Someone has relit the fires under Silent Hill as one intrepid player has found a secret mini map and save anywhere function hidden in Silent Hill 2 some 17 years after the game first hit shelves. With the follow-up to Konami's 1999 classic being held as one of the best in the series, it's no wonder that fans are still finding reasons to go back to the skin-crawling survival horror.
Focussing on James Sunderland as he goes into the terrifying town to tackle the likes of Pyramid Head, Silent Hill 2 has rightly earned its place in the gaming Hall of Fame. As a staple of the Silent Hill collection, many would be forgiven for thinking they know everything there is to know about the second chapter in the series. All these years later, someone has found not one, but two secrets locked away in the bowels of Silent Hill 2.
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According to Twitter user punk_7890, a secret mini-map can be discovered after completing the game’s "Dog Ending" and there is also a much-needed save anywhere feature. It may be a complicated set of instructions and button mashing to activate them, but getting to the stage of finding the hidden treasures is undoubtedly the hardest part.
To get to the mini-map and save anywhere, players must first unlock the Dog Ending by completing several of the main campaign endings and getting their head around the fact that the whole game has been orchestrated by a dog in a control room. Considering that the non-canonical Dog Ending is a relatively obscure thing to discover, the chances of finding the two secrets was extremely remote anyway.
Back in 2015, a Silent Hill Community thread used data mining to discover the hidden mini map that needed a memory editor to toggle the game's code. The instructions are in punk_7890's tweets on how to do it legitimately, but remember this will only work on the original PS2 version and not the various extended versions/ports (including the decidedly average Silent Hill HD Collection).
From the secret Chris Houlihan room in Zelda: A Link to the Past to Golden Island in the N64's Goldeneye, gaming history is littered with secret rooms, hidden locations, and unlockable Easter eggs. While there are whole communities out there dedicated to data mining every nook and cranny of a game, Silent Hill 2 managed to evade detection until now.
Importantly, both these new features make finishing Silent Hill 2 a lot easier. However, after completing it so many times to get to the unlocks, there can't be much left to find. That being said, with two such big reveals being discovered nearly two decades after gamers set foot into the foggy nightmare of Silent Hill 2, it's easy to see that the developers were more than willing to have a little fun with the title's fanbase.
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Source: punk_7890/Twitter, Silent Hill Community