Silent Hill 2 is a linear game that never feels like one, because it keeps handing you a map and letting you get lost on it. This is the order of the places, so you always know whether you are stuck or simply have not finished looking. It stays at the level of buildings and routes — no room-by-room item lists, because half of what you are looking for is rolled for your save.
The way in
The rest stop
The game opens in a bathroom mirror and lets you walk out when it is ready. Take the observation deck before the trail: it is the only wide view of Toluca Lake you get before the fog closes.
The trail and the cemetery
A long walk down to the town with nothing in it, which is the point. Angela is at the bottom, looking for her mother. She is the first of the two people the town has brought here for reasons of their own.
Silent Hill, Sanders Street
The road into town proper. Most streets are blocked or broken open; the map crosses them out as you find them, so trust it and stop re-walking dead ends.
The apartments
Wood Side Apartments
The first real building, and the game's tutorial in disguise: locked doors, a key somewhere else, a monster in a corridor you cannot fully avoid. Eddie turns up here, in one of the flats' bathrooms.
The first Pyramid Head
You see him before you fight anything like him — behind bars, doing something you are not meant to watch. It is staged, not a mistake, and shooting at it wastes ammo you will want later.
Blue Creek Apartments
Connected to Wood Side rather than reached from the street. The stairwell encounter with Pyramid Head is survival, not victory: keep the room between you and him until he goes.
The hospital
Rosewater Park
Maria appears here, and from this point the game is watching how you treat her. See the endings page before you decide how to play it — none of it is announced.
Brookhaven Hospital
Three floors, a lot of locked doors and the nurses. This is where the shotgun turns up and where ammo discipline starts to matter.
The hospital turns over
Brookhaven becomes its Otherworld version and the route changes under you. The map you filled in still helps: the geometry holds even when the surfaces do not.
Under the town
Silent Hill Historical Society
A small museum with a hole in it. James goes down the hole. There is no way back up and the game does not pretend otherwise.
Toluca Prison
Cell blocks, a courtyard and the long way round. The game stops hiding what it is about here.
The Labyrinth
Abstract Daddy — Angela's monster — and Eddie in the meat freezer. Two fights that are about two other people's guilt, placed where James cannot look away from them.
The hotel
Lakeview Hotel
Out of the Labyrinth onto the shore of Toluca Lake, and across the water by rowing boat to where James and Mary stayed. The hotel is the only place in the game that is quiet, and it is worse for it.
Twin Pyramid Heads
Two of him in a room with no exit. Their health seems to be shared, so concentrate your attacks on the closest one.
The last room
Which ending you get is settled before you walk in: partly across the whole game, and partly in the hotel's last stretch — the door you take after placing the two eggs, and whether you hear out the voice in the corridor on the way. Nothing you do in this room changes it.
If you are stuck
- Check the map for a door you marked and never opened. The game marks locked doors differently from doors it has ruled out.
- Re-read what is in the inventory. Notes stay there, and the clue for the thing blocking you is almost always something you already picked up.
- The radio hisses near monsters, not near objectives. Silence means the room is safe, not that it is empty of things to find.
- If a walkthrough's code does not match your note, your note is right — see the puzzles page.