Silent Hill 2: Director's Cut Platinum (PS2)

Important: if you like bright, cheerful games, or if you're faint-hearted, Silent Hill 2 is most certainly NOT the game for you!! Your character, James Sunderland, is drawn to the town of Silent Hill by a letter from his wife - the problem being that she's been dead for 3 years. As you venture deeper into the town, the nightmare begins to truly unfold, as you are pitched against all manner of eyeless, groping horrors with initially nothing but a two-by-four to defend yourself with. This is what ratchets up the tension to 11: the control system is barely sufficient and fighting is hard. You are, after all, just a man; no special powers or heavy weapons.

Make no mistake, this is one heavy game. In addition to your mission to find your late wife, the storyline involves intense, harrowing sequences with the other (human) characters, exploring the cheery themes of child abuse, bullying, bereavement, self-harm, insanity and murder.

To say much more would give the game away (no pun intended), so if you like very deep, extreme survival horror with puzzles, this is the game for you. Bear in mind, though, this game will stick in your mind long after you have finished playing it (playing in daylight is taxing enough, but switch on in the dead of night - I dare ya!) Seriously. Only the Prince Of Persia trilogy has ever left this kind of imprint on me.

Nonetheless, it's cheap at twice the price - if being unsettled doesn't bother you over much, and you like survival horror, where have you been all this time? Buy it!

Silent Hill 2 is one of the best games I've ever played (and I'm including SHs 1 and 3 here). The storyline is absorbing, the atmosphere throughout is incredibly tense and, on occasion, terrifying, the graphics/cut scenes are excellent and the monsters are hideous (Pyramid Head is the stuff that nightmares are made of). You spend the game dashing from one creepy location to another with your trusty broken radio letting you know when the nasties are out there, even when you can't see them (the static radio noise signalling danger close-by has got to be one of the most effective devices ever used in a game for cranking up the tension). As you move about you collect various bits and pieces and solve puzzles - I found the level of difficulty to be about right; I had to think about the puzzles but I was never completely stumped for any length of time.

I'm not kidding about the scare factor - I'm in my 30s and fond of horror games but I still had to get my boyfriend out of bed in the middle of the night to come and sit with me the first time I played it. It's not just the 'something jumps out of the shadows at you and you get a fright' type horror (although there is that) but a slow build up of tension throughout combined with very disturbing images and a storyline that deals with serious subject matter. It was still giving me the heebie-jeebies long after I turned the consol off. People of a nervous disposition: beware!

This is certainly not what I would call an easy game but the (sometimes tricky but ultimately) manageable puzzles and range of weaponry means that you will probably have a reasonably smooth time. Don't get me wrong, you will be killed...horribly... quite regularly (in my case often in dark corners of the hospital by knife wielding nurse zombies who seemed to have an above average grasp of ambush tactics and could withstand several swipes of a metal pipe) but you probably won't come to a complete 'tearing your hair out in frustration' type standstill anywhere. In a game like this it is quite nice not to interfere with the movie like feel of the story to spend 3 hours trying to work out a puzzle or kill a Boss. The downside to this is that it's on the short side. If you are a reasonably experienced gamer with normal abilities (like me) you will finish it within a day easily.

The shortness of the game is offset somewhat by the fact that there are different endings. The story is such that you will be curious about how else things could turn out for poor James and you will probably end up playing SH2 through again and again, doing things slightly differently, to see them all.

A great game with decent re-play value. Give it a go.