A while ago, I picked up a used copy Silent Hill 2. I knew a lot of people consider it the best horror title ever made, and I'd been wanting a new survival horror game for a while. I got home, put it on the shelf and... just kind of forgot about it, I guess. It's been sitting there for a good two months.

Tonight, I decided to fire it up. I also decided to chronicle my experience with it in a series of blogs. This is the first of those blogs. There will be spoilers, of course, so if you haven't played the game and don't want it ruined for you, you should probably stop reading now. Again, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

The game starts out with the main character, James, standing in a public bathroom, looking at himself in a mirror. I walk out of the bathroom, and a cutscene explains the basic gist of the game's story for me: James' wife died some time ago. He's received a letter with her handwriting, saying she's in the town of Silent Hill. James, of course, assumes that the letter was actually written by his dead wife, and isn't just a cruel prank/trap by someone who's copied her handwriting. He's now driven to the outskirts of Silent Hill, where a roadblock forces him to walk the rest of the way.

I grab a map lying in the car, and start walking down a foggy path. It's really, really long. I eventually reach a graveyard, where a woman advises me not to go to the town, because there's something "wrong" and potentially dangerous about it. James promptly tells her that he doesn't care if it's dangerous, asks her for directions (even though he got a map from his car like two minutes ago, and there's only one path), and leaves without even asking what exactly is wrong with the town. What if it was full of lethal gas or had become a testing ground for military weapons or something? Dying would make it kind of hard to look for your wife, you know.

Anyway, I walk down another absurdly long path, only to find a door leading to another absurdly long path. (Seriously, what is up with the paths in this game? Why are they so damn long? Is it some atmosphere thing? Because if it is, I don't think it's working.) After about five hours I reach the town, where I see some creature running away. I follow its trail of blood, find an enemy-detecting radio, grab a stick with a nail at the end and beat the monster to death. As I walk back through the town streets, I see several more monsters. At this point, I do what any normal person would do: I try to get the hell out of the town. I run all the way back to the door dividing the last long path from the first two, and James says something along the lines of "I have no reason to go back, I have to find my wife". Listen, James. I know you're not the brightest dude in the world. But seriously, discovering that a town is full of creepy monsters that are out to kill you is a pretty damn good reason to leave. You can always come back and look for your wife when you've, you know, gotten the police or the army, or at least bought some weapons.

Being a fictional character without any will of his own, James won't have a bar of it. So back to town it is. I explore a little; most paths are either temporarily or permanently inaccessible, but I manage to find a key and two maps. With the help of these, I get into an apartment building. I walk around a bit. Kill some monsters, find some keys; you know, standard survival horror stuff. There's this one part that's pretty dumb, where James tries to get a key by sticking his arm through a grate. Just as he's about to reach it, an annoying little girl appear and kick the key away. The ridiculous thing is, he could easily have reached the key before the girl even got there by using the stick he'd been carrying around since he encountered the first monster. I suppose it's unfair for me to expect the amount of brain activity required to realize that from someone who isn't the least bit alarmed by the fact that he's in a town filled with gross, violent, humanoid monsters, but still. Come on. Either way, I find a dead body that kind of looks like James, solve a fairly simple clock puzzle, run into Pyramid Head twice (once when he's just standing around, and once when he's having sex with a mannequin), and then, in an apartment with a dead guy lying in the kitchen, I encounter a dude puking his guts out (not literally; I usually wouldn't have to explain that, but this is a survival horror game, after all). And this right here is probably the most bizarre part of the game so far. The two have a conversation that basically amounts to:

"Hey."
"Hey."
"I'm James Sunderland."
"I'm Eddie."
"So... who's that dead guy in the kitchen?"
"Don't know. I didn't kill him!"
"Are you friends with the the pyramid helmet dude?"
"Don't know what you're talking about. I saw some monsters, though."
"So, uh, what's up with this town?"
"I don't know. I'm not even from here."
"Uh... you should probably get out of here soon."
"Yeah. What about you?"
"I'll leave when I'm done. Be careful."
"Yeah, you too."
"See ya."
"See ya."

No "Dude, what the hell is going on with this place? There are monsters trying to kill me and a creepy guy who has sex with mannequins -- it's seriously messed up." No "You probably won't make it on your own. You should stick with me; I've got a stick with a nail on it, and I found a handgun not too long ago." No sensible conversation at all. They just exchange names, establish that neither of them knows what the hell is going on, and part -- that's it. Even cheesy horror movies don't have scenarios this absurd, and when they do, the sure as hell don't get away with it.At this point, I saved the game and stopped playing.

An hour and a half in. My first impression? Not good.So far, the game has been mind-numbingly boring (it's basically been fetch quest after fetch quest, with the occasional button mashing combat segment), shockingly stupid (the story makes no sense -- mostly thanks to James & Co., who are about as believable as the average set of Uwe Boll characters), and worst of all, not scary in the least (the way I can tell I'm playing a creepy game is that I'm too anxious to use the run function outside combat; in this, I run everywhere). It's still too early to pass any sort of proper judge on the game, and I am open to the possibility that the rest of it is amazing, but... let's just say that I'm not exactly looking forward to playing more.