Virtually a full month after the Silent Hill 2 remake’s launch, gamers have cracked one among its trickiest puzzles. And the answer to that puzzle, which includes a collection of collectible Polaroids known as Unusual Images, offers the sport a brand new storytelling layer — that’s, relying on the way you interpret it.
Bloober Staff’s Silent Hill 2 remake contains 26 photographs scattered all through the sport. They look like innocuous and disconnected from the general story of James Sunderland’s journey by way of Silent Hill. Every photograph has a quantity scrawled on the again and a caption related to photographs of seemingly random objects and scenes. Reddit consumer Dale Robinson cracked the sport’s code over the weekend, revealing that the clues within the Unusual Images spell out the phrase “You’ve been right here for 20 years.”
“If you happen to depend issues inside every photograph,” Robinson wrote, utilizing the instance of six open home windows in photograph No. 1, “Then depend that quantity throughout the writing on each, you’re going to get a letter.” In Robinson’s instance, the caption on the primary photograph is “So many individuals right here!” and the sixth letter in that phrase is Y. Robinson exhibits their work throughout all 26 Unusual Images.
Silent Hill 2 remake inventive director Mateusz Lenart later confirmed that Robinson’s answer was appropriate.
“I knew it wouldn’t keep hidden for lengthy!” Lenart wrote on X (previously Twitter). “(There was a idea in our firm that the puzzle is perhaps too onerous 😜) I actually needed to make it refined after I was portray these photographs… I believe the timing couldn’t be higher so that you can resolve it. Congratulations!”
The meant that means of the phrase “You’ve been right here for 20 years” is up for debate. Some gamers have interpreted the road as a message to them from Konami and Bloober Staff, a recognition that they’ve been enjoying some type of Silent Hill 2 since 2001. One other interpretation of the puzzle’s answer is that it’s directed at James, who’s caught in some type of time-looping purgatory and compelled to relive the occasions of Silent Hill 2 however dying repeatedly — all through the sport, James encounters a number of corpses that appear like him. In a sport the place James recurrently refuses to simply accept his actions, it might be a secret message making an attempt to get by way of to him.
Lenart doesn’t seem to substantiate whether or not that time-looping idea is true or not. When a fan commented that the “loop idea is canon,” Lenart cryptically responded, “Is it?” If that idea is true, it might have massive implications for the story of Silent Hill 2 and whether or not it’s actually a remake or just one other model of occasions of James’ plight.
Silent Hill 2 is out now on PlayStation 5 and Home windows PC. In gamerjive’s assessment of the sport, we praised the sport for its “array of adjustments, some refined, some daring, that problem that familiarity, leading to an intriguing revisit.”
