Day 16, Game With the Best Cutscenes: Silent Hill 2

It’s incredibly difficult for me to judge a game by it’s cutscenes, because more often than not you just want to skip cutscenes and get back to playing the game. For this reason I had to think about a game that had cinematics I actually wanted to watch more than once. Silent Hill 2 satisfies this requirement because no matter how many times I’ve played the game, I still want to watch each cutscene again. The Silent Hill series as a whole is heavily story based and that lends itself tremendously to the effectiveness of its cutscenes. While SH2 manages to convey a lot of atmosphere and story elements through its gameplay, the cutscenes are typically the climax to what was built up through gameplay.

The reason we often want to skip cutscenes is because they usually don’t have anything constructive to tell us; after we’ve seen them once we can gladly skip them even if they are gorgeous.

Yes, you're very pretty; now GTFO!

SH2 exploits the full potential of its cutscenes, employing music, cinematography and emotion to craft strong and memorable moments that you want to relive every time you play. Even if you know how the story ends, you can still pick up on something new with each play through. The richness of this franchise’s use of cinematography was even carried over in the film adaptation, which borrowed a lot of frame by frame shots from Silent Hill’s cutscenes and gameplay. I would recommend hunting down some of the videos online, but I personally think you’d be cheating yourself out of the context. Still, take a look at the game’s introduction down below for a good sampling of the game’s many cinematics.

Silent Hill 2: Introduction