Goddamn it.

I’ve been racking my brain for about a week now, trying to think of a new and interesting You Should Play. Something that breaks from the norm a little, that won’t be so trite and predictable.

But I can’t think of anything else, dammit. Silent Hill pops into my head, unbidden, a game on leathery wings smashing through the window to my mind. And of course, it is Silent Hill 2 that tops the throne, that makes the loudest smash whenever it bursts through the window (approximately every five minutes).

It gets into your head. It burrows under your skin. It is a parasite that you fall in love with; a gaze into not just abstract and unkind terror, but into deepest pits of melancholy and sadness, and oddly comforting beauty. It is a game that actually takes time to make you think. Characters are reflections on the condition of humanity; human sexuality, fears and desires of all kinds. They aren’t just plastic-faced bobbleheads that gawk and give you cash for your feats of great strength and beg for help. They have lives, dammit. They come off the screen and into your mind and they live there, rent free.

You wonder what makes Silent Hill 2 so effective, in the end. I know I do.

Is it Akira Yamaoka’s music that sends me to heaven and hell all in the same track? Is it Masahiro Ito’s repulsive and attractive human monster designs? Is it the grungy, dilapidated environments that feel real because they look like people lived in them, yet abandoned them a long time ago? Is it the earnest voice acting that makes you feel at once connected and strangely distanced to these people? Is it the deeply moving story based partially on the themes and ideas of Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment?

I think in the end, Silent Hill 2 is genius because it’s a horror game that doesn’t set out with the intent to frighten. Jumpscares and shock horror were not the founding principles of the game.

Cheap horror games linger a little while, perhaps, if they are good at what they do. But few games ever achieve what Silent Hill 2 does, even twenty years on. It is a game about depression and actually allows the topic to come up in a meaningful and heartfelt way. No character is represented poorly or unfairly. It is a game that does frighten, certainly. But it frightens in a much different way than startling jumpscares or spooky monster designs, although it, too, can pull these off. No, it is the kind of fear that lingers on old flower wallpaper, your blankets pulled up to your face, as you stare into the darkness. The warmth of your blankets is a temporary comfort.

What happens when feeling leaves your life?

Silent Hill 2 has no answer for you. It just asks the question.

I can’t think of any game more deserving of the title “best horror game ever”. But horror is trite in itself. Genres are reductive and nonsensical when it comes to games like this. Silent Hill deserves more respect than to be enshrined beside games like Outlast 2. When I see Silent Hill 2 in the lists of best horror games, it doesn’t make sense to have them comparable to shlock-horror gorefests. Silent Hill doesn’t function like other horror franchises. They’re not on the same playing field.

What happens when your one reason to live is balanced on the edge of the abyss?

Silent Hill 2 is playing a different game to the rest. Games have tried, and failed, to replicate what was successful about it. I’m not sure people ever will find the exact winning formula again. Not with our current level of media consumption; reboots, mere regurgitation of old ideas, packaged in shinier new graphics or CGI or covers or what have you. Silent Hill 2 dares to be smart while not wrapping itself in the mantle of the intellectual, the academic or the prude. Silent Hill 2 is approachable in its universal ideas. Its thoughts burning in and out of your brain all the time, because they are universal ideas. They are your ideas, at one point or another. Silent Hill 2 speaks to people. Sometimes, it’s only a whisper.

Other times, some people just can’t resist the call.

It’s in your special place. Just waiting for you.