Making your way through the Silent Hill 2 remake can be pretty dangerous, even if you’re familiar with the 2001 original. As with a lot of things in Silent Hill, the locations of the game’s weapons, as well as the puzzles you have to complete, have changed in the last two decades.
Here’s a full rundown of where to find all of the game’s guns, along with additional weapons like the chainsaw. If you’d prefer to skip to a certain weapon, we’ve laid out some bookmarks for each one.
How to get the handgun (pistol)How to get the shotgunHow to get the rifleHow to get the chainsaw
Where To Find The Handgun
While you’ll find the main melee weapons, a piece of wood and iron pipe, as part of the story in Silent Hill 2, the firearms are a little easier to miss. The handgun is your first, popping up as you explore the Wood Side Apartments. If you’re diligent, you might discover a note mentioning neighbors complaining about gunfire in Apartment 217, giving you a hint as to where you’re headed.
Getting to Apartment 217 will take a bit, though, as you need to explore most of the first and second floors of Wood Side. The main hallway of the second floor is closed off, but James will spot the key to open it through some bars during a cutscene. After Laura kicks it away, you can make your way around the floor from the other side to retrieve it and make your way to 217. Inside the apartment, check the shopping cart in the middle of the room to claim the gun.
Where To Find The Shotgun
When you get to Brookhaven Hospital, you’ll get a tease for your second weapon: the shotgun. Checking in at the entryway of the hospital, you’ll find an empty gun cabinet, letting you know that there should be a shotgun here, but someone has moved it.
As with Wood Side, you need to explore the hospital to make your way to where the shotgun has been placed. You can find it on the second floor in the Women’s Locker Room, which you can reach after you’ve found the director’s office.
Check the lockers when you arrive to find the shotgun waiting for you there.
Where To Find The Hunting Rifle
The hunting rifle is Silent Hill 2’s most powerful gun, and it’ll be waiting for you in the Toluca Prison Armory, one of the first rooms on your path through the prison when you arrive. Unfortunately, it’s locked up; a nearby note mentions that the key is likely in the Witness Checkpoint.
You can’t go straight to the checkpoint, though, thanks to it being locked down by the prison’s security system. Instead, you need to go through the Headless Serpent door to reach Death Row–use our Prison Weights and Hangman guide for all the info on how to unlock the door.
Make your way through Death Row until you get to the execution chamber. You need to overload the generator, which will kill the power throughout the area and unlock all the doors. After that, head for the Witness Checkpoint and grab the key from the counter as you head through. The nearby door exits back to the main hall of the prison where you first started, allowing for a quick detour to the Armory.
Where To Find The Chainsaw
Completing Silent Hill 2 unlocks its New Game Plus mode, which opens up a lot of new stuff to the game–including endings you can’t see during a normal playthrough. One of the big benefits to starting a new run is the chainsaw, a high-powered melee weapon that can kill many kinds of enemies in a single hit each.
You can find the chainsaw along the road into Silent Hill at the start of the game. The path takes you through the woods to the cemetery, where you meet Angela for the first time. Just beyond is the lumber yard, and if you check the right side of the road as you head through, you can find the chainsaw sticking out of a pile of logs, waiting for you to grab it.
The original Silent Hill 2 included other weapons, including the powerful Hyper Spray and Pyramid Head’s Great Knife. We’re still exploring Silent Hill and searching for these weapons and any others, and we’ll update these guides as we uncover more.
In the meantime, you can find lots more information on the Silent Hill 2 remake’s puzzles, endings, and everything else in our Silent Hill 2 guides hub.