Editing Silent Hill (section)

==Silent Hill 2==
James Sunderland receives a letter from his wife Mary, begging him to come to Silent Hill, where they had vacationed. Naturally, James immediately follows to investigate what's happening and how he got such a letter. After all, Mary has been ''dead for three years''...

Regarded as the best entry in the series by far, this is the game that single-handedly made Silent Hill a well known and respected survival horror franchise. It invented many of the staples in the series such as enemies being metaphoric representations of personal fears and hangups, a protagonist who must face the harsh truth of their actions, and Silent Hill being a ''genius loci'', an almost living, breathing creature who sucks in people from the outside in order to confront them about the crimes they committed. While many claim it's overrated, it generally comes down to how deeply you look into the game. If you just burn through it you'll find it a poorly designed, spooky haunted house of a game with some memetically bad voice acting. If you like to look into the symbolism of the world and meanings behind actions and designs, then this game will blow your mind.

In fact, there are fans who argue that this psychological horror, whilst done masterfully, has led directly to the franchise's downfall; post-SH4 games have tried to clumsily ape the symbolism and psychological horror of Silent Hill 2, but failed to provide any hint as to why this is happening. This straying from the series' roots, combined with standard flaws like bad dubs, clunky controls and nonsensical plots, have caused the infamous sequel rot. 

As of October 2022, Konami has officially announced a remake of Silent Hill 2 which looks slick as hell. It's being developed by Bloober Team, who are famous for horror walking simulators like Layers of Fear and Observer, which has caused a [[Skub|calm and reasoned debate]] in the fanbase over whether they're the right people for the job. Hilariously enough, during the reveal livestream the presenters mentioned that the company's been discussing this remake for the past three years, which suggests that the Konami execs looked up from their mounds of coke and pachinko machines long enough to notice the boatload of cash Capcom made off the Resident Evil 2 remake and decided they wanted in on that action.

Silent Hill 2 is where the monsters as symbolism angle really started to take off, and it created some of the most iconic members of the motley bestiary of the series. Aside from the returning Creepers, James faces off against the following horrors...

'''Lying Figures''' are the basic mooks of the game, and kind of look like somebody trapped inside a straitjacket or half of a bodybag made of living skin, writhing and thrasing wildly. They attack by spraying toxic fumes from a disturbingly yonic slit in their upper torso. They're essentially an abstract embodiment of a hospital patient writhing in agony, and represent both James' memories of his wife Mary's constant pain and his own feelings of being trapped and suffocating in his role as caretaker to a dying woman.

'''Mannequins''' are the second common monster found wandering the twisted landscape of Silent Hill, usually in dark areas where they can pretend to be inanimate statues. They look like somebody has taken two female mannequin pelvises and legs and attached thems together by using a singular torso, creating a weirdly feminine yet androgynous figure. They are generally accepted as embodying James' pent up sexual frustration, something they share with the Bubble Head Nurses.

'''Mandarins''' are bizarre humanoid forms found clinging beneath metal grating floors floating in otherworldly voids. They have massive-lipped maws tipping their arms and attack by wriggling long, bladed tongues through the grating to stab and rip at James' legs if he gets too close. Supposedly, they symbolize "feelings of overwhelming, incomprehensible anguish and helplessness." Only three Mandarins show up in the entirety of the game.

'''Flesh Lips''' are a monster found three times as mini-bosses over the course of the game, resembling a twisted mass of tumorous flesh and human limbs entrapped in an iron cage. Their most recognizable and disgusting feature is the orifice resembling a nightmarish cross between a set of woman's lips and a set of female genitalia dangling from beneath the bottom of the cage. They are widely believed to be embodiments of James' hatred to his wife for the verbal abuse she showered him with during her three years of sickness. The final boss of the game is a monstrous depiction of Mary in a similar cage configuration to the Flesh Lips.

'''Abstract Daddy''' is a weird monster that technically is from somebody else's hell that crossed into James'. Long story short, during his trip through Silent Hill, James runs into a sexual abuse survivor named Angela Orosco, who has been consumed by her guilt over murdering her father and brother for repeatedly raping her. The Abstract Daddy, which looks like a living bed made of flesh and bone with two writhing humanoid figures covered beneath a literal skin sheet atop it, is widely accepted as a living embodiment of Angela's memories of being raped. James encounters it and kills it as a boss, but then fights weaker versions of it later in the game.

'''Bubble Head Nurses''' resemble sexy, big breasted nurses with inhumanly swollen, largely featureless faces. They are a cocktail of different symbolisms, including James' lustful memories for the attractive nurses who cared for his sick wife, and how he strangled said wife in a fit of maddened rage. Their design went on to be repeated in several other media, largely because they were much more striking than the original Parasite Nurses.

'''Pyramid Head''' is hands down the most famous monster in Silent Hill 2; Konami's answer to Capcom's Mr. X and Nemesis, he is the embodiment of James' repressed guilt and subconscious yearning for punishment.