Dug deep into the backlog this week and unearthed Silent Hill 2, which I’ve been meaning to play for ages.  I played through the Wii remake (re-envisioning?) of the first game a couple of years ago, which I am told is an abomination and an insult to the series at large, so this is my first proper Silent Hill game.

It… hasn’t aged well, I don’t think.  It is somewhat saved by some excellent sound design, and the fog and shadow effects aren’t half-bad, but character and enemy models are pretty terrible and objects in the environment are usually just a few shiny pixels on a shelf.  It’s a 13-year old game, after all.

(With that said, it still looks better than the HD remake versions that came out a couple of years back.  Those are shinier, yeah, but in a way that displays far too much detail at times.)

It’s also terrifically easy to walk past key items and not notice for quite a long time, which got me well and truly stuck on two occasions.

Putting those gripes aside, it’s got atmosphere in spades and a seriously creepy ending, so  I’m glad that I finally got around to playing it and I’m looking forward to trying 3 at some point.