I have never played a “Silent Hill” game before this week when I started the Bloober Team remake of “2.” And despite the weird, slow opening and off putting opening level, I beat it. It was confusing, aimless, and haunting, but something drew me to go further and discover more in this town.

Early on in “Silent Hill 2,” one of the characters suggests that the town of Silent Hill is dangerous. The protagonist, James, agrees, but neither one knows why. They can feel it though. Another character he runs into later suggests that they don’t know why, but something drew them to the town. Whether it’s James’s very dead wife, or the clearly missing family of Angela, there is no reason why they should be in Silent Hill.

But something drew them there, and they have to do nothing but torture themselves in dread, guilt, shame, and agony. Pure misery suffered for no reason other than those people clearly knew they did something wrong, and have to atone for their sins. Instead, they figured they could go into Silent Hill and distract themselves in the midst of a horrific nightmare.

I suspect that this place is a version of hell itself, and they have to be reminded of everything they’ve ever done to deserve it — every reason they ended up in the foggy ass place to begin with. Whether it be murder, suicide, manslaughter (that’s what I suspect the main cast of Eddie, Angela, and James are guilty of), they keep bumping into each other en media res. Every resulting conversation is an avant-garde mish-mash of allegories and mysterious cliffhangers — hinting at the state of mind for these miserable sad lonely people.

Most of the time, you pump shotgun shells into slimy nurses in a prison with the lights off. That’s what makes “Silent Hill 2” special.

There’s a magic to the game that is hard to find in most other horror titles — a mysticism that also draws you to go down the rabbit hole deeper and deeper alongside James as he attempts to find his dead wife. She’s already dead — years gone — so why is he still looking for her? All he does in every building is encounter limbless sacks of skin who vomit acid on him, or solve obtuse puzzles to wind up in a creepy hospital or the most disgusting apartment building imaginable.

It’s definitely not the combat, that’s an afterthought in this game, but the most impressive thing in “Silent Hill 2” is the locations. The setting, the atmosphere, the pacing, and the absolutely repugnant levels you go between. It’s dripping with ooze, filth, bugs, and the worst shit imaginable. And yet, it’s so compelling that I can see immediately why some fans of the genre believe this to be the best in the industry or among their favorite games of all time.

This is primarily a puzzle game akin to a point-and-click adventure with all of the traversing around picking up items and gluing them together to shove into a hole or a locked box. They can get pretty tricky with the player really being required to pay attention to notes, numbers, and things scrawled on walls in blood.

Also, who the hell would ever think to combine a broken lockpick with a medical tube to be lowered into an opening near a pool? It’s that kind of sick, twisted logic that makes this game one of a kind. For better or worse.

I don’t want to spoil the multiple endings that you can unlock, as it more or less points out what was going on the whole time with James and his super dead wife Mary. But if you’ve never played a “Silent Hill” like me before this week, you should heavily put on your big boy pants, enter that gross looking prison down past the abyss, and turn off the lights to get spooked out of your jorts.

This game has elite sound design, absolutely fascinating levels, and the perfect balance of not tipping its hand while revealing enough about the world to make it still interesting to lurch around.

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Image Credit: “Silent Hill 2,” Konami and Bloober Team