Silent Hill 2

The objective of Silent Hill 2 is to guide the player character, James Sunderland, through the monster-filled town of Silent Hill as he searches for his deceased wife. The game features a third-person view, with various camera angles. The default control for Silent Hill 2 has James moving in the direction that he is facing when the player tilts the analog stick upwards, although players can choose a more traditional control scheme. Silent Hill 2 does not use a heads-up display; to check James' health, location, and items, the player must enter the pause-game menu to review his status.

Throughout the game, James collects maps, which can only be read if there is sufficient light or when his flashlight is on. He also updates relevant maps to reflect locked doors, clues, and obstructions, and writes down the content of all documents for future reference. Maps are not essential to proceed through the game, but they give players a significant advantage when exploring the world of Silent Hill 2.

While not focusing on the characters and plot threads of the first Silent Hill game, Silent Hill 2 takes place in the series' namesake town, located in Maine. Silent Hill 2 is set in another area of the town, and explores some of Silent Hill's backstory. As opposed to the first game where the monsters and environments were a real manifestation, and everybody could see what was happening, this time the town draws upon the psyche of its visitors and ultimately forms alternative versions of itself, which differs depending on the character; thus, Silent Hill 2 acts as more of an internal representation of a person's guilt or demons. The concept behind the town was "a small, rural town in America"; to make the setting more realistic, some buildings and rooms lack furnishings.

The game's main storyline follows a character named James Sunderland. Later editions of the game include a second storyline titled "Born from a Wish", which follows a character named Maria. In editions that include "Born from a Wish", the original storyline is titled "Letter from Silent Heaven".

Development of Silent Hill 2 began in June 1999, directly after the completion of its predecessor, and lasted a little over two years. The game was created by Team Silent, a production group within Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo. The story was conceived by CGI director Takayoshi Sato, who based it on Russian author Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (1866), with individual members of the team collaborating on the actual scenario. The main writing was done by Hiroyuki Owaku and Sato, who provided the dialogue for the female characters.

Around the time Silent Hill 2 was in production, the average budget for video game production has been estimated to be around US$7–10 million by Sato. The decision to produce a sequel to Silent Hill was partly a financial one, as it had been commercially successful, and partly a creative one, as the team had faced difficulties while working on the original game. The team was given a small window to settle on a platform. As it was unable to gather information on the then-unannounced GameCube and Xbox consoles, they began production of the game for the PlayStation 2.

3 million copies since its release in North America, Japan and Europe, with the most units sold in North America. The game has received praise from video game journalists. Rating aggregation site Metacritic shows "generally favorable reviews", with an average rating of 89 out of 100 for the PS2 version and 84 out of 100 for the Xbox version. The PC port received "mixed or average reviews", with a Metacritic score of 70 out of 100.

Jeff Lundrigan reviewed the PlayStation 2 version of the game for Next Generation, rating it four stars out of five, and stated that "it's not for the faint of heart, nor anyone looking for fast action, but those who enjoy a good shiver won't be disappointed". Andy Greenwald of Spin magazine praised it as a frightening but "restrained" game. Jon Thompson of AllGame stated: "Silent Hill 2 feels a bit rushed, and although it might not live up to the dizzying horror of the first game, it packs enough of its own punch to make it a worthy sequel." IGN's Doug Perry wrote: "It's frightening, deep, clever, and tries to improve the genre, if just a little, and in the end, that's all I really want in a survival horror game."

Silent Hill 2 is often considered to be one of the best horror games and one of the best video games of all time. According to GameSpot, "critics have championed" the game as a key example of video games as an art form. In Replay: The History of Video Games (2010), Tristian Donovan described Silent Hill 2 as the "high point" of the series. In a retrospective article on the survival horror genre, IGN writer James Stephanie Sterling praised the game's plot as "one of the finest examples of narrative construction in gaming to this day". Fellow IGN writer Travis Fahs credited the game as a factor in the "short-lived period of renewed interest in horror games".

It ranked first on X-Play's list of the scariest games of all time in 2006. In 2009, IGN listed it as one of the five best horror video games created after 2000, and one of the twelve greatest PlayStation 2 games of all time. It ranked again in IGN's list of the top 100 PS2 games, and again in 2018, on IGN's list of the 100 greatest video games ever made. In a retrospective by GamePro, it was the 26th best game for the PS2.