Silent Hill 2: Born From a Wish Review

Silent Hill came into the video game world in 1999, shocking and enticing gamers all over the world with its macabre story, scary-as-hell soundtrack and sound effects, and disturbing scenery. Along with Resident Evil, it revolutionized the survival horror world.

In 2001, a sequel was developed that many would consider to not only be a peace of art, but one of the best video games of all time. Silent Hill 2 follows the exploits of James Sunderland, a man who received a letter from his dead wife Mary. When he was asked to meet her in their special place, he must journey to Silent Hill to solve the mystery of why his wife is seemingly alive. Along the way you meet not only a host of horrifying monsters, like the infamous Pyramid Head, but also a host of bizarre people, like Eddie and Maria, a doppelganger of James's dead wife.

Where the other games emphasized on the struggles of not only the psyche of the main character but with the crazed cult of The Order, Silent Hill 2 skips the religious fanatics and focuses on the conflict of James's guilt over the (spoiler) death of his wife at his hands. In December of 2001, an expanded edition was released, Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams. As well as being a port to the Xbox and PC, it also included new content like a mini-campaign featuring the character Maria called "Born From A Wish." Since the main game itself was reviewed to death by countless other reviewers, I think taking a look at this portion of the port would be cool and not out of the question, because let's face it... Silent Hill 2 is like the Stairway to Heaven of the video game world: it's so good that everybody will say the same thing about it, and it will get ridiculously repetitive.

Synopsis

In Born From A Wish, Maria finds herself alone in the Heaven's Night Bar. Left with nothing but a revolver, she wanders the streets of the town with the wish of finding a sign of human life. She eventually comes across the Baldwin Mansion, coming across Ernest, a man who has locked himself inside a room with the desire to be alone. In true Silent Hill style, Maria takes on the task of solving the puzzle to find out what's going on, and even find out more about herself.

The Good

The story was the strongest point about this campaign. Since this is a supplement of the main game, it's a little difficult to understand the significance of the plot in Born From A Wish so it's crucial to have played as James Sunderland before you tackle this head-on. The story is unique because it actually explores the character of Maria a little more, and it's fascinating to actually learn about her because of her role in the main story. It doesn't give away what EXACTLY she is, but it hints at a few things so the subtlety is still there.

The Bad

It was too damn short. The length of this game is, depending on what difficulty, an hour in length. However, I beat it in only 30. This game is so short, that there have actually been speed runs as fast as ten minutes. I know that, technically speaking, this is probably best to be considered as an expansion pack, but in the end it didn't actually feel very rewarding. It felt like the length of a proper demo, since the Bioshock demo and the Left4Dead 2 demo were actually longer than this. It's a shame, because Maria's story would have been some very interesting ground to tread.

If anything related to this game is longer than your game, than you're in trouble.

I could complain about the voice acting, the controls, and everything else that goes along with a Silent Hill game's negative aspects, but in the end it doesn't really matter because the Silent Hill franchise is not focused on the technical aspects; instead, the narrative quality of Silent Hill 2: Born From a Wish is what the creators were concerned about. Born From A Wish has the same technical hiccups, but we're not going to get into that. However, something that did piss me off a little bit was the emulation in some aspects. When Curt, my friend, was reading through the walk through for this, he said that I will pass by a table in the lobby of the mansion, and run past it. There was just a white X on the ground. When I came back later, it suddenly appeared! When I ran past a chandelier later on, it was stark white with no detail whatsoever. When I ran past it again, it was perfectly fine. When a Mannequin monster was attacking me, I ran past it and went into the room I was meant to go into. When I came back into the hall, the critter wasn't there to greet me. When I went into the hall again, though, there it was, swinging its legs about viciously instead of playing possum like it is supposed to.

Microsoft, there were so many damn complaints against the emulation of this game with earlier emulators of the original Xbox for the 360, and even this latest version brings forth some glitches. Are you guys gunna fix the problem, or just hide it?! But this is not an issue with Silent Hill 2: Born From a Wish itself, so no points are docked off.

Verdict

In the end, this review is going to be short and sweet because it would be weird if the technical criticisms are longer than the actual product being criticized. The story, as usual, was peachy keen, but the length was the main problem that I had with this expansion pack. With that said, I'm going to give this sucker a:

3.5/5

I would add the standard game rating system, but this campaign is really too short to properly judge on those aspects. Either that, or I'm too damn lazy.