When you first arrive in Wood Side Apartments in Silent Hill 2, you’ll find a strange cabinet with spaces to insert several round objects and a poem on top. This cabinet is the remake’s version of a similar puzzle from the 2001 original, and you’ll spend the next few hours of your time exploring the apartment building in order to solve it. To finally uncover the solution, you first need to hunt through the apartment building and find three strange coins, if you’re playing on normal puzzle difficulty.
In addition to searching just about every inch of Wood Side Apartments’ three stories for the coins, you’ll then have to use them to solve a series of puzzles to unlock the cabinet itself, and that can be a bit confusing. We’ve run down where to find the coins in Wood Side Apartments so you can be sure you won’t miss them, and how to solve the puzzle once you do.
Of course, this guide contains some light spoilers for Silent Hill 2, so if you’d rather go in blind, now’s the time to stop reading.
Finding the three coins happens somewhat naturally as you make your way through Wood Side Apartments, opening rooms as you find keys and solving puzzles you discover there. You’ll find the first coin in Apartment 206, which you access through Apartment 208.
Use the Golden Apple Handle on the cabinet in 208 to open it and reveal a peephole. Looking through allows you to see a room with a safe in it. Push the cabinet from the side to open a path into the next room, where you can solve the safe puzzle.
Figuring out the safe puzzle requires surveying the room pretty closely, but once you get the apartment 206 safe code, you can get the Man coin from inside.
You might have seen the Woman coin as you were exploring the second floor–it’s in the clogged trash chute, but out of reach for James. To unplug it, you first need to get the 2F Small Staircase key to unlock the path up to the third floor.
On the third floor, explore until you find a hole you can crawl through to get into the trash chute room. Grab the Canned Juice and use it on the chute to drop it down and use it to clear the clog. Head back down to the first-floor courtyard near the lobby and grab the Woman coin off the ground.
The last coin is inside the pool, which is also teeming with Lying Figure monsters. If you’re quick, you can slip past them to get to the baby carriage in the middle of the pool. Inside is the Snake coin, the last one you need. Return to the cabinet.
Note before you start that you can flip the coins over once you’ve put them in the slots, and each has a different image on each face. The Man coin also has a Sword face; the Snake also has a Flower face; and the Woman also has a Gravestone face.
In the first poem, you’re told the Woman is beneath the tree, the Flower is alone, and the Man walks in the moonlight.
Place the Man coin in the farthest left slot (beneath the moon), the Woman coin in the center slot (beneath the tree), and the Flower in the farthest right slot.
The second poem reads: “The man doth approach, his Blade now revealed, his face disappears behind shining steel. Away from the man the Maiden doth flee, toward the Flower, away from the tree.”
Flip the Man coin to the Sword face, move it one slot to the right, and move the Woman coin one slot to the right.
Here’s the third poem: “Where once a Flower grew, a venomous glee, where once was a Maiden, a stone doth be. And over her Grave the Man doth remain, his blade never met the vile Serpent’s vein.”
Don’t move the coins, but flip all three of them to reveal the Man, the Gravestone, and the Snake faces.
And the final poem: “The Beast who its teeth in her flesh doth bore, He who has failed, she who is no more. Now unto you falls the grievous chore, who carries the blame for what fate had in store?” The idea here is to pick the correct coin and move it into the upper slot.
The answer is the Snake, so move that coin to the top slot. The cabinet will open, revealing the key for Apartment 201. There are many more puzzles and confusing sections of the game ahead. For more help with Bloober Team’s remake, use our Silent Hill 2 Remake guides hub.
