Plot

Letter From Silent Heaven

James Sunderland has arrived in the town of Silent Hill after receiving a letter from his wife, Mary, despite that she had died from an illness three years ago. The letter states that Mary is waiting for James in their "special place," but this confuses James as the whole town of Silent Hill was their special place.

After leaving the town's observation deck and walking towards Silent Hill, James briefly meets Angela Orosco, a teenage girl who came to the town to search for her mother. When James reaches Silent Hill, he discovers that it is not the same, beautiful town from his past. In addition to the strange, omnipresent fog, the whole town seems to be rotting away and abandoned. Bizarre, vaguely humanoid monsters are wandering the streets, waiting to attack James. With the path to his first destination, the lakeside Rosewater Park, cut off, James enters an apartment complex to reach what he believes could be the "special place" Mary mentioned in the letter.

Inside the apartments, James meets an obese young man, Eddie Dombrowski, vomiting in one of the apartment toilets. Eddie responds in a very defensive manner to questions regarding a corpse in a refrigerator in the same apartment. James also has a brief encounter with a little girl named Laura, who is apparently immune to the effects of the town and has a yet unexplained loathing of James, as well as a hidden past with Mary. James finds Angela again, who had warned him of the town's bizarre nature, lying in one of the apartments with a knife, suicidal. James persuades her to hand him the knife for her own safety, after which she flees in panic. James also encounters "Pyramid Head", a humanoid monster whose head is completely covered in a giant, metal, pyramid-shaped helmet that protects him against anything James will possess in his arsenal. However, Pyramid Head leaves when a siren starts to sound in the distance after battling James for a short while.

When James finally reaches Rosewater Park, he meets a woman called Maria who is almost identical to Mary, but donned in a more provocative outfit and possessing more of an attitude. During their travels, she reveals insight into matters that only he or Mary would know and acts in a very seductive manner towards James. Maria accompanies James in his attempt to reach his second suspected "special place," the Lakeview Hotel. James enters Pete's Bowl-O-Rama where he meets Eddie again, yet refuses to come with him. He also spots Laura, who runs away from James. When James exits the bowling alley, Maria claims to have seen Laura and, out of concern for her, she has James try to reach the girl. Their pursuit ends at Brookhaven Hospital, where Maria becomes sick and has to rest in one of the hospital rooms.

James finds Laura in one of the hospital's rooms, but becomes angry at her for claiming to have known Mary for the past year, in clear contradiction to his belief that she has been dead for three years. Laura responds by locking him in a room filled with covered monsters stuffed in hanging cages under the pretence of looking for a letter from Mary. After they are defeated, the hospital undergoes a sudden, dramatic change to the Otherworld, where Maria is missing. Fortunately, James finds Maria in the hospital's basement, however, she is angry that he abandoned her, and after calming down they press on to find Laura. Pyramid Head, however, chases James and Maria in the hospital's basement and he slaughters Maria while they make their escape to an elevator, leaving James alone again. Maria's death saddens James, but he refocuses on his original task of finding Mary. He leaves the hospital and finds a key behind a statue in Rosewater Park, which leads him to the Silent Hill Historical Society.

The Historical Society becomes an exploration of two levels not noted on the town map: Toluca Prison and a labyrinth in which Pyramid Head resides. In this area, James finds Maria, who greets him with disillusions of Mary, miraculously alive and locked in a prison cell. He is unable to rescue her as she is killed by Pyramid Head again. This area also provides back story as to why Angela and Eddie are in the town as well. A newspaper clipping indicates that Angela killed her father, who abused her with the complicity of her mother. James saves Angela from a monstrous representation of her father, but she is still hostile towards James. Eddie is revealed to have snapped after years of verbal abuse by his peers. He killed the dog of a football player and then shot the dog's owner in the leg. It becomes clear that, upon his arrival in Silent Hill, he has gone insane, seeing everyone as making fun of him, and has resorted to killing anyone he encounters. He first attempts to explain the path of bodies he has left, but ultimately he turns on James as well and must be killed to progress through the game. James feels ashamed for killing Eddie, a human being, and after this point, James seriously questions his perception of the events leading to his arrival in the town. As well, the letter that he supposedly received from Mary goes blank, indicating that the letter itself was something that James himself thought up, and that it never actually existed in the first place.

James exits the labyrinth and takes a boat to the Lakeview Hotel in hopes of finding Mary. In the hotel, he finds Laura once again and she gives him the letter she claimed to be seeking earlier, which reveals that Mary wanted to adopt her while confirming Laura's claims of knowing Mary for the past year. The final truth is shown to James when he watches a video tape he apparently left at the hotel three years ago, which shows that he killed his terminally ill wife himself, smothering her with a pillow to stop her suffering. Laura, who is ready to leave the town, finds James, and he chooses to reveal the truth to her; Laura becomes angry with him for killing Mary and she leaves, disappointed.

The radio James has been carrying to warn him of the approach of monsters sends a message from Mary, asking him to find her. James explores the rest of the hotel, which has undergone an Otherworld transformation in which it is damp and leaking everywhere. James finds Angela on a burning staircase and she asks him to return her knife so that she can commit suicide, but he declines. James states that the room is hot as hell, to which she replies that it's always like this for her; her life was always a living hell. Angela ascends the burning staircase and walks into the flames.

The climax approaches as James finds yet another resurrected Maria, bound and screaming for James' help, but is promptly killed by two Pyramid Head monsters; James realizes that they have been created to punish him for his sins. James fights the two Pyramid Heads, and after they are severely weakened, they commit ritual suicide with their own spears as if to indicate that their purpose has been fulfilled. James is led to a hallway where he listens to a previous conversation that he and Mary had while she was still alive; in this conversation, James brought Mary some flowers, but she did not accept them, stating that she is too disgusting to deserve flowers and yells furiously at James. At the end of this conversation, Mary desperately pleads to James for him to be with her. James enters a large metallic complex with a long staircase, and at the top of this staircase, he finds a woman (depending on the ending, the woman will be either Maria or Mary herself) who transforms into the manifested pain of Mary. After James defeats this final demon, the game comes to a close.

Born From a Wish

Maria wakes up alone and frightened in the "Heaven's Night" club. After pondering to herself about what she should do, she eventually decides to try and find someone else in the town.

She begins to wander through the streets of Silent Hill until eventually she enters Baldwin Mansion, an area out of bounds in the main game. Here she meets the owner of the mansion, Ernest Baldwin (although she never actually sees him; all their conversations are shared between locked doors.) Ernest speaks in a strange monotone, and asks her to find him the "white liquid" to help him bring back his dead daughter. Maria helps him with this, even though it may not work, stating, "I don't mind fighting for an impossible cause." After Maria brings back the "white liquid" to Ernest, he reveals slightly more about Maria to her, and tells her about James. He warns Maria that James is a bad man, and that he's looking for "the you that isn't you". This seems to stir something in Maria, who begins to remember things about James. Maria then opens the door, but the room where Ernest is in is empty. Disappointed from not finding another human, she leaves the Baldwin mansion and considers suicide, but refrains. She decides to follow her fate, hoping that James would accept her as she is.

This article uses material from the "Silent Hill 2" article on the Silent Hill wiki at Wikia and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License.