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Silent Hill 2 is overrun with monsters – their flesh taut and torn, blood or rust seeping from the cracks – but I've always been most viscerally opposed to that one scene where James sticks his hand in a rancid toilet bowl. In its Silent Hill 2 remake, developer Bloober decided that this was the best method to punish James for his wife-hating ways: dirty holes.
While discussing level design at GDC 2025 [spoilers to come], Bloober's senior level designer Anna Oporska-Szybisz described a "rotten area" Bloober decided to devote to the theme of "disgust, which is supposed to represent how James felt when he saw the face and the body of the loved one taken by the disease."
It's his wife Mary, who, we learn by the end of the game, was never really waiting for James in their "special place" like a lost princess – at least, not in any physical sense. James already suffocated with her own pillow, unable to keep enduring the illness changing her body and temperament.
"The thing we were aiming for here was, 'my lover's rotten,'" Oporska-Szybisz said during her GDC panel. "The illness took not only the body of Mary, but also their love."
To parallel that breakdown, Bloober tainted its remake's atmosphere with "mostly a yellowish color, rust, and dirt to achieve this feeling," Oporska-Szybisz says, "and to show everything through environmental [aspects]."
She accentuated her point by showing off a familiar game mechanic she calls "searching," or, "probably, we can call it, 'forcing James to put his hand in the dirty places.'" In Bloober's remake, this looks like James – that nut – grimacing delicately as he plunges his hand into a full toilet bowl to retrieve an item. When you don't think it can get any worse, he decides he must go deeper, he sinks his entire arm into the toilet, practically pressing his ear against the seat, and finally fishes out a key item with his greasy, poopy hand. Well… better him than me.
