Virtually a full month after the Silent Hill 2 remake’s launch, gamers have cracked certainly one of its trickiest puzzles. And the answer to that puzzle, which entails 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 images scattered all through the sport. They look like innocuous and disconnected from the general story of James Sunderland’s journey by means of Silent Hill. Every picture has a quantity scrawled on the again and a caption related to images of seemingly random objects and scenes. Reddit person 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 rely issues inside every picture,” Robinson wrote, utilizing the instance of six open home windows in picture No. 1, “Then rely that quantity throughout the writing on each, you’re going to get a letter.” In Robinson’s instance, the caption on the primary picture is “So many individuals right here!” and the sixth letter in that phrase is Y. Robinson reveals their work throughout all 26 Unusual Images.
Silent Hill 2 remake inventive director Mateusz Lenart later confirmed that Robinson’s answer was right.
“I knew it wouldn’t keep hidden for lengthy!” Lenart wrote on X (previously Twitter). “(There was a concept in our firm that the puzzle may be too laborious 😜) I actually needed to make it delicate once I was portray these images… I believe the timing couldn’t be higher so that you can clear up it. Congratulations!”
The supposed which 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 kind 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 seem like him. In a recreation the place James usually refuses to simply accept his actions, it might be a secret message attempting to get by means of to him.
Lenart doesn’t seem to substantiate whether or not that time-looping concept is true or not. When a fan commented that the “loop concept is canon,” Lenart cryptically responded, “Is it?” If that concept is true, it may have huge implications for the story of Silent Hill 2 and whether or not it’s really 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 game-feeds’s assessment of the sport, we praised the sport for its “array of modifications, some delicate, some daring, that problem that familiarity, leading to an intriguing revisit.”
