As you explore Lake View Hotel during the Silent Hill 2 remake, there’s are some puzzles that can be easy to miss if you aren’t exploring every nook and cranny of the beautiful albeit daunting area. The Reading Room’s bookshelf puzzle is one of these puzzles, which tasks you with finding and arranging four books in a specific order.
If you do so successfully, a hidden room leading to another puzzle will be revealed, so there’s no time to waste. Here’s how to solve the Reading Room bookshelf puzzle in the Silent Hill 2 remake.
Silent Hill 2 bookshelf puzzle solution
Once you begin exploring Lake View Hotel in the Silent Hill 2 remake, you will soon find yourself in the Reading Room. Here, there are four red books scattered around the room to collect.
Once you have all four in your inventory, I recommend taking a good, long look at the painting on the wall opposite the bookshelf. There’s a screenshot below for your reference, too.
When you’re ready to solve the puzzle, interact with the portion of the bookshelf that has a gold emblem in the center of it. We need to place the four books we have found on this shelf so that the symbols on their spines almost mirror the painting behind us.
The key thing to note here is that the spines won’t completely mirror the painting. The position of the books and how close they are to the spear symbol is very important.
In the painting, there are two entities closer to the spear-wielding man than the others: the bull and the lion. As they’re closer, we want both of these closer to the symbol in the bookshelf, and thus, positioned on the bottom shelf. With that logic, we then want the wings and the eagle on the top shelf, where they’re positioned on the outside of the bull and the lion books. Just like they are in the painting!
The symbols on the spines of the book are wings, a lion, a bull, and an eagle. Position them as follows:
- Top left corner: Wings
- Top right corner: Eagle
- Bottom left corner: Bull
- Bottom right corner: Lion
Once the books have been placed in the correct positions, a secret door will open leading you to the Vanity Mirror and locked suitcase puzzle.
For more on Silent Hill 2, take a look at our Silent Hill 2 walkthrough, our endings guide, and our spoiler-free review of the remake.