As you get older there is always that recurring moment when, usually the night before bed, you take stock of your life. This is also true for me when we talk about video games.
I have always considered Silent Hill 2 to be one of my favourite titles of all time, a milestone in my path as a video game geek. There are many different reasons for this, but the main one is that its story and the reflections that come with it are and will remain timeless. This makes Silent Hill 2, despite the years and technical obsolescence, an indispensable masterpiece for one’s personal growth.
As I watched Konami’s conference and cursed an unspecified deity and then prayed to her that Bloober team would not ruin everything, I realised with a certain sadness that the emotions I felt while playing Silent Hill 2 will remain, for better or worse, those of the distant 2001.
If science would allow me to erase all the memories associated with it, I would do so without hesitation.
To relive its story as if for the first time? No. ‘Reliving’ is an inaccurate term.
We are, as human beings, hopelessly trapped in the present moment. And every fact we interpret can only pass through a filter composed of the memories and experiences we have collected up to that point. That is why the word ‘relive’ is tremendously out of focus: I am not the same as I was nineteen years ago and today Silent hill 2 would trigger different emotions and reflections. Looking back at it ideally, I realise how my thirteen-year-old self underestimated the work of Team Silent, despite the indelible memory it left in my mind.
I was lucky enough to have had a light-hearted childhood and for me that ‘illness’ that had taken Mary, James’ wife, was an undefined tragic event. I could hardly comprehend the weight of it. A bit like when I watched a Disney movie as a child: Cinderella’s poor father died, but I was sad just the right amount. Unaware of what was behind that event.
But life goes on, time passes, and that illness becomes more and more tangible. You acquire an awareness you never wanted to have. And today I wonder what it would have been like to plunge into that tragic story twenty years later: would Mary’s trembling words as she reads her farewell letter to her husband have had the same meaning? At that time, could I really understand the tragic nature of an emotional relationship destroyed by an incurable disease?
Thus I also think back to the character of James: the quintessence of the average man hit by something he cannot handle, unable to stand up straight against adversity. A character as distant as possible from the hero archetype, but as such painfully real. He is the potential reflection in the mirror of each of us: we blame him for his ineptitude, but that blame is nothing but the intimate fear of being like him. We hate him for the extreme gesture he committed against his wife, but intimately we wonder if it was not the only thing to do, justifying that selfish act as a gesture of pity.
This is the true horror of Silent Hill 2: to puke the cruel and merciless reality onto you. To make you lose yourself inside the dark abyss that is James’s story, with the fear that at every moment it will lay you naked with your true self.
For these reasons I feel a bit of envy for those who, out of curiosity, will decide to discover the original title now that the franchise is back in the spotlight. I wish them to play it at the perfect moment of their life. Mine, unfortunately, has already passed.