Silent Hill 2 Remake brings back one of James Sunderland’s plights with its gripping and horrifying plot.
Developer Medium‘s Bloober Team in collaboration with Konami Silent Hill 2 The remake brings the beloved modern horror game back to life and gives it a new coat of paint along with some quality of life improvements.
While the remake may look new, fans shouldn’t worry as its iconic story, set in the mysterious town of Silent Hill, Maine, has remained completely intact.
Silent Hill 2 Remake plot explained
Just like the 2001 original, the Silent Hill 2 The remake focuses once again on James Sunderland when he receives a mysterious letter from his long dead wife.
This mysterious mail sends him to the abandoned town of Silent Hill, a ghost town in the American Northeast full of horrors, other runaways, and lots of fog.
From there, James must peel back the layers of why he was sent there in the first place, battling the deepest parts of his psyche while trying to stay alive in the process.
Below is the full spoiler-filled recap Silent Hill story:
It starts with a letter
The game begins by introducing fans to its main character, James Sunderland, as he arrives in an instant in the creepy town of Silent Hill.
He comes alone with only a bag, a flashlight and a letter from his now dead wife Mary saying that she is waiting for him at their place. “a special place.” This particular location is revealed to be Silent Hill, a seaside community the pair had vacationed as a couple.
At this point, to James’ knowledge, Mary had died three years earlier, succumbing to a devastating illness and leaving him a widow.
As he initially explores the town and tries to find out the origin of this letter, James encounters the horrors of the outside world, creatures occupying the city streets and the abandoned buildings of Silent Hill, bent on killing everything in its path.
Early on, James interacts with three other runaways who all seem to have their own reasons for being in Silent Hill: a woman named Angela Orosco who is looking for her mother, a man named Eddie Dombrowski whose intentions seem unclear, and a young girl named Laura who claims that he knew Mary and says that James did not love her.
Around the same time, James also encounters one of the game’s primary antagonists, Pyramid Head, a dead undead fiend whose head and face are covered by a massive metal pyramid, and a woman who looks suspiciously like his dead wife, Maria Maria. .
How do you solve a problem like Maria?
Maria is like Mary in almost every way, with a few heightened personality traits such as a clear confidence and hypersexual demeanor.
James takes Maria into custody and vows to help her escape the city while questioning who/why she looks exactly like his dead wife.
That’s when things start to get weird. When the pair investigate a local hospital at Maria’s request, they are cornered and forced to fight the evil Pyramid Head.
During James’ escape, Maria dies in the crossfire, and James’ hearts are left with a sinking feeling of sadness.
From there, he heads to the hotel where James and Mary had stayed all those years ago, where he suspiciously encounters Mary again. He’s alive and well, but locked in a room and seemingly with no memory of the devastating events that just happened before.
At this time, Maria also begins to describe James and Maria’s relationship, even in details that only Mary would know.
James decides to try to save the trapped woman. After finding the key, he returns to the room where Maria was stuck and once again finds her dead.
Again shocked by this discovery, James comes to the aid of Angela, who has had a run-in with the monster at the hotel. After rescuing a 19-year-old girl, he reveals part of the story of why he ended up in Silent Hill.
She tells James that her father once raped her, and it is implied that he then murdered her, sending her on the run and eventually into the foggy streets of Silent Hill.
Also as part of this game, James finds Eddie again, and a misunderstanding between them leads the pair to end up in a bloody fight to the death.
Because of this, James is forced to murder Eddie in cold blood. This is a big, emotional moment for James, because as far as he knows, this is the first time he’s ever had to kill a living person.
There’s something about Maria
This sets up the big reveal Silent Hill 2. Continuing to navigate the hotel, James comes across a mysterious video tape.
By playing the tape, he finds video footage of his wife’s death, which shows that she did not die because of her illness, but because James killed her himself (read more about James killing Mary Silent Hill 2 here).
This seems to suggest that, in a fit of grief-laden guilt, James has created the delusion that his wife had perished because of him and not at the hands of the pillow he used to smother her.
Exploring the rest of the hotel, James finds Angela again. This time he’s trapped in a burning staircase and says he’s ready to die.
James tries to talk her out of it to no avail, as Angela claims she deserved to be sexually abused as a child, walk into the fire and never be heard from again.
This leads to a sort of final showdown for James. He encounters a room with two pyramid heads trapped, as well as Maria, who is somehow alive again.
The Pyramid Heads kill Maria in front of James, leaving James to realize that these grave triangular skull creatures were created to punish him and that all the horrors he has seen in the small town have been manifestations of his psyche.
When he makes this discovery, both Pyramid Heads commit suicide and James heads to the roof to meet either Maria or Maria disguised as his dead wife.
Many Silent Hill 2 Endings
From here on, the game may vary depending on how the player played the game up to this point.
Silent Hill 2 Remake contains eight different endings (six original and two completely new.
In the “Leave” ending, James arrives on the roof of the hotel, talks to Mary one last time, reads the letter, collects Laura, and leaves Silent Hill altogether.
“In the Water” is a bit darker, depicting James committing suicide in nearby Toluca Lake with Mary’s body in the car.
In “Maria”, James confronts Mary on the roof as she scorns her ex-husband for killing him. He thinks she’s hallucinating and leaves town with the now-alive Maria to live a happy life together.
Before the camera cuts away, Maria is seen coughing, hinting that she will get sick like Mary.
The two new endings added to the remake can also be achieved on the first playthrough.
“Stillness” is very similar to “In the Water”, which ends in a slightly different context. This sees James in the car greeting the ghost of Mary, who caresses his cheek and asks when she will join him. It then fades to black with the sound of the car starting up and hitting the water.
The new “Bliss” ending is one of the most mysterious in the game. It takes place before the final encounter with the two pyramid heads, and shows a videotape that in most other ends shows James choking Maria to death.
That’s not the case here though, as the tape now features simple footage from James and Mary’s Silent Hill vacation years earlier. The series shows a conversation between the two former lovers as Mary tells James that she never wants to leave Silent Hill.
The two then embrace on tape before the game returns to the empty armchair where James was previously sitting. This seems to suggest that James is forcing himself not to deal with the severity of his guilt and is happy to spend his days in these pleasant memories.
Hero Silent Hill 2 decisions can only be reached in the second game round of the game.
These New Game+ endings include “Rebirth” (in which James attempts to revive Mary with arcane items collected during the game), “Dog” (in which it is revealed that the events of the game were directed by a Shiba Inu dog in the control room), and “UFO” (in which James is abducted by aliens) .
Silent Hill 2 Remake is now available for PlayStation 5 and Windows.
