The Silent Hill Transmission

Silent Hill is back, baby! It’s good again!

Maybe.

I have written before about my obsessive love for the Silent Hill franchise of video games, most notably in a big multi-part series of essays I did years ago on my old blog (look out for those getting ported over here at some point). As such, I have been keenly following the rumours of a series revival that have been swirling around for quite some time. A few days ago Konami finally lifted the lid on that revival, and boy howdy, us Silent Hill fans are going to be feasting in the years ahead.

First, a quick primer for people who have no idea what I’m talking about.

The Silent Hill series launched on the Playstation back in 1998, rose to prominence with a handful of sequels on the Playstation 2, entered a decline period in which the original development team broke up and new games were farmed out to third parties on an apparently semi-random basis with decidedly mixed results, then appeared to die for good when Konami acrimoniously parted ways with Hideo Kojima, who was developing a new entry with Guillermo Del Toro, amidst a major pivot away from video game development.

In the years since, Konami’s pachinko and fitness club enterprises have waned due to factors largely outside their control (primarily changes to Japanese gambling laws and the Covid pandemic), and management shakeups have ousted the anti-games faction and brought in executives who want to re-pivot back to videogames as a core business, with a particular focus on exploiting Konami’s classic IP stable. Silent Hill isn’t quite the top tier of that stable—that would be Metal Gear—but as a franchise not connected to a particular auteur creator who’s unlikely to ever work with them again (reportedly Kojima and Konami have smoothed things over, but Kojima has since launched his own studio and is unlikely to come back), it makes an obvious choice for a big return, especially with high-budget horror getting a huge boost via Capcom’s wildly successful Resident Evil efforts of late.

So we knew for a while that Silent Hill was coming back. We just didn’t know how much it was coming back. It turns out the answer to that question is: all the way. It’s coming back all the way.
Specifically, during their “transmission” video Konami announced five major Silent Hill projects, consisting of three video games, a movie and one…thing (I’ll get into that more later). In order of announcement, here’s what we have to look forward to in 2023 and beyond.

First off, Konami are remaking Silent Hill 2, near-universally regarded as the best entry in the series. Hey, it worked for Capcom, didn’t it?

The sticking point here is who’s developing this remake: Bloober Team, the studio behind Layers Of Fear and The Medium. This has been a…contentious choice, for a number of reasons.

Actually, only one reason. It’s because their games suck.

Most of the trepidation is the result of The Medium, which was very clearly Bloober’s attempt at doing a Silent Hill-inspired game. I only ever played a brief amount of it myself because it was boring as shit, but having watched other people play it I agree with the consensus opinion that it’s poorly-written nonsense that tries to handle a lot of touchy subject matter like grief, guilt and child abuse (why, the same themes Silent Hill 2 tackles!) and severely bungles it.

The potential silver lining here is that Bloober’s main flaw is their writing and storytelling, both aspects which are already done for them in producing a remake. I don’t expect this new Silent Hill 2 to be absolutely identical to the original—nor would I want it to be—but I’m hoping that having this template to work with means they can’t fuck up the dialogue and plot too badly.

In fact, with that in mind, Bloober actually makes a lot of sense in this role. They’re known for punching above their weight when it comes to visuals and cinematic production values, so if you wanted to make something that could compete with Capcom’s Resident Evil remakes without spending Resident Evil money, they’re actually a pretty obvious choice. I just hope the involvement of original creative talent like Masahiro Ito and Akira Yamaoka is enough to keep the Bloobs from getting too creative with the writing.

I said in my big Silent Hill essay series that I’m something of a contrarian in not liking Silent Hill 2 as much as most of the fanbase, but I have to admit that it’s the obvious choice for a herald to introduce this new era of Silent Hill projects to the general public. As such, while I’m not champing at the bit to get my hands on this remake, I do think it’s a good idea and I’m glad we’re getting it.

Yes, Townfall. That’s what it’s called.

Goofy name aside, this is my second most-anticipated project in the transmission, which is impressive considering we barely saw anything of it. What we do know is that it’s a narrative-focused spin-off that insiders have compared to Telltale’s adventure games.

I’m looking forward to this for three reasons. Firstly, I’ve always thought that a purely story-focused Silent Hill game would be interesting, given that the games’ combat has always been its weakest attribute. Second, I just like the vibes in the trailer. Third, it’s being made by the developers of Stories Untold, a well-regarded story-focused horror game, and it’s being co-produced by Annapurna Games, who have a very good reputation as a publisher.

I’ve said in the past that I think the root of the problem with the post-SH4 games is that Konami hired developers to make ambitious big-budget horror games who didn’t have the experience or resources to do that. So I’m quite enamored with the idea of an indie developer making an indie-scale Silent Hill game that’s suited to their strengths, instead of trying to do a big-budget affair with lots of combat.

This is a sequel to the 2007 Silent Hill movie, helmed once again by director Cristophe Gans. Wisely, everyone involved seems to have decided that the 2012 Silent Hill Revelation movie didn’t happen.

The first Silent Hill movie wasn’t  good, but that was largely due to the screenplay by Roger Avery; Gans’ directing, cinematography and visual design were mostly strong. As such, the fact that Avery doesn’t seem to be involved in this is encouraging.

At the same time, the approach Gans and co are taking still leaves me cold: the movie is based on Silent Hill 2 and seems, based on the concept art and storyboards we’ve been shown, to be sticking relatively closely to the game’s structure. The problem with this is that I don’t think you can make a truly good movie about one or two characters wandering around an empty town and fighting monsters, which is what any semi-accurate adaptation is going to consist of. 

As such, I can’t say I’m exactly excited for Return To Silent Hill. I’ll keep an eye on it for sure, and I’ll probably watch it at some point, but I’m not on tenterhooks to see more.

Thankfully, we have more than one televisual Silent Hill project coming up!

Made in conjunction with JJ Abrams’ Bad Robot production company, what exactly this is wasn’t entirely clear during the transmission. According to information revealed afterwards, it’s a game-engine streaming experience with audience interaction, where people watching will be able to permanently affect the outcome of the story—permanently, because it will stream in its interactive form only once. And apparently there’ll be other bits you can play like a normal game in between the one-off “episodes”, or something.

This sort of game/TV series interactive experience is something that’s been attempted multiple times already with varying results. I never would have expected Silent Hill to be the IP to finally get it right, but sure, I’ll go along with this try. I have no idea if it will succeed, but we’ll see.

That said, the very short teaser video they showed didn’t inspire a lot of confidence: the monster featured very much looked like your typical unimaginative Silent Hill fan art creation where someone makes a red fleshy thing and then sticks a bunch of metal bits to it.

If this had been the only new Silent Hill media announced I would have been extremely disappointed, but as it is I’m content to view it as a fun bonus. Maybe it will be good, maybe it won’t be, either way it doesn’t really matter.

This is, for me, the big one.

Silent Hill f is the next “mainline” entry in the Silent Hill series, a bigger-budget project than any of the others already described. And based on the non-gameplay teaser we were shown, it’s deviating very heavily from the games that came before it, being set in Japan in the 1960s and featuring radically different imagery than what Silent Hill fans are used to seeing…up to a point.

If the Silent Hill 2 remake is the equivalent of Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 remake, being a spruced up version of a fan-favourite entry in order to reintroduce the franchise to a general audience, then Silent Hill f looks to be Konami’s Resident Evil 7: a new entry that seems at first glance to be a complete departure from the series’ roots, but which actually embodies the classic gameplay that the series has long been known for.

The trailer has numerous obvious call-backs to classic Silent Hill elements, which to me indicates a commitment to recapturing and recontextualizing the Silent Hill of old even as the game heads off into wild uncharted territory. Personally, I think this willingness to experiment while also preserving the core appeal of Silent Hill is exactly what the franchise needs.

The game is being developed by Neobards, an experienced support and work-for-hire studio, overseen by a creative team that includes Ryukishi07, the author of the Higurashi visual novels. I’ll admit that this initially displeased me, as I have a deep and visceral dislike of of the Higurashi franchise; however my problem with it stems pretty much entirely from the art style and character designs associated with the VNs and their adaptations (it’s difficult to take a story of madness and violence seriously when the characters look like this) and that’s obviously not going to be a factor here. Ryukishi07 is apparently highly regarded as a horror writer, so that bodes well.

Character and creature design is being handled by kera, a Japanese artist I am completely unfamiliar with. They did artwork for the Spirit Hunter series of visual novels, which seem to have fantastic and creepy monster designs, so that’s another point in the game’s favour.

Conclusion

As a longtime Silent Hill fan, the most exciting part of all of this is simply that it’s happening at all. Over the course of a forty-five minute announcement video the franchise went from essentially dead to having five major projects in the works; I think this is probably the most dramatic and sudden IP revival in video game history.

But more than that, the specifics of these announcements reveal a level of attention and care on the part of Konami that hasn’t been seen since…well, ever, to be honest. Even during the series’ peak there was always a sense ( backed up by behind the scenes rumours) that the executives didn’t really know what to do with Silent Hill and had been completely blindsided by its popularity. And then during the decline years we had a long period where Konami seemed to just be tossing money at the series with any real thought or planning, almost like they were running purely on inertia.

By contrast, these five projects show real planning and forethought, with development studios being allowed to make games that play to their individual strengths. The series is clearly not being given a full-on AAA mega-blockbuster budget like I expect the inevitable Metal Gear revival to get, but maybe that’s a good thing–a smaller budget means less risk, and consequently more scope to experiment.

It remains to be seen whether any of these projects are actually going to be good. But for now, I’m just content knowing that they exist.