Key Takeaways
- Silent Hill 2 offers a top-tier enemy variety like no other survival horror game, with Bloober Team’s updated designs adding to the horror.
- From Creepers to Lying Figures, Silent Hill 2’s enemies provide suspenseful surprises in atmospheric environments, intensifying the fear factor.
- Unique enemies like Flesh Lip Monster, Mandarins, and Mannequins add a disturbing and terrifying element to the game’s already creepy atmosphere.
There’s truly no other survival horror game that can top the disturbing enemy variety Silent Hill 2 offers, which is why it’s considered one of the best of all time. Creature designer Masahiro Ito has outdone himself in his contributions to the world of Silent Hill, and Bloober Team has pulled off an equally massive undertaking in giving them updated designs that elevate the horror.
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Silent Hill 2’s atmospheric environments make excellent use of enemies and their placement, providing you with a suspenseful surprise in every hallway, corner, and room. From Lying Figures to Mannequins and the infamous Pyramid Head, here are the horrors that await James Sunderland.
The Abstract Daddy entry briefly mentions childhood sexual abuse.
10
Creepers
Creepy-crawly Creepers live up to their name in Silent Hill. While not the scariest enemy by design, they can still make you paranoid when your radio comes on, since they can move around walls and are sometimes harder to spot. They’re like a giant cockroach crossed with a beetle, and they can do a bit of damage if not squashed in time.
If insects truly make you tremble with fear, there’s a puzzle room right before the main Toluca Prison section where the Creepers shine. Thousands of bugs will crawl all around James, and among them will be waves of Creepers that jump off walls and attack James as you attempt to enter the code, which is tensely done through trial and error.
9
Lying Figures
Your first experience with combat is with a Lying Figure. These enemies are scattered around every area within Silent Hill, but perhaps still aren’t the scariest creatures being conjured from James’ psyche. Even in the dense fog, you wouldn’t hesitate to rush up to one and start giving it a brutal beatdown with your plank Negan-style, dodging their occasional sprays of gunk.
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The fear factor gets upped, however, when you enter an area to see a crawling Lying Figure slithering out of the room and coming back around unexpectedly, or the Otherworld version of these enemies where they explode into a cloud of toxic fumes. Their shocking design also resembles a creature that’s been forcibly stuffed into a latex BDSM suit (which was said to be part of the inspiration).
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Eddie Dombrowski
You build up a lot of sympathy toward Eddie when you first meet him. He’s clearly someone who’s been horribly bullied for being overweight and carries a lot of that trauma with him, which feeds into a negative cycle of him continuing to overeat. He also has no trouble making friends with Laura, so that makes him seem gentle… that is until the prison encounter and the meat locker fight in the Labyrinth area.
You learn Eddie came to Silent Hill after he murdered his bully’s dog and nearly did the same to the bully and actually enjoyed it, seeking to harm those who laugh at him. Now, he becomes as unsettling as all the other monsters you’ve encountered thus far in the game, and seeing the dead bodies before heading into the fight in the meat locker and the cat-and-mouse fight itself through all the carcasses and fog makes his character even more terrifying.
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Mandarins
In the initial sections where you encounter Mandarins, they are relatively harmless. They only suction to the caged floor beneath you, and you can easily outrun them and avoid their attacks, which come in the form of an extremely long tongue that can impale you. The Labyrinth section makes escaping these enemies much more intense, and then you arrive at the Lakeview Hotel’s version of Mandarins.
The Mandarins in the final location of the game aren’t found below you anymore; they are erratically monkey-barring around a conference room ceiling and traveling all over the basement area of the hotel, where you must avoid them without any help from your weapons. Their strange designs also entail mouths for arms and faces featuring giant, puffy lips inspired by Francis Bacon’s Second Version of Triptych painting.
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Flesh Lip Monster And Mary
The Flesh Lip monster that Laura locks you in the room with before the start of the Otherworld Brookhaven Hospital and Mary’s final form are on an even playing field of scary and disturbing. They’re both creatures that are suspended in cages and burst through the ceiling to try and get James. Then, their cages begin to sprout appendages and move like giant metal spiders on the ground.
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The Flesh Lip monster is basically like an upgraded Mandarin, a more industrialized and mechanical version that proves a genuinely intimidating creature to fight, as it can fall right onto you from above and swipe you to low health with its spiky legs. The boss version of Mary/Maria achieves a disturbing design because it incorporates her illness and suspends her upside down inside the spider cage.
5
Mannequins
After the Lying Figures, you meet the Mannequins, which are really two pairs of mannequin legs joined together, and they become both the scariest and most annoying enemy in the game. Their main characteristic is lying low in hiding spots in different rooms until you spot them and take them out, or they can spot you first and pop out very unexpectedly to cause a jumpscare.
These will get you most of the time, especially when they move around, but sometimes, you’ll get lucky and see exactly where they take their post in the environment. The fact that they can also latch onto James and need to be wrestled off adds a more terrifying dynamic altogether. Therefore, you quickly start to become paranoid and cautious of them whenever entering a new room.
4
Bubble Head Nurses
Bubble Head Nurses have the most obvious symbolism to James’s psychology, given that they first appear in Brookhaven Hospital and are meant to be a reflection of the hospital nurses he would interact with during his wife, Mary’s, hospital stays. They are grotesque, their movements and audio design are super eerie, and they’re the most dangerous enemy type since they can wield actual weapons, with the Otherworld version getting knives.
Going toe-to-toe with a Nurse won’t be the same as with a Lying Figure or Mannequin. They are much better at dodging and outright sending your attack back to you when you try to take a swing. Your best strategy is to down them with a shotgun blast and beat them with your pipe before they can get back up. Facing multiple Nurses in one room is extremely daunting.
3
Abstract Daddy
What Pyramid Head is to James Sunderland, Abstract Daddy is to Angela Orosco. It’s the main source of her trauma that bleeds into James’s experience in Silent Hill, and the enemy design is as disturbing as the backstory. This vile thing represents the childhood sexual abuse Angela suffered from her father and brother, which drove her to kill them both.
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“In my restless dream, I see that town. Silent Hill.” That may be so, Mary, but these mods will certainly never make it the same again.
The design reflects a larger figure on top of another sealed inside a bedframe in a sexual position. It’s quite an image to take in, let alone to have to fight him off in a suspenseful close-quarters encounter. This creature is the stuff born of nightmares and Masahiro Ito arguably achieved a far more visually repulsive boss that contrasts Pyramid Head with Abstract Daddy’s aesthetic.
2
Pyramid Head
Silent Hill 2’s Pyramid Head became one of the most iconic video game monsters of all time, showing up in future installments and movies, and even cameoing in other games since. He’s a faceless brute with a giant knife and wearing a Pyramid-shaped mask and apron who torments James throughout his journey in Silent Hill. In the end, you find there are even two of them, now with spears.
While Pyramid Head is an unbelievably menacing figure representing an executioner, he’s actually at his scariest when he chases you rather than when you have to face him head-on during a boss battle. The end of the Brookhaven Hospital section, the Flooded Labyrinth, and the final Ruined Labyrinth hallway area where you must outrun Pyramid Head through the sea of arms are all equally harrowing.
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Spider Mannequins
Bloober Team did an excellent job with all the classic enemies in the remake of Silent Hill 2, but the developer also put an incredibly unsettling original twist on Mannequins that made them even scarier to encounter than Pyramid Head. These would, of course, be the Spider Mannequins, which are present from the prison section until the end of the game.
Spider Mannequins are new to the 2024 remake, and they can really make your skin crawl as you watch them maneuver around walls, especially if you have bad arachnophobia. They also have the mechanic of light drawing them away, pouncing on you once the room finally goes dark. Their scariest moments include when you’re trapped inside a Labyrinth room with one of them, or when a group of them crawls along the second-floor hallway of the Lakeview Hotel after acquiring the Snow White music box figure.
Survival Horror
Horror
Adventure
Action
- Released
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October 8, 2024
- Engine
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Unreal Engine 5
- ESRB
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M For Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Language, Sexual Themes, Violence
- How Long To Beat
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15 Hours
- How Long To Beat (Completionist Runs)
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26.5 hours