i already made a video on the topic so i might be repeating myself, but the release of these recent silent hill projects make it impossible for me to not think about how much this franchise struggles with defining its identity. and for as much as i love silent hill 2, it's kinda its fault for muddying the waters on what a silent hill game was supposed to be 'about', since it is the one game that popularized this notion of the 'therapist town'.
twisted projections of the worst parts of someone's mind have been a cornerstone of the series since the first entry, where we are forced to experience alessa's nightmare, but it's a notably different approach than that of the second game, starting by the fact that it's a deep dive of someone else's mind, not the protagonist's - a formula that repeats itself most notably on silent hill 4, with walter's character being the sources of the projections, and even silent hill 3, where we are split between heather and claudia's versions of the otherworld.
in these games, we spend a good chunk of the game with our player characters as confused spectators of a horror that is connected to them, sure, but bigger than themselves. it is that contrast that made silent hill 2 stand out back when it came out, in fact. finding out that what we were experiencing stemmed from james himself instead of other characters around him was a genuine twist, not the forgone conclusion that it became these days.
in reality, what i believe has always been central to the identity of the silent hill games and that has been sorely neglected on basically every title that has been released after 4 (no doubt because of this belief that silent hill /needs/ to be about a tortured protagonist discovering hidden truths about their lives) is the occult. the genuine surreal supernatural elements that complement the metaphors. the cult and the gods and the otherworld and the psychic powers. and that's something that even silent hill 2, the game most disconnected of this aspect of the series out of the original four, still recognizes and approaches in direct ways. that's what makes maria such an intriguing character, especially on born from a wish, and there's even an ending where james tries to engages directly with elements of the cult of the original game, attempting to perform a ritual of rebirth on mary.
i feel that later silent hill titles feel almost ashamed to engage with these elements directly, preferring to lean heavily on the metaphorical aspects of it in order to downplay the weirdness of the occult in the series, but in doing it that, you end up stripping it of something that's essential to it, that gives the series its distinct flavor and, worse of all, end up with very samey, predictable stories that try and fail to recapture the magic of silent hill 2
