After a string of Resident Evil remakes, the resurrection of Dead Space, and even genre granddaddy Alone in the Dark stepping back into the spotlight earlier this year, it feels long overdue that seminal survival horror classic Silent Hill 2 should emerge from the fog and be given a modern makeover. Enter Bloober Team, the psychological horror specialists best known for Layers of Fear and Observer, who’ve been given the task of taking the morbid masterpiece from the PlayStation 2 era and making the fetid flesh of its many demonic ghouls seem fresh. As a big fan of the original, I’m happy to report that this resulting Silent Hill 2 remake is an exceptionally grim and grimy horrorscape that’s consistently compelling to explore, packed with new puzzles and beefed-up boss encounters, and enhanced with modernised combat that made my return to the small town of Silent Hill a regularly violent thrill.
Given it was released more than two decades ago, there’s every chance you don’t have the foggiest idea what made the original Silent Hill 2 so impactful. Aside from its sinister small town setting that felt like stepping into the pages of a Stephen King novel, Silent Hill 2 stood apart from other survival horror stories of its era by putting just as much focus on the battle with personal demons as it did regular scraps with the snarling physical kind. Protagonist James Sunderland, who’s lured to a remote mining town by the promise of making contact with his deceased wife Mary, is not a battle hardened member of a zombie-killing special unit – he’s an ordinary man forced to confront some truly extraordinary things. The struggles with his own guilt and trauma both humanise him and add believable heft to the horrors that unfold around him.
While the roles of James and the handful of other lost souls he meets along the way have been recast with voice actors of a noticeably higher standard in this remake, the campy dialogue they deliver remains mostly unchanged. This does preserve the off-kilter, David Lynchian feel of the original character interactions, but comes across as a little bit jarring at times given the vastly improved standards of storytelling we’ve seen in more recent horror landmarks. I was no less entertained by Silent Hill 2’s quirky characters this time around, even if I never became emotionally invested in their plights to the same extent I did with the supporting casts in The Last of Us or Alan Wake II. Regardless, I found the mystery surrounding the fate of Mary was still more than intriguing enough to drag me through the darkest depths of Silent Hill 2’s story.
Hell Comes to Fogtown
The difference in look and feel between this Silent Hill 2 remake and the 2001 original is night and day – or perhaps that should be nightmare and daydream given the surreal nature of its small town’s continually altering state. The streets are blanketed by believably heavy fog and rich with detail, right down to the missing persons posters taped to telephone poles that flutter in the breeze. Dimly lit dwellings are overrun with discernable signs of decay, and drywall and cinder block splinter off in shards from startling shockwaves felt in hurried hallway chase scenes. Hordes of cockroaches startle and scatter in the beam of your flashlight as you make your way down each putrid path that winds you through an increasingly hellish otherworld. Silent Hill 2’s festering environment is at once both off-putting and alluring, like a scab you can’t stop picking.
The enemies too have been dressed up in far more disturbing and disgusting designs. The most common type, the Lying Figure, which appears to have its arms wrapped up in a straightjacket made of its own skin, seems slick with a decidedly icky sheen and more smoothly shifts from two-legged stagger to writhing prone along the ground in preparation for a surprise attack. There’s also the twitchy, Bubble Head Nurses introduced during the Brookhaven Hospital section (who now come in both pipe and knife-toting forms), and of course Pyramid Head, who’s sharply pointed skull once again brings a more literal meaning to the term apex predator. This lumbering death-dealer remains one of the most terrifying presences in the horror genre, only now he seems somehow even more sinister thanks to extra details like the realistic rust on his jagged head and the ghastly inky goop that coats his powerful frame.
Of course, that’s when you can actually see the enhanced enemies and environments around you, since Silent Hill 2 is also oppressively dark for significantly long periods at a time. James’ chest-mounted flashlight has a shorter throw than Mr. Burns, meaning it’s regularly the case that you can only see a few feet in front of his nose – testing your television’s black levels, tightening the unrelenting sense of claustrophobia, and leaving you vulnerable to ambushes from the creepy Mannequin enemies that stand eerily still in the corners of rooms like they’re floor lamps purchased from Hell’s Home Depot.
It’s during these moments, when your peripheral vision shrinks down to a pinhole, that Silent Hill 2’s incredibly unsettling audio design really comes to the fore. The signature radio static hisses that intensify around imminent dangers, the shrieks in the distance and whispers that are uncomfortably close, and the accompanying discordant drones maintain an ongoing and ominous sense of dread. Stalking through Silent Hill 2 left my nerves more shredded than a guitar solo played by a shirtless Hugh Jackman.
Cloudy with a Chance of Street Brawls
Thankfully when things get loud in Silent Hill 2, we’re much better equipped to fight back this time. Gone is the stiff, auto-targeted shooting and cumbersome pause menu-based weapon-swapping of the original, Silent Hill 2’s combat feels much more like what you’d expect from a survival horror adventure post-Resident Evil 4. Enemies can be manually targeted from an over-the-shoulder viewpoint, weapons can be quickly shuffled between at the tap of a d-pad button, and James is also able to perform quick dodges to nimbly sidestep around lurching enemies or the streams of acidic bile they spew. Additionally, melee attacks can be used to smash through glass in order to gather health drinks and ammunition from cabinets or locked cars, and even to crash through weakened sections of walls to gain access to secret areas hidden amongst its expanded environments.
That said, although Silent Hill 2 gives you far more control over each shot fired, it remains staunchly true to the original in terms of its noticeably limited arsenal of weapons – James is an underpowered everyman by design, after all. There are two types of melee weapons plus a handgun, shotgun, and rifle, and that’s your lot. There are no weapon upgrades or mods to expand the capabilities of your arsenal further, and ultimately I didn’t particularly favour one weapon over the other – I pretty much just switched to whichever gun I had the most ammo for at any one time. Actually that’s not entirely true – according to the story completion stats page, I did prefer one weapon more than most: the lead pipe. Partly since ammo was so scarce, but mainly because it just feels amazingly satisfying to relieve Silent Hill 2’s near-constant tension by clubbing a hellborn beast to the ground and continuing to pound their slimy skulls in until they’ve long since expired.
Yet while Silent Hill 2 lags behind the likes of Resident Evil 4 or Dead Space as far as the flexibility of its firepower goes, the developers – in collaboration with original Silent Hill 2 creature designer Masahiro Ito – have thrown a few new enemy types into the mix to keep the combat consistently engaging despite its relative mechanical simplicity. When I first entered the Toluca Prison section in the story’s second half only to find a freaky new breed of Mannequin that could scramble up and down walls and along the ceiling like a spider made of discarded doll parts, I couldn’t hit the new 180-degree turn button fast enough. However, once I’d composed myself, I set about trying to pick them off from afar with my rifle as they shuffled in and out of the shadows above, which gave Silent Hill 2’s combat a challenging new edge.
Where the overhauled combat really shines, however, is in the boss battles. Some fights, like the first encounter with the iconic Pyramid Head, play out largely the same way they did before – they just feel more muscular and menacing thanks to the immediacy of the over-the-shoulder viewpoint and the vastly more detailed visuals. However, other action sequences have been enhanced to far more comprehensive degrees. Without spoiling too much, there’s one particular late game fight in the original Silent Hill 2 that amounted to little more than an attritional head-to-head stand-off, but here it’s been reworked into an intense game of cat and mouse amidst the frigid air and dangling carcasses inside a meat locker – effectively transforming one of the story’s weakest boss fights into one of its very best.
Similarly, many of the original game’s puzzles have been preserved here, whether it’s the eccentric, point-and-click adventure kind like using a specific tool in order to retrieve an item from an apartment suite garbage chute, or the more ingenious form like swiveling an ornate box on its axis in order to manipulate the towering, MC Escher-inspired room of impossible staircases inside a late-game labyrinth. Meanwhile, other brainteasers like the coin puzzle early on have been given additional steps to complete, which prevented their solutions from ever becoming too predictable as someone who played the original all those years ago. With the exception of some obligatory valve-turning here and there, puzzle types are largely unique and consistently stimulating, and there are plenty of them to solve. (Like combat, you can also vary the difficulty of puzzles via the in-game menu in order to best suit your tastes).
However, some of the simpler puzzles have been expanded upon a touch too much. Take one early obstacle in the original that effectively required you to solve a fairly straightforward riddle in order to wind a grandfather clock to a specific time. In this remake, I had to undergo a sequence of multi-part treasure hunts to gather up each of the three hands for the clock face – fending off enemy hordes and completing additional puzzles along the way – which ultimately meant that close to an hour of my playthrough was spent simply attempting to make the clock chime and unlock the way forward. This is just one example of a number of instances where the new Silent Hill 2 bogs down slightly in terms of story progression, and I have to admit that as I jumped through yet another elaborate series of hoops just trying to get my hands on the key to a locked door in the Wood Side Apartments, I did catch myself wishing the owner had simply left a spare under their welcome mat.
To Cut a Short Story Long
It’s because of the expanded puzzles and combat sections, that the new Silent Hill 2 is considerably longer than the original despite the fact it seems to stick to all the same story beats. The main campaign of the 2001 Silent Hill 2 can be completed in around eight hours, but my playthrough of this 2024 remake hit the credits at just over 15. While it’s almost twice as long, I don’t really feel it’s doubly as good. This remake is genuinely excellent for large stretches at a time, particularly during the escalating stakes of its climactic final third, but there are definitely moments throughout the early parts of the journey that are lined with more padding than the walls of the Brookhaven Hospital psychiatric ward.
It also means that although Silent Hill 2 features eight different endings to unlock – two more than the original’s six – I can’t see myself investing the time for any repeat playthroughs because I’m slightly put-off by the protracted length. Although admittedly alternate endings aren’t the only incentive to return in Silent Hill 2’s New Game+ – there are also extra weapons to find, additional graphics modes with CRT scanlines and the like to try, plus numerous secrets and easter eggs to comb for in the town’s increased number of interiors – I don’t feel a huge pull to step face-first back into the fog anytime soon.
Even so, although it might not completely trump the original in the same way that the Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes did, Silent Hill 2 is still an incredibly high quality reimagining that improves on its source material in more ways than not. I really like the way it uses distinct hues of light and distant audio cues to subtly steer you along the right path, allowing the HUD to stay free of any immersion-breaking objective markers. It’s great how James automatically marks his map with any puzzles or locked doors you find, vastly reducing the amount of aimless backtracking that occasionally plagued the original game. Developer Bloober Team has also really emptied its full bag of tricks as far as taking tense situations and bringing them to near-nervous breakdowns. The timer-based light switches in the Toluca Prison, for example, are an extremely effective device for creating panic – the intensifying countdown beeps echoed my own escalating heartrate as I hurried to complete my search of each cell before the whole block was plunged back into darkness. It’s fantastically fear-inducing stuff.