought they could make games sophisticated without also having to make them overly self-referential. If that’s what you want out of a game, Silent Hill 2 is what you’re looking for. But if you just want to talk about games in those terms, that’s the conversation Mike Drucker clearly wants to have in this book.
The post A review of Silent Hill 2 from Boss Fight Books appeared first on Old School Gamer Magazine.
