Often, in Silent Hill 2, you need to find an item that’s inside a toilet. Typically, they're keys, or fragments of puzzle pieces, things that you need to progress the story forward. In other words, Silent Hill 2 is a game that forces you into uncomfortable or grim situations; you have to press a button multiple times to make James Sunderland dig through the detritus, muck, and gross liquids to dig out the items you need.
The point of this isn’t just for the game to gross you out, but to force agency onto you. In order to move forward, you need to make unpleasant choices. This is often at the core of how horror works in video games: you, the player, actively respond to – and sometimes create – horrific situations. And this seems to be one of the major reasons that horror games seem to struggle when it comes to being adapted for the big screen.
