It has been a long time coming for me to play Silent hill 2 remake, I must admit that my experience with the silent hill series is very limited having played only shattered memories and silent hill 1 before playing the remake of 2 and even then I played those back when I was in high school. Still, I very much liked silent hill 1 and see it's aesthetics in a lot of the psx horror revival games of today. I am 27 years old at the time of writing this, I had been delaying playing silent hill 2 for some time because as I got older the more I saw of myself on James, having a partner who suffers from mental illnesses leaves you sometimes with a bedridden partner that seems to be deteriorating day after day. It is a complicated thing really caring so much for someone and wanting to go back to a time where the illness was not so present and you could enjoy life, sexuality, even a meal without feeling guilty you are leaving the person you love behind. Of wanting a version of them that was not so ill. In my case it didn't help that the other version of them had the same birthday and often said “Are we the same person?” to each other. I had a lot to relate about with James, but I stuck around with them did as good as I could and now I am still with them, their condition improved and now more days are good than bad. I grew a lot as a person, with no major errors on my part, but nonetheless I understand James. Luck has it that I wanted to play Silent Hill F and well, I saw it bundled with silent hill 2 remake so I said “What the hell” and got em both and I decided to play it, exclusively with my partner besides me nonetheless. Silent hill 2 as a game is really fun and very atmospheric, but I do have the suspicion that the OG is even more atmospheric, which only hypes it up more in my mind. Puzzles could be a bit more obtuse but I think that it was overall enjoyable, the music by akira yamaoka is as beautiful as always. In it's time I saw ((discourse)) on silent hill 2 remake, from the silly culture war tourists complaining that the nervous wreck sexual abuse victim was not hot enough, the immature idiots say who often say that the women need to always be hot while promoting nofap and other ridiculousness. But I wrote the preface of relating to James for a reason: I feel people don't really put themselves in James's place and go with the absolutist liberal BS of “murder is always wrong”, which more often than not IS a true statement, but I feel people just say that in a similar way as the culture war tourists. They ignore the nuance and moral ambiguity of the story with what I see as a situation with no outcome where everybody or even someone can come out satisfied. It is true that James has done something bad, but the story is trying to explore the “what's next?” of a person who has done something bad to a person they care about and which cannot be undone and the endings show the different attitudes a person can take after the fact. I Like to think of the different endings as the attitudes a person can take for the wrong they have committed, self punishment, suicide or embracing the evil within us. I got the leave ending which I feel goes with the attitude I have taken to stop punishing myself and actively try to do good for as many people as I can, giving priority if possible to those I have wronged before. I love how expressive everyone but James is in this game, James himself says so little because the town is bringing the worst aspects of him to the front and center, one can just stay quiet, specially so if those accusations are completely true and aspects of ourselves we wish lacked. I loved the early open exploration, it has always been my favorite part of every horror game, the early sections, I also remember hating the other world sections, as they made and still make me very anxious with all the rusty red color palate, the fog is to me the comfortableness of giving into sadness, it is of course not nice, but it is cleaner and less heart racking than confronting oneself, so I still do love the other wold sections as I do the pain of confronting parts of ourselves which we try to ignore as much as we can, Just as I think, if we see James as nothing else but a cold blood murderer we reject the nuance of understanding oneself and others which mind you does not necessarily include forgiveness. When James talked bout how he hated Mary, how he wanted her out of the way only to have Mary ask “if that's true why do you look so sad?” I really felt encapsulated the confusion and frustration of seeing someone you love in pain for so long, you desperately want to believe you hate someone you love if only to protect yourself, I am glad I left that way of thinking behind.