Yahtzee summed it up well when he said SH2 captures the dread of being alone. Silent Hill's gimmick, aside from cribbing from Jacob's Ladder, was urban decay. A drug den apartment complex is scarier than an empty forest, because abandoned homes reek of passing time. Of entropy. Of death. The Otherworld was more frightening in the previous game (and subsequent games), because it suggests that Hell is not another place, but lurking under the surface of everywhere we go. Here the Otherworld is almost a relief, because it's less scary than the loneliness of the Fog World. Maria and co. are there. There's a lot more monsters, etc. To this day, I still get nightmares of running around a daytime tangle of abandoned alleys.
Another reviewer summed up SH2 as pure evil, which is also on-target. This is not really a game, it's a social experiment. We're gonna throw you into an underground jail with no illumination besides your dinky pocket flashlight. We'll put you in whole levels of narrow corridors with a dodgy camera and acid-spitting enemies standing in the way. We'll make you reach in a toilet. We'll make you pointlessly fire bullets at Pyramid Head while dodging his buster sword and call it a "boss fight."
As far as other games go, I tend to like SH1 and SH4 the best. I can't say I enjoy playing Silent Hill 2. Too fucking scary.
ThEre WaS a HoLe HeRe
Yahtzee summed it up well when he said SH2 captures the dread of being alone. Silent Hill's gimmick, aside from cribbing from Jacob's Ladder, was urban decay. A drug den apartment complex is scarier than an empty forest, because abandoned homes reek of passing time. Of entropy. Of death. The Otherworld was more frightening in the previous game (and subsequent games), because it suggests that Hell is not another place, but lurking under the surface of everywhere we go. Here the Otherworld is almost a relief, because it's less scary than the loneliness of the Fog World. Maria and co. are there. There's a lot more monsters, etc. To this day, I still get nightmares of running around a daytime tangle of abandoned alleys.
Another reviewer summed up SH2 as pure evil, which is also on-target. This is not really a game, it's a social experiment. We're gonna throw you into an underground jail with no illumination besides your dinky pocket flashlight. We'll put you in whole levels of narrow corridors with a dodgy camera and acid-spitting enemies standing in the way. We'll make you reach in a toilet. We'll make you pointlessly fire bullets at Pyramid Head while dodging his buster sword and call it a "boss fight."
As far as other games go, I tend to like SH1 and SH4 the best. I can't say I enjoy playing Silent Hill 2. Too fucking scary.