Interactive entertainment, despite its moments of excellence and triumph, still hasn’t quite achieved the deserved status of Art. For too many people, the automatic mental image of “video games” defaults to a (not entirely misleading) beeping, flashing catalog of gaudy arcade machines, boppy digitized music, vapid anthropomorphized characters and -- mark this -- mindless distraction. For such people, something like Silent Hill 2 will come as a shock, perhaps even a menace, certainly a rude awakening; this game has disarmingly powerful things to say about grief, pain, loss and anger. The fact that it does so in the form of the scariest, creepiest, most disturbing video game ever made---well, just think of that as a pack-in bonus.

Silent Hill 2 puts players in the shoes of James Sunderland, a thirtyish, fairly normal sort of man whose life is upended when he receives a letter from his wife Mary, urging him to meet her in the resort town Silent Hill -- a place of many memories and emotions shared between the two. The brief, intimate urgency of this reunion-summons would be the stuff of bittersweet love songs if it weren’t for one near-unspeakable fact:

Mary Sunderland -- beloved wife -- is dead.

Some three years in her grave now, she succumbed to an unspecified wasting affliction which James can only think of as “that damn disease.” James isn’t a rube or a moron: At some level, he knows that to believe the letter is a sick folly, to answer it a form of madness. And yet---torn, desperate and numb---he makes his way to Silent Hill regardless. But the couple’s fondly-remembered hamlet of sunlight, sanctuary and serenity has become a nightmare of darkness, death and dread: The once-quaint streets have become a fog-shrouded, blood-splattered labyrinth of dead storefronts and abandoned vehicles, populated by shambling horrors the eye struggles to even identify, let alone accept; the town’s pervasive silence is broken only by James’ echoing footfalls or the teeth-grating shriek of James’ malfunctioning pocket radio (which inexplicably blares warning static whenever some monstrosity approaches from the mist); even the player’s own innate, human sense of time and location comes under assault as the already-diseased township begins to unaccountably and uncontrollably shift between its present form and the physical manifestation of the town’s dark past, which begins to bleed through into the canvas of reality like a pentimento straight out of Hell.

While the game certainly demands the violent defeat of many a monstrosity, the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s warning of Silent Hill 2’s “blood and gore” so entirely misses the point that it almost becomes a black joke: Silent Hill 2’s greatest moments of shock and unease -- and there are some whoppers -- come not from its depictions of physical violence or grue, but from its powerful, twisted story and presentation. Alive and crawling with disturbingly eerie, fluid graphics courtesy of the Playstation 2 console, Silent Hill 2 pulls absolutely no punches, be they visual, aural, emotional or psychological: The first time James encounters something that shouldn’t walk free in a sane world, his only handy defensive implement is a board with a nail through it -- and his only option is to beat the abomination to death, to the accompaniment of brutally wet sound-effects. But that’s as nothing to what follows; James encounters a handful of other lost individuals, including a young woman named Maria who almost exactly resembles James’ late Mary. This enigmatic but undeniably real lookalike -- by turns vulnerable, teasing, whorish, shrewish and innocent -- turns James’ already-surreal quest into a relentless, self-recriminating push into very personal hells where violent physical battles with half-human things are punctuated with the internal struggles and honest-to-God wrenching revelations of the various characters.

All the while the ambient soundtrack gets eerier, the hallways get darker, the player’s health and ammunition run lower, and the hysterical, insectile shriek of static heralds approaching doom as the player battles through Silent Hill…for one more chance to get it right. Through the darkness and dread, Silent Hill 2 manages to impart a message of terrible beauty, one that flies in the faces of personal demons and occasionally triumphs... if only the player can last that long.