What Was Life Like in Silent Hill 2 Before Its Downfall? 

The amount of detail in the game is ridiculous. SH feels like a real place that I can visit. Every room in the apartments, hospital, prison etc. all feel varied and lived in.

If I'm right isn't Silent Hill just a normal town? Like it has people living it, James takes his wife there. There are 3 versions of the town The real town - Just a normal Town, people live here, people holiday here. The fog town - this is like the first layer of the other world. it's the town but abandoned. there is a thick fog everywhere, potentially monster as well, depending on who you are. The nightmare - the deepest part of silent hill. when everything gets really bad. This is just my interpretation but throughout Silent Hill 2, James is never in the real town, he's always at least in the dream fog version. I think the idea of it being a normal town makes it creepier, imagine you are a normal person living in your woodside apartment and right now someone is in your apartment fighting some unspeakable horror in a dimension you can't even perceive at all.

Silent Hill exists as a normal town with ppl living there. It always has. After the events of Silent Hill 1, with the doors to the other worlds open after Alyssa's passing, it began to experience a high level of missing persons cases. People both in the Town and driving through it would and could get pulled into the "purgatory Fog world" due to trama and guilt, the foundations for its creation, but otherwise the town was still functional. It's was never truly abandoned. It was the movie that claimed it as a ghost town. In both silent Hill 3 and 4 you get hints that it's not the quaint little town it used to be, but it's also not an abandoned ghost town either. The Fog world is a representation of Silent hill created by the memories of both Alyessa before she was burned, and the individual that is trapped. Its why it looks stuck in a specific time. If you look at the clocks in SH2 remake they are all stuck at 9:10

This game took me 27 hours to finish because I kept slowing down to study the environments. Insane how they expanded on all the locations in the game and yet the vast majority of it provides new things to see. One of my personal favorite rooms in the game is at Wood Side Apartments, the back office where the puzzle box is. The somber music that swells when you examine the box combined with the lighting and dust covered furniture, that's one of the spots where the atmosphere transcends even the original Silent Hill 2 for me.

MORE SILENT HILL LORE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now how often do we see games with these kinds of pieces done about them? Some channels are into double digit videos about this game in the past week. As a SH fan from the very beginning this has been a dream come true.

I think Silent Hill 2 takes place in the 80s, not the 90s. There is a receipt in the pharmacy near the beginning that says 1982. Even if it was out of date, the types of cars, record players, and television sets are more consistent with what was available then. The computers look like the kind that were common in the 90s, but would more similar to the Apple II. I haven’t finished the game yet though so I may be missing more details about the timing.

This is incorrect, there was no downfall. Silent Hill is still a functioning town divided into different dimensions. The regular town that's completely normal and pedestrian, people live there, life as normal. The fog town, which is a different dimension certain people find themselves in. And the Otherworld, which is the full-blown crazy nightmare dimension. Based purely on the lore of the original 4, Silent Hill never had a downfall and the town is still perfectly fine. MASSIVE SPOILER WARNING FOR SILENT HILL 2! STOP READING IF YOU CARE ABOUT THE STORY!! James kills Mary directly before the events of Silent Hill 2, most likely the same day the game begins. Her body is in the back seat of his car. Before the town distorted his memory, James planned on driving his car into the lake with Mary and having a water burial for the both of them. This is confirmed in the In Water ending, and not conflicted by any of the other endings or events in canon. Mary was only permitted a short stay at home to say goodbye because she was beyond recovery. The hospital she was staying at was Brookhaven, as stated in her true letter, the one she reads at the end which is unaltered by the town. The town can't possibly be abandoned, Mary was in Brookhaven and being taken care of by doctors literal days before the events of Silent Hill 2. Learn your lore, stop spreading misinformation Edit to correct myself: Mary was not a patient at Brookhaven, my bad. This has been declared false by Masahiro Ito. That being said, there exists evidence the town never had a "downfall" and still functions.

I love videos like this about the details in a certain game. Please make more Eurogamer

This game and everything about it is just creepy. We thought Bloober would drop the ball and ruin a legacy. Silent Hill 2 with all its flaws from 2001 was and still is revered as one of the best games ever made. We have first timers with the remake and veteran's of the old game picking the remake apart piece by piece. I believe the remake is good enough to stand on it's own, but the original will always be better. I guess it's due to me having the original and playing it when it released. I have played SH2 on PS2 and PC, as well as the remake on PS5. I really like the remake and am still creeped out. It's unsettling, unnerving, and actual scary. We've get a normal guy in a very messed up world trying to survive and come to grips with his own life. We're not the Doomslayer with loads of guns, or the John Wick style Leon S Kennedy. A normal dude with no combat experience fighting monsters with a handful of bullets and boards and pipes. Well, a board and a pipe rather. Sure we get a shotgun and a rifle later, but, the ammo is so scarce it's better used on the biggest of baddies. Point is. This game is fantastic and well worth the visit to Silent Hill in 2024. Well done Bloober. Now if we could just get that performance and stuttering ironed out. I'm hoping later updates help it. I play on Performance mode on my PS5. The sudden jarring of what seems to be a real time loading sequence in a game with little to no loading screens sometimes ruins the immersion for me, then something jumps out of nowhere and gets me scared again. It's vicious give and take. Maybe Bloober crafted this or maybe it's hardware hiccups, either way. Good job at to a company who we all thought would drop the ball, it wasn't dropped but maybe slightly overcooked?. Here is hoping we get Silent Hill 1 and 3 remade next. It is surreal to imagine that with this presentation Bloober gave us. Silent Hill feels like a real place again.

Why would the colors red and white together be bad luck when they clearly evoke a sense of.... commitment.... honesty..... integrity.

The whisper room of 209 in both games would connect well with this video too. Either the tenant is still haunting the room or we're hearing whispers of the power the town holds within it (or an admixture of both.) Since the games came out in 2001, many have been trying to deciper what the voice is saying and its inclusion once again I don't think is just mere homage/coincidence. With more of the town to explore, we've been able to see more of the cult's influence, truly disturbed people who lived in the town, and the darkness simmering underneath.

Thank you Zoe for the deep lore!

Entertaining but the habitants of the apartments were "handpicked illusions",a way the town was reminding James and Eddie what they have done... Specially the room with the football posters (Eddie's bully was a football player).... PLEASE don't start fake lore like the one when the movie was released! We still have people thinking the game was based in the real town Centralia!

I always just considered what James was seeing was all in his head. The "monsters" he was killing were actual people, he just saw them as grotesque female monsters, always female. This is heavily hinted at in the OG with the news report about a woman being killed in an "alley way," the same alley way James has his first combat encounter, in the OG.

Wait a second! Im new to Silent Hill lore. After finishing the game (incredible, btw) I looked up a couple of things and one of them was the town itself. Theres supposedly three layers or "realms" of the town, right? The normal, real world. The fog world. And the otherwold. I thought that the normal and real was, well, that. So, its abandoned then? And what the other games?

Zoe, a streamer friend of mine, Sam, played a great demo yesterday for "Below, Rusted Gods" due out next year and we were saying it seems like there'd be some super interesting lore in it that you would love!

I played it all night. Game is amazing. Honestly, it's a contender for game of the year and horror games never win. But being honest, it will probably be wokong

The only thing the town was missing was Arcades, but it did mention a theme park outside of the town proper.

i really hope they remake SH1 and SH3 again.

Masterpiece . One of the rare games that leaves you thinking and emotional after its over .

What downfall? People still live there in the real world

Wait P.T.V? PT might be a coincidence

It just looks like London during a football game

It's Centralia, approx 3000 people

The thumbnail looks EXACTLY like MMA fighter Luke Rockhold.

Bring back VR Corner!

Reminds me of Winona Minnesota

I was thinking during and after the events on SH1, towns people just vanished. Depending how far from the epicenter and within fogs range, half of South Vale inhabitants disappeared. Thinking of it as a curse, they closed shop and sealed off the town. It shows many locations of items left behind where they used to sit, collecting dust. Maybe the town sealed itself off instead of the inhabitants because who would leave "We com!", I mean, "Welcome!" at the gate. After Alessa's end, Silent Hill became a living entity and is very manipulative of its surroundings. Its why Laura can only see an abandoned town with fog, no otherworld and no monsters anywhere. Here's a question: How did Laura make it to the Hotel? Walking? Ghost Ferry? A Bus? Maybe that lost boat guy rowed her there.

needs to be VR

Zooey Deschanel you sound cool

Incredibly generic remake

oh man I wish you would have used the no fog pc mod for this it would have been perfect