Almost a full month after the Silent Hill 2 remake’s launch, players have cracked one of its trickiest puzzles. And the solution to that puzzle, which involves a series of collectible Polaroids called Strange Photos, gives the game a new storytelling layer — that is, depending on how you interpret it.
Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake includes 26 photos scattered throughout the game. They appear to be innocuous and disconnected from the overall story of James Sunderland’s journey through Silent Hill. Each photo has a number scrawled on the back and a caption associated with photos of seemingly random objects and scenes. Reddit user Dale Robinson cracked the game’s code over the weekend, revealing that the clues in the Strange Photos spell out the phrase “You’ve been here for two decades.”
“If you count things within each photo,” Robinson wrote, using the example of six open windows in photo No. 1, “Then count that number across the writing on each one, you will get a letter.” In Robinson’s example, the caption on the first photo is “So many people here!” and the sixth letter in that phrase is Y. Robinson shows their work across all 26 Strange Photos.
Silent Hill 2 remake creative director Mateusz Lenart later confirmed that Robinson’s solution was correct.
“I knew it wouldn’t stay hidden for long!” Lenart wrote on X (formerly Twitter). “(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 intended meaning of the phrase “You’ve been here for two decades” is up for debate. Some players have interpreted the line as a message to them from Konami and Bloober Team, a recognition that they’ve been playing some form of Silent Hill 2 since 2001. Another interpretation of the puzzle’s solution is that it’s directed at James, who is caught in some sort of time-looping purgatory and forced to relive the events of Silent Hill 2 but dying repeatedly — throughout the game, James encounters multiple corpses that look like him. In a game where James regularly refuses to accept his actions, it may be a secret message trying to get through to him.
Lenart doesn’t appear to confirm whether that time-looping theory is true or not. When a fan commented that the “loop theory is canon,” Lenart cryptically responded, “Is it?” If that theory is true, it could have big implications for the story of Silent Hill 2 and whether it’s truly a remake or simply another version of events of James’ plight.
Silent Hill 2 is out now on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. In Polygon’s review of the game, we praised the game for its “array of changes, some subtle, some bold, that challenge that familiarity, resulting in an intriguing revisit.”