Silent Hill 2's remake is full of new puzzles that players have had to tackle since launch, and it turns out that the most important one of them all has only just been solved by a dedicated fan.
"I solved the Silent Hill 2 remake photos secret," a player who goes by DaleRobinson says. "If you count things within each photo (for example, the open windows in photo 1 = 6), then count that number across the writing on each one, you will get a letter. It spells out: 'You've been here for two decades.'"
DaleRobinson was able to figure this out by doing the following: There are 26 photos you can find throughout the Silent Hill 2 remake in total, and of these contain one letter that will help decipher the answer: "You've been here for two decades." You can figure out which letter is part of the solution by counting key objects in each photo and then cross-referencing that number to the writing underneath said picture.
For example, under the first photo, the words read, "So many people here!" There are also six windows in the picture, so you need to select the sixth letter of the sentence, which is "Y". DaleRobinson has explained the workings for every single letter as well as linking to a list of every single photo present so you can double check the answer for yourself.
It's a complicated way of solving this puzzle, and even though I understand how they were able to figure out the answer for themselves, I'm not sure I'd ever be able to complete it myself, a fact that I'm not too ashamed of because Silent Hill 2's dev team thought the puzzle was too hard.
"I knew it wouldn’t stay hidden for long," creative director and lead designer Mateusz Lenart says. "(There was a theory in our company that the puzzle might be too hard) I really wanted to make it subtle when I was painting those photos... I think the timing couldn’t be better for you to solve it. Congratulations!"
The solution to this puzzle also confirms a popular fan theory that the Silent Hill 2 remake takes place in a looping story and that James is trapped in an endless nightmare. But there are other small clues that the game takes place in some kind of loop. Twitch streamer Deadhead proposed a few weeks back that you can tell the Silent Hill 2 remake is a looping narrative due to certain actions from key characters, like how Pyramid Head seems slightly more subdued than in the original game and how Maria mentions experiencing deja vu. There's also the fact that quite a few of the dead bodies scattered around Silent Hill seem to resemble James, "There were some hints in the original Silent Hill 2 of some kind of loop taking place, as many of the random human corpses looked like James," Deadhead explains.
Whether or not these small features prove the theory about Silent Hill 2 is still unclear, but at least we do know Bloober Team's intentions when it came to creating a looping story for James to suffer in for the rest of eternity.
