I find this game (if you can even call it that) so unusual and dense that I don't really know how to talk about properly. It really shook my heart and made me feel a certain way even if I didn't entirely understand what was going on. I'm still sort of reeling from the experience. Lain PSX presents a lot of existential questions and scenarios that I found deeply moving and disturbing at times. With how intimate the diaries and files are in this game, Lain and Touko come across to me as some of the most believable and human characters I've seen in a game. It really showcases how profoundly loneliness and isolation can affect a person's mind, especially a child growing up. The game makes a lot of use of psychiatric terminology to go about this. It clearly feels very well researched. Never gonna forget this game.

If you love the anime, I urge you to play this game. If you love the game, I urge you to watch the anime. Many of their themes and ideas are tightly intertwined and certain concepts that are mentioned or can be inferenced in one medium are expanded or elaborated upon in the other. The two are definitely most rich when experienced hand in hand.

It was neat. I very much appreciated the game's attention to detail with its sound and area design. I was expecting to not be very impressed with the game's low-res stereotypical indie game look, but I found the environment design to be pretty believable. This is most evident while driving around the city or wandering in the wilderness, I could feel like I was there a bit.

Overall the game is neat and kind of pulled me into it but I don't find it very memorable. I don't have a lot to complain about with how quickly the game ends.

I enjoyed this game a lot more than I was expecting. Many will tell you that the voice commands are incredibly finicky and that's only somewhat true... It becomes irritating mostly when you're surrounded by a lot of quick enemies in a fight which fortunately doesn't happen terribly often. This game may give you a lot of problems if you have a particularly thick accent as well. The occasional awkwardness extends towards a handful of other aspects besides the voice recognition.

For starters, Rio doesn't have much in terms of AI... She will often just kind of stand or pace around doing nothing unless you give her very particular instructions, though this isn't that noticeable out of combat since you're just giving her directions from a map. In combat, though if she loses track of the enemy she will just stand there doing absolutely nothing until you instruct her to turn around or look elsewhere. You need to tell her to do pretty much everything else too actually including fleeing, how often she fires, dodging, etc. This felt especially awkward given her characterization.

Rio, as the star character, is pretty cool. She's assertive and level-headed, but still comes across like a normal person and not some kind of action hero (which makes her need for hyper specific directions feel kind of weird). I went into this expecting her to be a sort of... helpless and shy type character for the player to fawn over and was pleasantly surprised. The game cared a lot about making you and Rio feel like a team.

I was pleasantly surprised by the narrative too. It was.. kind of B-horror type stuff but I found myself pretty invested in it and it ultimately tries to make a bit of a statement but nothing too grandiose.

I guess overall I was expecting this game's appeal to lie completely in its novelty. The game is for sure a little more than that. I'll remember it fondly.

This game is alright. It's definitely a big step down from the first game in a good handful of ways, particularly in terms of story, characters, and soundtrack. The beginning story hook can't really compare to the first game's at all and the rest of the game doesn't keep interest up very well either. Not a single character in this game is entertaining, compelling, or even just cool except for Aya. The soundtrack is incredibly generic and forgettable save for two tracks or so. This game also has a really unnecessarily large amount of backtracking. It feels as though all of the backtracking was included because they didn't or couldn't devote the time toward making levels larger and more dynamic.

All of that being said, I still think PEII is worth playing. Combat is genuinely pretty fun and is just the right amount of challenge most of the time. Despite the mediocre level design, I found them pretty atmospheric and visually pleasing. Managing and using your resources and Parasite Energy is pretty fun and satisfying too. The monsters are very well designed and unnerving to look at. While I prefer her in the first game, Aya is still an awesome character. She has something to say about a surprisingly large amount of random things in the game's environments if you're one to examine everything. That, along with the story, does a pretty good job at characterizing her. I understand why this game gets a lot of hate because it's quite disappointing to play after coming off of PEI, but I think it's worth at least giving the time of day.

This game is chocked full with easily the best imagery in the series. It takes much of the groundwork that had been established SH1 and fine tunes it. The world is more oppressive, atmospheric, and is vehemently trying to kill you.
I find that most people are quite critical of the series' return to an occult based narrative over a psychological one, but the occultism is one of the things I personally love about Silent Hill in general. Even so, I found Heather's coming of age story to be pretty touching. It has a lot of subtlety that I think people occasionally don't give it credit for.