The strange photo puzzle of the Silent Hill 2 remake has been solved

Almost a full month after the Silent Hill 2 remake’s launch, players have solved one of the trickiest puzzles. And the solution to that puzzle, which consists of a series of collectible Polaroids called Strange Photos, gives the game a new layer of story – that is, depending on how you interpret it.

The Bloober team Silent Hill 2 remake contains 26 photos spread throughout the game. They seem 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 this weekend, revealing that the clues in the Strange Photos spell out the phrase “You’ve been here for twenty years.”

“If you count the things in each picture,” Robinson wrote, using the example of six open windows in photo No. 1, “count that number over the letters in each picture and you get a letter.” In Robinson’s example, the caption on the first photo is “So many people here!” and the sixth letter in that sentence is Y. Robinson shows their work on 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 wanted to make it very subtle when I was painting those pictures… I think the timing couldn’t have been better for you to solve it unload. Congratulations!”

The intended meaning of the phrase “You’ve been here twenty years” is up for debate. Some players have interpreted the rule as a message from Konami and Bloober Team, an acknowledgment that they have played some form of gaming. Silent Hill 2 since 2001. Another interpretation of the puzzle’s solution is that it focuses on James, who is trapped in a kind of purgatory with time loops and is forced to retrace the events of Silent Hill 2 but dying repeatedly – throughout the game, James encounters several corpses that resemble him. In a game where James regularly refuses to accept his actions, it could be a secret message trying to get through to him.

Lenart does not seem to confirm whether that time loop theory is true or not. When a fan commented that the “gait theory is canon,” Lenart responded cryptically“Is that so?” If that theory is true, it could have major implications for the story of Silent Hill 2 and whether it really is one remake or simply another version of the events of James’s fate.

Silent Hill 2 is now available for PlayStation 5 and Windows PC. In Polygon’s review of the game, we praised the game for its “range of changes, some subtle, some bold, that challenge the familiar, resulting in an intriguing new visit.”