Silent Hill 2 isn’t just the best horror game of all time. It’s one of the best games the medium has ever produced. It’s also a puzzle. While it offers some of the most effective horror gaming, it’s so eccentric and offbeat that it’s difficult to translate it to the modern day.
Even ports that simply updated the game to newer hardware got it completely wrong (though not using Comic Sans for the Silent Hill sign was probably an easy fix). The game has a special sauce of weirdness that’s almost impossible to replicate, and while Silent Hill 2 has some odd and unintuitive aspects, they blend together to create this strange and unique cocktail.
They can try to improve the gunplay with modern conveniences. They can make things a little more obvious to the player. They can make people in the game talk to each other like they’re real people and not aliens talking to each other for the first time after reading about how conversations should work.
In many ways, it’s the Twin Peaks series from the video game. If you’re a fan of that series and have heard it’s being rebooted, you probably have the same concerns.
When you sand down Silent Hill 2’s “problems” in a remake, you make something fundamentally different and probably worse than the original. You lose the unreal, hallucinatory feeling that living in that world gives you. That’s the key. Like a boxer taking a punch to knock his opponent off balance before a knockout blow, Silent Hill 2’s weirder aspects keep you off balance and ready to be tormented with a dose of terror when it decides to ramp it up.
That’s why this is a seemingly impossible task – even without considering Bloober Team’s inconsistent performance in the past.
However, when I recently got the chance to play the game for just over three hours, I had to see how it turned out. Although I went into it with an open mind, I expected my fears to be justified. However, that was not the case. I dare say I was even a little surprised.
In my troubled dreams I see this city…
The opening section of Silent Hill 2 stays with you for a long time. I have fond, if unpleasant, memories of wandering the streets as James, confusedly looking for somewhere to go as the horrors slowly but surely drew ever closer. This is one of the things that was crucial to the feel of Silent Hill 2: getting lost in those streets and marinating in their thick layer of horror.
This opening section up to the point where you fight Pyramid Head for the first time is what I got to play from Bloober’s remake.
To the team’s credit, they did a great job recreating this place. I still found myself moving mostly from memory, mirroring James’ oblivious dream-like state as I moved around a place that was previously familiar but now foreign. Despite all the perspective shifts and glossy graphics, it was nice to revisit these streets in this newer context.
Replaying that opening act, the best way to describe it is that the benefits of modernizing this story became clear, and the things that could make it a terrible idea were toned down.
I’m just James
A good example of this is the combat system. In the original, fighting these monsters is a pain. It’s ugly, slow and awkward. But in many ways, that makes it feel all the more realistic. You had to laboriously aim your weapon while unsightly monsters kept getting closer.
This works because James isn’t a fully fleshed-out character. He’s just a guy, and we have no reason to believe he has any military or weapons training. However, modern gamers expect everything to run smoothly and the action to be exciting. Creating something that feels intentionally bad isn’t going to sit well with many gamers.
Thankfully, at least from what I’ve played, Bloober has suppressed any urge to make James a badass with guns, to make it closer to the remake of Resident Evil 4. While the combat is more fluid and easier to gauge, it still feels choppy and awkward in a way that works.
While Bloober has improved James’s weapon handling, the balance has been shifted back towards the monsters, who have more evasion, movement, and resources to avoid bullets. It’s now much easier to miss enemies with your shots – and these remain very rare.
One thing the developers have done well is that they have stuck closely to the survival horror aspects of the game. You will often find yourself in fights where you only have five bullets, and some enemies will require you to use many more.
This is another area of convenience that Bloober may have wanted to sand down for modern audiences, but I commend them for keeping James’ gun as a luxury rather than a necessity. You’ll definitely get used to that board and nails.
I look like Mary, don’t you?
One change I didn’t like at first was that James was much more explicit about where to go. James makes some pretty obvious notes on the map to better show the player where to go and what to do.
This is a sensible change that any new player would expect. It’s something that makes sense. Players should know where they’re going and not have to spend hours wandering around disorientated. However, it’s one of the things that made the original game what it is. Sanding down this change takes away some of the best hours of the original game.
In fact, I found myself running around and solving puzzles pretty quickly, racing through the room much, much faster than before. Thankfully, Bloober Team told me that all of this was optional. You can turn off the help and expand it to match the older experience.
But Bloober also put some thought into how to implement this convenience. They could have simply placed markers on your HUD showing where to go and what to do, but instead they rely on rough suggestions scribbled on the map. I still missed a few things and had to backtrack.
While these new tools exceed my expectations, Bloober doesn’t try to completely round off the edges.
The revelation of Silent Hill
While I was surprised by how well Bloober’s vision of Silent Hill 2 worked, the purist in me still had doubts. This game is also almost impossible to remake, as the reasons for a remake generally run counter to what works in the classic.
However, during the game I met Creative Director Mateusz Lenart, who told me something that really brought the vision closer to me. A perspective that alleviates these concerns.
“It helped me to imagine that we’re not going back to 2001, but that James is still in Silent Hill 20 years later. He’s in this endless loop. The nightmare keeps repeating itself. The nightmare changes details, but the result is always the same. That opened doors for me.”
And that was it. That allowed me to think of this remake as something that can exist, maybe even should. Of course, it’s important to remember that it’s not necessarily canon. This is a design principle that allowed a team to make a pretty radical remake of a popular game, to work within its framework.
Still, it’s that quote that eased some of my concerns for the rest of the playthrough. The constant fear that change would destroy what makes a classic faded, and I was able to let go and instead embrace what Bloober is doing – which is by far their best work to date.
I’m not crazy… at least I don’t think so
Bloober Team puts together a surprisingly good version of Silent Hill 2, from what I’ve played. It’s clear pretty early on what their vision for it is: a modernized, third-person, over-the-shoulder horror game.
What they do is a great version of it. If you go into it with an open mind, you’ll be much more convinced that this could at least be a novel take on the original game. A new take on James, stuck in this loop, trapped in Silent Hill forever, reliving his torment over and over again.
Silent Hill 2 Remake, however, still has a long way to go if it wants to truly capture what makes the original so special. Even after spending a while with it – and coming away much more positive than I expected – it just seems impossible to recapture the game in 2024.
That’s okay though. Silent Hill 2 Remake is (so far) a good version of the game Bloober Team is trying to make.
Is this a great remake of the previous game? Maybe the answer is less important. Maybe the game just needs to introduce enough of what worked about the original and sell it to a new audience that would never have gone back and played the original anyway.
If “Bloober” makes his breakthrough, his interpretation of this classic will not replace what came before, but at least it will have its place.
Silent Hill 2 will be released on October 8th for PC and PS5.
