The point here is not to be effusive about Silent Hill 2, because that’s been done plenty during the last 23 years and, while I’m confident, completely, that the game deserves it, and I think there are new ways to be effusive about it, too, the way I feel now is that Silent Hill 2, in some sense, represents not the zenith of videogames and game-making, but rather their failure. You look at Silent Hill 2—or look at it in a certain way, at least—and what you see is how almost every game equivalent in terms of budget, scale, or mainstream exposure that’s been created in the last two decades has not, in any way, come close to what Silent Hill 2 achieved. It’s an apex in the sense that an apex symbolises and prefigures a downfall, a depletion, a gradual collapse. I haven’t played the remake yet, so I’m not passing judgement on it in terms of its own quality, but it seems to serve as the ideal metaphor for games now as opposed to games then—there was a point in time where things like Silent Hill 2 came out, and now we’re at a point in time where remakes of those things come out. It’s the reputation of Silent Hill 2 that has guaranteed its remake. Its vision and originality are commodities now, the raw materials which are best suited to be recycled and exploited by modern game factories. The world of videogames today has become the town of Silent Hill itself, inhabited by reflections, refractions, and grotesques of the past—half-formed ghosts composed of the leftovers of living souls. More astounding than the original Silent Hill 2 is how few other mainstream games with its cohesiveness, depth, and general artistic credibility have ever been made. It’s astounding that it’s astounding.

I think Silent Hill 2 is special, and not just special—like, say, the original Medal of Honor or Driver: San Francisco, both games I hold in high regard—when compared to other videogames. It’s not just good ‘for a videogame.’ But right now, rather than admire it for its rare qualities, I’m given to a kind of despair, where I wonder what exactly it is in videogames—as a culture, a business, a form, a world—that means these qualities are so rare. Silent Hill 2 has an expert command of metaphor. It uses music, costume, production design, writing, and pacing to major effect. It’s adult. It’s frightening. It’s human and well observed. Silent Hill 2 is a game of uncompromising truth, but expressed via symbolism and stark abstraction. But the thing is—and I know that at a statistical or analytical or more balanced level this might be an unfair equivalency, but it feels intuitively right—this isn’t, in movies and books, that special, as in, so special it only happens once every 23 years. There are other games that are artistically excellent in the way that Silent Hill 2 is artistically excellent, but I don’t think there are any that achieve quite so much, or achieve it so potently and intelligibly and stylishly. It’s fantastic. But mainstream games like Silent Hill 2, mainstream games about sexuality, love, reality, and other things critics have been saying games don’t have enough of, for the last 1,000 years, should surely appear more often. It’s a monument to the achievements of the medium, but a monument also to the medium’s relative destitution.

I feel like, as time has worn on, this has become—for me at least—the legacy of Silent Hill 2. It’s that Fermi Paradox thing: if this is what we can do with the medium of videogames, where the hell are all the good videogames? There might be ten, twenty, a hundred great mainstream videogames out there, but so what? Given the amount of time that everyone’s had, the hit rate is low—real low. And then you compare that with how many games come out that make you feel ill, and like culture’s dead, and there’s no hope for any of this stuff, and, you know, it’s that old thing: The first time someone calls you a horse, you call them an ass. The second time they call you a horse, you punch them in the nose. But the third time someone calls you a horse, well, maybe it’s time to buy a saddle. I feel like Silent Hill 2, as the years roll on, is becoming more and more feeble. It’s proof that not everything is Warzone and Fortnite and Diablo Immortal and whatever else people like Asmongold play, but it’s 23 years old, and there are so few games that come close to it, even fewer that draw equal, that eventually you have to reckon that Silent Hill 2 and everything else in the Really Good Game canon amount to a teaspoon, and you’re trying to shovel the sea. I wish there were way more games like Silent Hill 2. I’m surprised there aren’t.

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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Twitter handle is @esmithwriter.