Silent Hill 2

James Sunderland fights like a man who has never hit anything before. He raises a wooden plank over his head, pauses, and brings it down late; the pistol wanders off target; the sprint runs out. That clumsiness reads as jank until you notice it never improves, and that the game has no interest in making you competent. Combat here is an obligation you would rather avoid, which is exactly how a grieving furniture salesman wandering a fogbound resort town would feel about it.

The letter from his dead wife gets him to Silent Hill in the first two minutes, and the rest is a slow descent through apartment blocks, a hospital, a prison and a hotel, most of them navigated with a flashlight clipped to a jacket and a radio that spits static when something is close. Konami's Team Silent built the whole structure around insinuation. Puzzles are literary rather than mechanical - a poem, a clockface, a coin - and the notes you find are written by people whose reasoning has already come apart. When the game does show you something directly, as with the two mannequin legs stitched together into a monster, or the executioner in the rusted helmet, the image is doing psychological work rather than shock work.

The famous fog started as a hardware compromise on hardware that could not draw a whole town, and it became the most influential aesthetic decision of its generation. It works because Akira Yamaoka's score works with it: industrial scrape, distant metal, then an actual song with lyrics arriving at the precise moment you have stopped expecting beauty. Very little in horror games since has matched that sound design, and plenty has tried.

What holds it together is that the supporting cast are not there to help. Angela, Eddie and the woman who looks like Mary all carry their own damage, and their scenes are staged with long silences and misfired lines that make more sense on a second run. The endings hinge on behaviour the game never flags - how you treat a photograph, whether you keep your health topped up - so the story quietly audits you while you play.

Two decades of imitators have made the fog and the static into shorthand, but almost none of them understood the harder trick: the monsters were James's all along, and the game trusts you to work that out yourself.