Returning to Silent Hill 2, we'd like to highlight an unofficial version of the game that currently represents the state of the art in digital artwork recovery and restoration: the Enhanced Edition, created by a core team of 15 individuals, is the cumulative result of countless amateur modifications to the shoddy 2002 American PC edition. By dating the convergence of these efforts into a coherent effort to 2006 (this is the date of creation of the official project page), we are talking about a work that has been going on for 16 years and that brings us, today, to be able to enjoy the game on relatively modern computers in a nearly ideal form. The aims of the authors, in this case, are bivalent: they wanted not only to restore the aesthetics of the game as it appeared on the PlayStation 2, but also to eliminate a whole series of bugs arising from the original conversion process first, and then from the introduction of advanced features including widescreen support.
Starting with the first point, Silent Hill 2 stands out for its ability to drop the player into environments that are eerie and corrupt, but still marked by an obvious, familiar underlying realism. To achieve this, the development team has infused their levels with a marked sense of depth by making use of the strengths of the Graphics Synthesizer: first of all, its great ability in superimposing sprites in semi-transparent layers, a technique already known in the previous generation but applicable there in a more intensive and sophisticated manner; this allows, among other things, to simulate volumetric effects for smoke and particles by appropriately animating the various layers - a method that PC video cards of the time digested poorly and slowly. Secondly, there is shadow management, which saw the PS2 capable of casting long stencil shadows (sometimes even mapping them in real time onto the levels and characters' geometries) and blurring their outlines in proportion to distance. Taken together, these and other details give Silent Hill 2's presentation a solid, textured and rough appearance, a perfect counterbalance to the well-known fact that just beyond the dense fog horizon, game levels are loaded "in chunks" into the console's limited memory.