Note: This article contains spoilers for the story of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 2 Remake. Read on at your own risk.
Silent Hill 2 players have been speculating about what’s really going on in the game since its release in 2001. Even on its most surface level, it’s impossible to say definitively what’s happening to protagonist James Sunderland. Is he trapped in a hallucinatory nightmare of grief and guilt? Has he wandered into some kind of supernatural space situated around a small American town, created by cultists and elder gods? Or is he dead and in Hell, paying for his sins?
With Silent Hill 2 Remake, developer Bloober Team seems to provide more details and clues related to those questions. In doing so, the developer has expanded the story of Silent Hill 2. The remake, it seems, isn’t just a revision of the story–it’s an expansion of the original, existing separately from the original Silent Hill 2. In the same way that Final Fantasy VII Remake revisits the same story while adding to it to make something new, Silent Hill 2 Remake is a secret sequel of Silent Hill 2.
The original Silent Hill 2 included several hints that what James was experiencing was something more than it appeared to be. Wandering through the town, players would come across several bodies of people apparently killed by the vicious monsters James repeatedly fights off. What was weird about these bodies, though, was that while their faces and heads were often covered or obscured, fans noticed that they often seemed to be wearing bloodied versions of James’s clothes.
In the 2001 Silent Hill 2, it’s a little bit tough to tell what’s going on with this choice–did the developers intend for players to see just a bunch of nondescript bodies, and used the James character model as a cost-saving measure, because the game just didn’t really include many other characters? Or were these bodies meant to be a subtle hint at something deeper happening in Silent Hill? A theory developed around the latter, culminating with a particular body in the Wood Side Apartments building, which appears to have died by suicide, and though their face is covered, they look suspiciously like James Sunderland. It’s a theory of the game that suggests James is already dead.
Silent Hill 2 Remake makes some changes to the elements of the Silent Hill 2’s story, puzzles, and combat, but it’s still pretty faithful to the broad strokes of the original tale. In fact, as you navigate through the town in the remake, you’ll find bodies killed by monsters. And just like in the original game, those bodies look a lot like James Sunderland.
Scattered throughout the town are notes, usually found near those bodies, scrawled in a bloody and manic hand. Several have the same messages as were seen in the original game, but there are more in the Remake. They suggest these other people were also trapped in Silent Hill, and for some, apparently for a long period of time. A few leave behind warnings and information, such as a map of Silent Hill like the one James carries that’s annotated in the same way he marks up his own. Some speak directly to the reader, hoping you can use what was learned before you to move ahead.
The more of them you read, though, the more they sound like they were written with James in mind.
Somewhat later in the game, you can find notes next to a James-looking body that relates to one of the game’s new endings. Though the handwriting is different from some of the other notes–others look like they were written hastily in all-caps printing–this one looks to provide some serious hints about the situation.
“I can leave by not leaving,” it reads. “I can only leave by not leaving. The deal is done. He said he left it for me. Where they once were.”
This note puts you on the path to unlocking the new “Bliss” ending, added with the remake. If you follow the clues, you’ll eventually find a hallucinogenic drug called White Claudia. Taking it at the right time in Lakeview Hotel, before James watches the video tape, triggers the ending. Instead of coming to terms with the fact that he killed Mary, it’s almost as if James hallucinates another course of events, willing himself to stay with Mary before her illness, happy in his delusion of denial.
What’s weird about the note is that it suggests the writer has been struggling to leave Silent Hill, just like James is. It also makes reference to “where they once were.” That location is Pete’s Bowl-o-Rama.
Players familiar with the original game know that James finds Eddie and Laura at the bowling alley, where he infamously berates the man for eating pizza while the town is overrun by monsters. The bowling alley is still there in the remake, but it’s empty. You instead encounter Eddie and Laura in the movie theater; the gist of the scene is similar, but it plays out slightly differently, with James being less antagonistic. “Where they once were,” then, seems to suggest the writer of the note is aware that James previously found Eddie and Laura at the bowling alley, but they’re not there now.
In other notes, you get the sense that the writer is driving James on. A message found in a safe in Brookhaven Hospital, in the office of the hospital director, reads as a letter written for James.
“Their images became blurry, melting together,” it says. “Not sure if I can do it, but maybe you can. This will take you where you need to be, though probably not the way you want to. And there’s bound to be some pain involved. There always is.”
Accompanying the letter is the key to the hospital’s roof. A few seconds after you get up there, you encounter Pyramid Head, who throws you through the floor of an elevator shaft so that you wind up in a previously locked-off section of the third floor. It takes you where you want to go, though not the way you want to, and there’s some pain involved.
There’s another particularly revealing note you can find inside Wood Side Apartments.
“You must think I’m cruel,” it says. “But this is a prison of your own making. The choice was yours. I watched you make it. Over and over and over again. This time’s not gonna be different. And I’ll be here. Watching.”
Silent Hill 2 Remake seems to be making it pretty clear. Those bodies are James; many of the notes in the game are about him, or possibly even written by those other versions of him. He’s trapped in Silent Hill, not just during the course of one playthrough of the game, but through all of them. He’s in some sort of time-looping hell, playing out the course of these events over and over again. The original Silent Hill 2 documented one set of James’s experiences. The remake is another. He’s experiencing them all in some kind of endless torment.
Three different times through the course of Silent Hill 2 Remake, you encounter Eddie near a dead body that he claims he had nothing to do with. These bodies are tougher to identify than the others we’ve discussed–until, that is, you reach your final scene with Eddie. At the end of the labyrinth section, Eddie’s anger finally reveals that he’s been murdering these people all along. Shouting, he fires a revolver into the body of his latest victim, and if you look closely, you can see who it is.
It’s James.
Or at least, it sure does look like him.
You fight Eddie in a frigid slaughterhouse warehouse filled with hanging cuts of meat, where you eventually kill him. But as these other James bodies suggests, sometimes, he kills you. What’s more, the two of you repeat this process continually. Eddie kills James. James kills Eddie. But both characters are trapped in Silent Hill, reliving their sins and their horrors over and over again.
In your last encounter with Angela, the third soul seemingly condemned to Silent Hill, she walks up a staircase wreathed in flames. When James comments on the heat, Angela asks if he can see it. “For me, it’s always like this,” she says, seemingly revealing that she experiences Silent Hill in a way that’s markedly different from what James does.
In the remake, in every scene where you find Eddie, you can see his breath, as if he’s in a cold room–even though you don’t see James’s breath in those same places. It’s like Eddie is always somewhere cold, even if no one else is. Angela’s Silent Hill is alight with fire; James’s Silent Hill is foggy and filled with monsters seemingly meant to torment him over his lustful, treacherous feelings and actions; and Eddie’s Silent Hill, it would appear, is always cold and filled with death. Just like you briefly see into Angela’s Silent Hill at the end of her story in the fiery staircase, it seems that in the slaughterhouse, you briefly see into Eddie’s Silent Hill.
All these tidbits and pieces of information suggest that Silent Hill 2 Remake isn’t a remake per se; it’s another trip through the hellish loop for James, and everyone else. And in fact, every time you play the game is another repetition of that loop. Each conclusion of the story–whether it sees James coming to terms with his actions, replacing the sick Mary with the idealized, sexier Maria, taking his own life in Toluca Lake, or choosing a delusion where he ignores what happened to Mary–seems to also represent another loop. Every time you die in the game is a trip through the loop. Each body you find is James, a loop terminating in his death, only for him to find himself again at the road overlooking the town.
So every ending in Silent Hill 2–except, maybe, for the jokey Dog and UFO endings, although even that might be kind of debatable–is as legitimate as any other. They’re all, seemingly, happening. James reaches them all, but none of them end his torment.
With Silent Hill 2 Remake, that fan theory about it being James lying dead in that chair, seemingly having shot himself, is confirmed, at least in this game. And with that, the game becomes much more horrifying. There is no escape from Silent Hill.