[GameCareerGuide here presents the latest in a series of narrative reviews written for a contest supported by GDC Austin in association with the IGDA Writers' SIG. The goal is twofold: to encourage students to look at game narrative and writing with the intensity and depth that they do other aspects of game development, and to reward the students who excel at game narrative analysis. To read the first entry, and an in-depth explanation of the contest, click here.]

Platform: PlayStation 2, Xbox

Genre: Survival Horror

Release Date: September 25, 2001

Developer: Konami

Publisher: Konami

Game Writer/Creative Director/Narrative Designer: Hiroyuki Owaku (Scenario Writer)

Overview

Silent Hill 2 follows in the footsteps of its predecessor in telling the tale of a lone man searching the mysterious, fog-shrouded, and haunted town of Silent Hill for a missing family member. However, unlike the first game and later sequels, Silent Hill 2 is not, for all its monsters and world-shifting horrors, a game about occult forces and the machinations of evil. Instead, it tells and intensely personal tale of loss, grief, and guilt, and the main character James Sunderland's relationship with his own past.

The game itself is strictly linear. While the player has a certain freedom of movement within the town, there is only ever one path forward, and the player must always have completed the necessary tasks before proceeding. The unfolding of James's story (and that of the other people he encounters within the confines of Silent Hill) rewards progress through the game.

Characters

Forces they do not consciously understand draw the characters of Silent Hill 2 to the titular town. This separates the game from both its forbear and its sequel, which tell a much more conventional tale of cults and prophecy and dark magic. Here, rather than people stumbling upon and being caught up in the sinister plots of others, the characters experience nightmares of their own creation, as each discovers a Silent Hill that reflects the darkest parts of their own minds back at them.

• James Sunderland - The player character; James is a seemingly ordinary man of unspecified age (his appearance suggests perhaps mid-30s). James receives a letter from his deceased wife Mary that leads him to Silent Hill, once a vacation spot for the couple. This impossible missive serves as the crux of his quest and of the narrative. James has no real interest in understanding the mysteries of the town itself, seeking only to understand where this letter has come from and if his wife, impossibly, actually awaits him there. 

• Angela - The first of only four people James meets in the otherwise unpopulated Silent Hill, Angela is a deeply troubled young woman who claims to be seeking her mother. With each successive encounter, she grows more unstable under the influence of the town, threatening suicide and referencing a traumatic past with an abusive father.

• Eddie Dombrowski - An overweight young man, Eddie, like Angela and James, finds himself drawn to Silent Hill by a compulsion he cannot explain. James quickly learns that Eddie is highly unstable, paranoid, and even homicidal. Obsessed with imagined persecution (Eddie frequently complains of the way people look at him), Eddie's path in the story is the inverse of Angela's. Where she turns her anger inwards and becomes increasingly self destructive, Eddie becomes murderous with rage, leading to a fatal showdown with James.

• Laura - This eight-year-old girl seems drastically out of place in the fog-shrouded town. Much to James's confusion, Laura insists she knew Mary from her time in the hospital, although her version of events contradicts James's own memory, placing Mary's death much more recently than the three years ago he recalls. Alone amongst the characters, Laura appears unconcerned in her exploration of the town. In conversation, it becomes apparent that from her innocent perspective, there are no monsters - a major clue to the nature of events in Silent Hill and to understanding why James's experiences in the town seem to differ from those of the other people he meets.

• Maria - A doppelganger of James's dead wife, Mary, Maria quickly adopts a strange, flirtatious attitude towards him. At times teasing, coy, and cryptic, and at others frightened or angry, Maria's scenes suggest a deeper understanding of the situation than she admits. While she travels with James at times, circumstances repeatedly separate her from him, even appearing to die on two occasions. The player and James come to understand that Maria is in some way a creation of the town, conjured from James's conflicted feelings about his wife. The player's treatment of Maria bears significantly on which ending they receive upon completion of the game.

• Pyramid Head - A large, heavyset figure wearing a massively oversized pyramidal mask and dragging an equally gigantic blade, the Pyramid Head pursues James in certain parts of the game. Distinct, ominous music heralds his coming, and scattered references throughout the game hint at some tie between this being and the town's past. Unlike the other enemies in the game, Pyramid Head is in some way an inherent part of Silent Hill, existing independent of James or the other characters. He functions as a sort of inexorable force, a more direct method by which the town torments those drawn there.