5 essential tips for exploring the Silent Hill 2 remake
If the thick fog and lack of people didn’t give it away, the town of Silent Hill isn’t the safest place to visit. Between the nightmarish monsters and confusing puzzles, you need to take care not to let the feelings of loneliness and dread get to you. Here are five essential tips for exploring the Silent Hill 2 remake.
Break as much glass as possible
Even though you may look like a burglar to passersby, smashing things is a surefire way to uncover Silent Hill’s secrets. Items like ammunition, Health Drinks, and Syringes can be found behind breakable glass cabinets and glass walls. Rare secrets, like some of the collectible Strange Photos and entire optional areas, can be found this way as well.
If there’s something behind a glass surface that catches your eye, try smashing your way through. You may just be rewarded for giving in to your primal instincts.
Look for the color white indicating crawlable and climbable areas
While the developers at Bloober Team didn’t cover Silent Hill in yellow-painted platforms and yellow-taped poles (as with most modern games), they instead opted for more subtle white-colored platforms and white sheets to let players know something is interactable.
Even with the interact prompts turned off in the accessibility settings, players will know which way to go thanks to these white-colored objects. White-colored crawl spaces and ledges are but a few of the things to watch out for if you want to explore everything the Silent Hill 2 remake has to offer.
Listen for radio static to find out when enemies are near
Though it is inevitable that you will run into one of the Silent Hill 2 remake’s monsters, you can get the drop on them thanks to James’s handy dandy radio. Provided you have it turned on, the radio will emit static whenever enemies are in your vicinity (it won’t tell you how many enemies are nearby, though). This will prevent you from getting the Radio Silence achievement, but the static can prove invaluable before turning the game’s many tight corners.
That said…
You don’t need to fight every enemy you see
The Silent Hill 2 remake isn’t an action RPG or a horror game in the same vein as the Resident Evil franchise. Common enemies like the Lying Figures and Nurses will not drop experience points or items no matter how many of them you kill or how many times you stomp on them.
It is sometimes better to cut and run than stand and fight. Monsters in this game mostly serve as obstacles to your goals. Apart from a few areas where killing them is mandatory, you will find that you can use James’s superior run speed and quick dodge to avoid almost all the monsters in the game.
Look at your maps often
You may have the reflexes to avoid the monsters, but if you don’t know where you’re going, then you might as well be running around in circles. Like the original game before it, the Silent Hill 2 remake does not feature a minimap. This means that you’ll be creating mental maps of areas and (more likely) looking at the game’s many maps to get your bearings.
One helpful thing about the maps is that James will update them whenever he encounters things of note. Locked doors, puzzle locations, and codes will automatically be written on the map and crossed out when they have been accessed or solved. Areas that have been explored will also have a rustic tinge to them when viewed in the map; signifying James has disturbed these areas in some way. Whenever you feel lost, make it a point to look at your maps. Just make sure that there are no enemies nearby; opening your maps does not pause gameplay!
These are just a few basic tips to help you get used to the town of Silent Hill and the Otherworld. Combining thorough exploration with good resource management will allow you to survive longer, but it won’t reduce the amount of horror you experience. Still, it’s better than trying to leave Silent Hill.
