Silent Hill Good: A Journalistic Investigation

The Silent Hill 2 remake is coming out this October (assuming it doesn’t get delayed), which means that Hillposting will be a regular feature of this blog going forward. I’m also working on a book review, I swear.

A few days ago Konami held their second Silent Hill transmission event, something I’ve been anticipating for a while now. We sadly didn’t get any updates at all on Townfall or Silent Hill f, but we did, finally, get to see a big chunk of gameplay for Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake. If you’ll recall, this is a project I viewed with some trepidation due to Bloober’s proven track record of making absolutely terrible garbage, and the short snippets of footage that have trickled out since have done nothing to change my cautious stance. But I reserved judgement, wanting to get a good look at how the game would play and feel, and now that we have that…

I think it looks great. I think it looks really good.

But before I get into specifics, let me lay out my mindset on remakes in general, and this project in particular.

When it comes to remakes, I’ve always been of the opinion that I prefer them to be their own thing instead of just a one-to-one redo of the original. When I find out that something advertised as a remake is actually a stealth sequel to the original, like the four Evangelion movies, or that it’s in some other way diverging wildly from what came before, that makes me a hundred times more interested. This is especially the case with video games, where the march of time hasn’t just improved graphical fidelity; gameplay mechanics and cinematic production values have also advanced, which gives developers the chance to make a remake better than the original.

Silent Hill 2 isn’t my favourite game in the franchise, like it is for a lot of other people. The game was trying to handle a lot of very heavy, heady themes in a mature way back when it was basically unheard of for mainstream console games to do that, and to an extent I think the developers were ahead of their time. The core ideas come through, but they’re weakened by terrible voice acting, stiff writing, the inherent graphical limitations of the hardware and (probably) budget-restricted time for cinematic dialogue scenes. And the gameplay has not aged well, largely consisting of running around identical corridors checking for unlocked doors while bashing enemies with a painfully rudimentary combat system.

So contrary to what most of the Silent Hill fanbase thinks, I feel that this game is badly in need of a remake, not just to update it but to hopefully fulfil the potential that it always had. The only question has been: are Bloober Team the ones to do that? Their earlier work certainly didn’t suggest they were worthy of the job. But instead of judging them by what they did before, let’s take a look at the remake itself.

It probably doesn’t come through as well in a compressed screenshot, but the first thing that stands out to me is that this is a ridiculously good-looking game, at least as far as the environments are concerned. These might be some of the best environments I’ve ever seen in a game, period. Modern rendering power has largely been used for huge open worlds, so it’s kind of jaw-dropping to see what developers can do with today’s engines when making smaller, enclosed spaces.

And that fog! It looks like you can touch it. That is some high-quality fog right there.

We also see here that the game now displays the player’s current location in the lower-right corner, not just outside but in interior locations. One of the problems all of the old Silent Hill games had was that the player would tend to get lost a lot due to all the fog, so I assume this is an effort to alleviate that issue without resorting to something crude like a mini-map or a compass.

So, how are they going to handle non-gun combat? This has been a perennial issue for attempts to modernise the franchise, and none of the previous attempts have really worked well.

The Silent Hill 2 remake isn’t going for anything too out-there: melee combat is a lot faster and more visceral, you can do a little dodge to sidestep attacks, and while it hasn’t been stated I’m guessing there’s probably a light and heavy attack as well. Later in the video we see that at least one enemy type can block attacks if you spam them too much, and the Resident Evil 4 “shoot them in the legs to stagger them” mechanic is here. Also, sneaking past enemies is still a viable strategy, although Bloober have seemingly not gone as far as adding in actual stealth mechanics—like in the original game, just walking slowly and keeping your distance will let you slip past.

Third-person melee combat is one of those things that seems like it should be a solved problem by now, but we still frequently see games bungle it, particularly in the horror genre (The Callisto Protocol being an egregious recent example). Bloober aren’t trying to reinvent the wheel here, and that’s a good sign. Silent Hill has never been a franchise where fighting enemies was fun in and of itself; I feel like Homecoming and Downpour slipped up by forgetting that. No one is playing these games to pull off sick skill-based combo moves.

While this is all encouraging, I do have some complaints. When James gets vomited on by the Lying Figure, the screen goes all goopy for a few seconds. This sort of effect was pioneered in first-person games like Metroid Prime, and I’ve never understood why it became popular in third-person. Can you imagine if people started doing this in movies? That makes as much sense as it does for a third-person game.

In a trailer shown at a Playstation showcase before the transmission, we see that two enemies have been given the ability to stun the player by screaming. This is a fairly common trope in modern horror games, including multiple Silent Hill sequels, and I’ve never liked it. It’s the horror game design equivalent of putting sawdust in a burger to bulk it out. The intention is supposed to be that the screech will give the enemy time to close distance and force the player to switch from long-range to melee combat, but nine times out of ten that doesn’t happen and it just becomes this annoying pause in the action that the player has to put up with for no reason. Maybe Bloober will be the ones to buck that trend—the game seems to be heavily emphasising managing enemy distance and switching from guns to hand-to-hand weapons on the fly—but I’m skeptical.

Here we see some on-screen UI elements in the form of a red border to indicate low health, and a pop-up showing the number and type of healing items.

This has been a point of contention in the fan community due to the original game entirely lacking any on-screen UI, which was the norm for horror games at the time. To be honest, I really don’t care about this at all. I’m not precious enough about my “immersion” that a videogame acknowledging it’s a videogame is going to ruin the experience, and these design choices became industry-standard because people recognised that they’re simply better than making players constantly open their inventory screen to check their health status. And the visual style they’ve gone for here is nicely understated, while still standing out clearly due to the use of red colour accents.

Still, I do hope there’s an option to completely turn the UI off for people who want it.

The influence of my beloved Silent Hill: Shattered Memories continues to be felt, as the Silent Hill 2 remake has committed to keeping everything physically-present and real-time. Notes and objects are examined in-hand instead of cutting to a seperate screen, the game no longer pauses when examining something in the environment, so enemies can sneak up and getcha while you’re solving puzzles, and as we see here James physically takes out his map and marks it when noting down points of interest based on clues.

This last one is a very small touch and isn’t really going to effect the gameplay at all, but it’s still neat it and shows that Bloober are putting a lot of care into the smaller details.

Speaking of notes and smaller details, the text on this bloody note is different from the original game. Ooh, exciting! New content! Maybe a new little explorable area? A side-quest of some kind? Hang on, what does that note actually say?

Yeah, so it’s written in straight-up broken English. “Hidden behind a rest”? “Sometimes you just here to look behind”?

Bloober Team are based in Poland, so it’s not surprising that some of the English during development would be rough, but the fact that this made it into a big gameplay showcase without anyone catching it is a little concerning. Please, Bloober, get a native English speaker to check over all the text in the game between now and October. I’ll do it myself for free, call me.

Brookhaven hospital is where the gameplay showcase really starts to get interesting. Here we’re seeing heavy deviations from the original game in terms of level design, visual style and atmosphere.

Fun fact: in Silent Hill 2, there’s a time of day mechanic whereby the sun will set as the player explores various locations and witnesses story cut-scenes, which will give the foggy streets of the town a very subtle twilight cast. So subtle in fact that many people, myself included, never noticed it even after playing the game multiple times. For the remake, Bloober have drastically punched-up the sunset effect, resulting in the ground floor of Brookhaven being bathed in orange sunlight. Like I said, a big departure—this area is much darker in the original game.

It’s a pretty ballsy move, to be honest. Hospital locations are infamous for being among the scariest in Silent Hill games, and by making this change Bloober are opening themselves up to accusations of de-scarifying the game. But they obviously felt there was a good reason for the change, and I think I know what it is. During this part we see Maria wandering around and examining things rather than sticking close by James, and when the player enters a room with a save point some semi-tranquil music plays. The overall tone is quiet, relaxing, like a brief respite in between periods of stress and darkness…

Wait. Could it be…? Is Silent Hill 2 getting…save rooms????

For my non-gamer audience, these are locations in survival horror games where the player is guarenteed not to be attacked by monsters. The idea was pioneered by Resident Evil, as was the associated trope of these rooms having peaceful music. I’m pretty sure classic Silent Hill games do technically have save rooms, in the sense that places where you can save will generally not have enemies in them, but it wasn’t codified with the music and everything.

But it’s not just a save room—this entire part of the hospital’s first floor feels like it’s a designated safe area, where the player doesn’t have to worry about protecting Maria. If so, that’s a very large change from how the original game worked. Could it make things less tense? Maybe, but here’s the thing about save rooms: the more the game insists they’re completely safe, the more the player will worry that the game is going to fuck with them.

There’s been a bit of a to-do over the game’s redesigned characters. Some of that is coming from the “women in videogames aren’t hot enough anymore” reactionary crowd, but there have also been good-faith criticisms made by the fan community. Silent Hill 2 and 3 had very impressive character models for their time, so it does make sense that this would come under scrutiny.

Objectively, I think you can’t argue with the assertion that the remake’s character models are not up to the standard that we’ve come to expect from modern AAA big-budget games, or even from something like The Last Of Us 2 that came out last generation. But I also don’t really care. I’d rather have a game that’s budgeted realistically and has a decent chance of turning a profit (preferably made under ethical working conditions as well) than a game where I can see the character’s pores.

They do stand out a bit compared to the very impressive environments, but again, it’s not a big deal. The game still has some time left in the oven, so maybe they’ll be improved in the final release, but I would be perfectly fine if they’re weren’t.

This is an original addition to the game, and here we can see the inner duality of Bloober Team at play. There are two game developers inside of them, you see. One of them yearns to make good, artistically-interesting horror games, while the other one wants to make butt-ass shit. These two game devs are in a constant death-struggle, each trying to become the dominant force within Bloober’s psyche.

(By the way, when I roast Bloober like this I’m mostly referring to whoever in the senior creative staff is in charge of deciding “is this scary” and “is this well-written.” They clearly have a lot of talented people working within the company, and I have no ill-will towards them. In fact I wish they would stage some sort of coup and take over).

The photo above is the sort of thing that would have shown up in Layers Of Fear or The Medium, except the nurse’s faces would be smeared with BLOOOOOD and the plaque underneath would say something like “The Face Is The Eye Of The Mind” and James would be like “These nurses…there’s something wrong…with their faces…what could this mean?!” and then you’d turn around and there’d be like a scary sound and the picture would be BLEEEDIIIIING.

It would be tempting to assume that they started out with an idea like that and then someone at Konami—perhaps even Masahiro Ito or Akira Yamaoka—told them to tone it down. But to be honest, I think it’s more likely that Bloober have taken the criticism people have tossed at them to heart and realise that fucking up this project would be catastrophic to their already-shaky reputation. We know from changes seen from earlier trailers to now that they are listening to feedback, and if that’s the case then they can’t have failed to pick up on the fact that people really, really don’t want their stupid haunted house bullshit in this remake.

To my mind, this spooky nurse picture comes just up to the line of what I would consider unacceptably blunt for a Silent Hill game, but doesn’t cross over it. That is promising. I was being sincere earlier when I said that I don’t want this to be a one-to-one retread of the original game. I do want Bloober to put their own thumbprint on it. I just don’t want them to enthusiastically smear shit all over the project like they’ve done with previous games.

Another example of Bloober pulling their punches can be seen here. As soon as this flickering light went on my stomach dropped, because I thought we were going to get the cliched indie horror thing where the lights in a hallway turn on one by one and then the corridor melts or grows really big or something. That’s the sort of thing that Layers Of Fear is built almost entirely out of.

But no, instead it’s just this one flickering light adding a bit of variety to what would otherwise be just another hallway. One of Silent Hill 2’s biggest flaws is that a lot of its environments are made up of identical dark corridors, so this is actually a pretty smart way to break up that monotony. And I think the nurse appearing on the other side is pretty spooky.

I might be reading way too much into it, but it looks to me like the ceiling light is reacting to the nurse’s presence—it comes on more steadily when she passes underneath. If so, this would be an interesting extension of enemies setting off the broken radio.

The trailer ends with the dialogue scene between James and Laura in the upper floor of the hospital, and I have nothing but praise for it. It’s leagues better than the original scene. A lot of that is due to the excellent voice acting and facial animation, but the dialogue has also been rewritten to flow better and sound more natural.

One of the big fears about Bloober handling this remake is that the dialogue would lose all of its subtelty and ambiguity (if you played The Medium you’ll know why this is), but that is absolutely not the case here. In fact the implication that Laura can’t see the monsters is delivered in a far more subtle way than it was originally.

I do have to add a caveat that for this particular scene, Bloober Team are still working off the template of the original. We know from the other trailers that they’re adding completely new dialogue scenes between James and the other characters—a smart move since the relatively scant time that Angela, Laura and Eddie get in the original has always been criticised, but it’s also where Bloober could crash straight into their old bad habits, particularly when it comes to Angela. So while I’m happy to enthusiastically heap praise on them for this scene, I still have some reservations.

So those are my thoughts on the Silent Hill 2 remake. Overall, seeing this extended gameplay trailer has shifted my opinion on the project way more positively. I’m positively hyped for October, and I sincerely hope that this represents a permanent redemption for Bloober Team. You can do it guys, I believe in you.

Oh, before I wrap up, I should mention one more improvement over the original game, one that heralds Silent Hill’s entry into the modern videogaming landscape. Behold:

Now that’s a videogame.