Silent Hill 2 (the new one)

My reposts of my old Silent Hill reviews took a lot longer to complete than I had anticipated due to health issues, but finally they’ve been slapped up onto the internet and I’m free to talk about the main event: Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2.

I’m actually kind of glad it took me this long to get to it, because it allowed two things to fully crystallise: first, the game’s status as a critical and (from all publicly-available signs) commercial success, and second, my own thoughts on it. I often find that my reaction to something I’ve been either looking forward to or dreading is like a free-standing tower of jelly, prone to changing shape in the immediate aftermath as gravity and time pull on it. This is more pronounced for things I had a negative initial reaction to—I actually feel quite a bit more positive about The Last of Us Part II than I did when I reviewed it shortly after its release—but it’s definitely also a factor when it comes to things I like, the well-known “Phantom Menace effect” tending to cause an afterglow that can obscure substantial issues.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that my initial reaction to Silent Hill 2(024) was very positive. My sober, more carefully-considered long-term reaction is…also very positive, actually. Turns out, it wasn’t just fan enthusiasm: Silent Hill is officially back.

When it comes to video games, “remake” can mean a lot of things, from a simple graphical overhaul built on top of the original’s code base to a ground-up reimagining. Silent Hill 2 is very much in the latter category, to an extent that was honestly surprising. The skeleton outline of the original game is still visible, but it’s embedded inside a great deal of new flesh, clocking in at roughly twice as long as the 2001 version and containing a lot of brand-new elements: new dialogue scenes, new gameplay mechanics, even a new boss. 

If you read my previous coverage of this game, you’ll know that the idea of Bloober writing original story beats and dialogue made me uneasy, given that they’ve been singularly bad at doing those things in the past. I don’t know if there was a staff shake-up or what, but I needn’t have worried; the Bloober-original material here is by and large just as good as what was in the original game, fitting the mood and tone of this version of Silent Hill 2 perfectly. At least one scene is, in my opinion, better than anything Team Silent made, an encounter between James and Angela in a park that manages to be incredibly tense and uncomfortable despite the fact that absolutely nothing scary happens during it. Excellent voice acting and facial animation are a big part of that, but it’s undeniable that the writing is also doing a lot to carry the uneasy, David Lynch-esque tone that the scene is clearly going for.

There are scattered, brief moments–-the revamped Angela boss fight, a new addition to the labyrinth, the game’s climax–-where you can feel the Bloober tendency to go over the top wriggling to life beneath the game’s skin, but every time it pulls back just before breaking through. And these really are just moments; for most of its playtime, this remake is firmly in an atmospheric and horror territory that matches its ambitions perfectly.

Note that I said it matches its own ambitions, not the original game’s. Don’t get me wrong: this is vastly different from the original Silent Hill 2, not just in terms of content but in tone. You will see locations that you recognise, but in some cases they’ll feel very different from how they did twenty three years ago. What was quiet is now loud; a short jog through a side-location is now a fully-voiced cinematic cut-scene; a boss fight that consisted of whacking or shooting a monster as it trundled around a single room is now a multi-stage affair where the boss chases you through corridors and smashes through walls. In most respects the game trends towards bigger, louder and more.

That sounds bad. It probably should have been bad. But you can break any rule as long as you do it well enough, and Silent Hill 2’s amped-up, more bombastic take on the franchise is executed very well indeed. Akira Yamaoka’s score is a microcosm of this point: consisting of a mix of re-arrangements and original pieces, it’s both far more “cinematic” than the game’s original score (check out the eardrum-blasting remix of Theme Of Laura) and far more present, with what feels like a comfortable majority of the game having ambient music instead of the deathly silence that so often characterised the classic Team Silent games. Why did he decide to go down this route? Has he forgotten what made Silent Hill great? No, not at all. It’s just that Yamaoka, as I’ve stated multiple times in the past, is an expert at tailoring his score to the needs of the specific game he’s working on, and he clearly recognised this remake for what it is: a razor-lined roller coaster that seeks not to get under its players skin, but to tear that skin off. Thus, silence is (mostly) out and oppressive, nerve-shredding ambient horror music is in.

And by God, it works. I’m usually an advocate for silence as a key tool of horror, I’ve stated in the past that I think 90% of horror games and movies could be improved by removing their scores entirely, but Akira Yamaoka cooked so hard with this one that he managed to make me not just tolerate audial maximalism, but embrace it. And he’s not the only one: everyone at Bloober, from level designers to artists to whoever made the sound effects, similarly refused to be bound by expectation. They had a clear direction for what this project was going to be like, one that didn’t always overlap with what die-hard Silent Hill fans would expect, and they went for it with no hesitation.

Let’s get into the more granular design decisions. It has to be acknowledged that the Silent Hill 2 remake is, in a lot of ways, quite derivative. It is clearly, obviously, heavily drawing from the last decade or so of big-budget action-adventure games, to the point that it often seems to have been made with a “how to do AAA cinematic video games” guidebook. In how it handles pacing, puzzle design, cinematics, interactions with NPC characters and more, it will remind you strongly of at least a dozen other games if you’ve been playing a lot of console blockbusters from The Last of Us onwards. I bring this up not as a criticism, but merely as a statement of fact; like I said before, you can do things “wrong” as long as you pull it off well, and I think it was an obvious route for Bloober to take given that they had never made anything like this before.

All of the original game’s locations are present here, in the same order, but they’re surrounded by an array of activities and collectables on the streets of Silent Hill that could fairly accurately be described as “side quests.” This isn’t like Downpour, the game isn’t fully open, and in fact I’m not even certain if the explorable space in Silent Hill has been expanded all that much from the original game. It’s just that between new puzzles that send you off to various locations and some optional side-areas embedded into the town’s familiar layout, there’s now a lot more reason to actually explore that space.

Once you get into the main locations, things diverge from the original even more heavily, especially when it comes to the Otherworld. One of my complaints about the original game is that the Otherworld designs were very drab and understated compared to those in Silent Hill 1, so I was pleasantly surprised to reach the Otherworld apartment building and find myself in the full-on, classic Silent Hill rust-and-metal environment. Not only is this a cool rendering of the franchise house style in modern 4K graphics (very good modern graphics, this game looks phenomenal), I think it’s the best deployment of that style since Silent Hill 3. Bloober didn’t just ape Team Silent’s work here, they made a brand-new location that feels like it could have come straight from the classic games. At this point, I couldn’t have been more delighted.

I was a little less delighted when I got to the Otherworld hospital and found more of the same waiting for me, which made me nervous that the game was going to just repeat the rusty-metal motif for all subsequent locations. That turned out not to be the case, as the underground prison and labyrinth get reworks that stick a lot closer to their original designs while still feeling fresh. The game’s final location, always criticised for being underbaked, has been greatly expanded upon, including some genuinely surprising gameplay elements that are completely new to this remake. These are all strong positives in the game’s favour, even if the Otherworld hospital remains a bit of a low point.

One big question going into the game was how it would handle melee combat. While third-person shooting is mostly a solved issue, games still sometimes struggle to make entertaining melee systems, especially if they’re stuck with more down-to-Earth and realistic movesets, as most horror games are. If you read my recaps of the previous games, you’ll know that this is something multiple post-Team Silent entries in the franchise tried and failed to get to grips with, a satisfying  modern combat system (or complete absence of such) always seeming to elude the developers. I did not expect Bloober Team, who have up to this point never developed a game with any kind of combat at all, to finally crack that dilemma, but here we are.

The approach they took is refreshing in its simplicity: one attack button, one dodge button, one melee weapon (technically two, but you only ever use one at a time). Instead of having to switch to a close-combat weapon, pressing the attack button makes James immediately drop what he’s doing and start swinging, while holding the aim button will make him pull out whatever gun you have equipped instead. This lets the players switch seamlessly back and forth between long-range and close-range combat, with a bit of a time delay to ensure that pulling out a shotgun when a monster gets too close isn’t entirely risk-free.

It sounds very limited, and it is, and it’s clearly been designed that way intentionally. This is a system that is very much based around fighting one monster at a time, so of course the game utterly delights in throwing multiple monsters at the player simultaneously, usually waiting until you’re fully locked into fighting the first one before the rest show up. Often this happens in tight, cramped spaces, all the better to induce panic in the player. Deliberately designing around gameplay limitations can lead to frustration, and occasionally in Silent Hill it does when the camera flips out in confined spaces, but for the most part it stays firmly on the fun side of intentional frustration—something that many classic survival horror games, including the original Silent Hill games, often failed at.

In order to counteract James’ new ability to sidestep damage and close distance, the monsters have been upgraded to be far more dangerous and aggressive. This applies across the board, but the starkest difference can be seen with the mannequins. In the original game they just amble towards the player while flailing their little stumpy arms; in the remake they’re fast, vicious, and deal tons of damage, and also have a delightful habit of hiding in environments so they can leap out and ambush the player when they walk past, something that just about avoids getting tiresome despite how often the game does it. The bosses have gotten even more extreme murder-glow ups, acquiring completely new movesets and mechanics that will surprise long-time Silent Hill 2 fans.

Apart from the aforementioned occasional camera problems, I really have nothing negative to say about the game’s combat. It’s kind of absurd how easily Bloober have strolled in and solved this issue, given how long it’s been an anchor around the franchise’s neck. I really hope that Silent Hill f and Townfall, if they have melee combat systems, copy Bloober’s homework.

Do I  have anything negative to say about the remake as a whole? Kind of, and it stems from my status as a confirmed Silent Hill 2 hater. As I played the game, I noticed a creeping feeling of dissatisfaction in the bottom of my chest, not with how the remake was executed but with the game it’s remaking. There are things I just don’t like about Silent Hill 2, and those things still remain even in its shiny remixed form. I still think James is an uninteresting character until right before the end of the game, even if his voice acting and facial performance are far more nuanced. Many of the game’s locations are still repetitive sequences of rooms and corridors, even if a lot of work has gone into making them feel more diverse and distinct. I still think the game’s overall visual style pales in comparison to Silent Hill 1 and 3, despite the remake incorporating some of their DNA. And Mary’s letter at the end, which is supposed to be this big emotional climax, still leaves me completely cold.

In other words, the thing that I dislike most about Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake has nothing to do with how they remade Silent Hill 2, but with the fact that Silent Hill 2 is the game they decided to remake in the first place.

But I don’t want to finish off this review by diminishing what they’ve achieved here. This is an excellent remake, by far the modern Silent Hill game that’s captured the series’ core appeal the most faithfully. As a long-time Silent Hill fan who watched the franchise fade into irrelevance, who firmly believed at one point that it was gone for good and was never coming back, it’s so cathartic to not only be able to point people to a modern, current Silent Hill game sitting on store shelves, but to be able to recommend it without hesitation as something that accurately demonstrates what drew so many people to the games in the first place. Forget all the “should you play this” recommendations at the end of the recap posts; if you’re curious about Silent Hill, start here. Play this one first.

So well done, Bloober Team. Now how about remakes of Silent Hill 1 and 3?