There are several reasons why speedrunning Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition might catch your interest. To start, check out some of the benefits running this version of the game has to offer at the top of this page.

To broadly summarize, Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition is an overall smoother way to run the game. When speedrunning Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition, you get a version of the game that is fast, responsive, and most importantly, fun to run. Gone are slow transition times, sluggish camera controls, and general stability issues that are otherwise experienced with the vanilla PC version.

And, with all of our project's enhancement packages in use—such as the FMV, Image, and Audio Enhancement Packs—running Silent Hill 2 has never been more beautiful. Surround yourself in revitalized visuals and audio as you run through the foggy town of Silent Hill, making for an enjoyable audio/visual experience for both you, the runner, and your audience tuning in. If you ask us, Silent Hill 2 deserves to be played—and speedrun—beautifully.

No. Speedrunning Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition is a fundamentally different experience than running vanilla Silent Hill 2 PC. This is due to quality-of-life improvements found in Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition, such as faster fade times and more responsive camera controls, that can optimize and shave off time compared to the vanilla version. As such, they shouldn't be classified as the same run.

Yes! For casual playthroughs, we removed the chainsaw on a first game for Beginner/Easy Action difficulty to keep it in line with all other releases. But for the Speedrun Mode, the ability to grab the chainsaw on a first playthrough is retained like normal.

You will need to consult your speedrunning community to see if running Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition is allowed. We are providing a speedrun version of our project for your personal enjoyment, but we certainly hope it will be accepted and embraced by a wider community for competitive health and interest running this beloved game.

Enabling the Speedrun Mode of our project does more than just show an in-game timer on the game's window. Because our project has so many quality-of-life features, the Speedrun Mode locks down many of the features that could otherwise skew run times from one runner to another.

Our purpose in doing this is to create a level playing field for all runners while taking a lot of the guess work out of what to enable/disable. For example, when Speedrun Mode is enabled, it will enable and lock down fast transitions, fast camera movement, and 60 FPS mode, to name a few. (These types of features are what "rejuvenates" a Silent Hill 2 PC run over the vanilla version.)

When you enable the Speedrun Mode feature in the Configuration Tool (SH2EEconfig.exe) found at <path-to-game>, the tool will gray out any features that are locked down for speedrunning purposes. Features that are adjustable will still work like normal within this tool while Speedrun Mode is checked.

In a nutshell: The purpose of our Speedrun Mode is to create a new way to speedrun the game that makes it fun to run while presenting it in a more beautiful, appealing way for audiences, which we feel Silent Hill 2 deserves.

If we ever include a new feature that could affect run times, we will do one of the following:

1. Have this new feature disabled when speedrunning, thus not affecting anything with how Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition is ran. This is how we anticipate and want new features that could affect run times to be handled for the project's Speedrun Mode.
2. If it is critical to include this new feature as part of the Speedrun Mode—such as it fixing a catastrophic bug or is a highly-requested feature by the runners—and it will affect run times, we will make a post of this change on our Twitter page and appropriate speedrunning community channels (where possible), along with updating the version number below our in-game timer.

The version number (see illustration to the right, circled red) is a quick way to indentify which speedrun build of the project the run was performed on. A change to this version number will signify something was altered with the Speedrun Mode that can affect run times. It is our goal to never have to update this number; only doing so if it is imperatively needed.

The sum of all our enhancement packages is what makes Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition as renowned and beloved as it is.

As such, we highly encourage you to use all of our project's enhancement packages when running the game. This makes running the game a significantly better audio/visual experience for both you, the runner, and your audience tuning in.

There are two reasons for this:

1. The original game was made with only 4:3 displays in mind, and the bulk of improvements our project has to offer were made for a 16:9 presentation. Other aspect ratios—especially ultrawide—can produce anomolies while playing.
2. There have been preliminary tests done by runners that show certain things, such as enemy behavior, may slightly change depending on the aspect ratio used. While there hasn't been any substantial evidence yet to determine if differing aspect ratios play a factor at reducing run times, we wanted to play things safe and limit the aspect ratios that can be used.