Survival-horror is one of my favorite genres, and yet I don't like most of the survival-horror games that I play. It's a difficult genre to pull off, considering the entire point is to instill feelings of dread and horror in the player -- if a survival-horror game doesn't do that one, specific thing, then it's failed at its job. I've played enough of these games that basically nothing scares me anymore, and I'm good enough at these types of games that the mechanics don't do much to inspire tension within me, either, so it takes a rare, special type of survival-horror game to satisfy me.
Silent Hill 2 was one such game. I didn't think very highly of it at first, but it grew on me as I played, and even stayed with me long after I'd finished. Looking back, I realized how much of an impact its story had in elevating a borderline decent-good gameplay experience to something truly excellent. Silent Hill 3 had the unfortunate luck of following what has been commonly regarded as a monumental survival-horror game; it's difficult to top a masterpiece, and SH3 therefore never achieved the same level of acclaim as SH2. In some ways, SH3 is actually a better game than SH2, but I wasn't all that impressed with it.