Warning: this article contains mild thematic and environment spoilers for Silent Hill 2.
The Silent Hill 2 remake is the most miserable experience I’ve had with a game in recent memory.
With an opening sentence like that, you’re probably expecting to read a very negative critique of developer Bloober Team’s recreation of Konami and Team Silent’s survival horror classic. But, in this very rare occurrence, complete and unrelenting misery is actually a positive. The original Silent Hill 2 is perhaps the bleakest, most sombre game ever made and Bloober Team has successfully preserved its miserable magic, ensuring this remake is a deeply effective descent into genuinely uncomfortable terror.
That journey begins with sound and vision. The thick, opaque fog that conceals the town of Silent Hill is part of the story’s instantly recognisable iconography, and the remake’s impressive modern volumetric effects mean it feels thicker and more isolating than ever. Moving away from the monster-infested streets should feel like an escape, but instead you’re forced to find shelter in some of the dankest, most depressingly disgusting residences you’ve ever seen. Much of Silent Hill 2 is themed around a descent, and there’s a clear gradient in the visual texture of each area that communicates that downward spiral. Locations initially feel unkempt and abandoned, such as apartment blocks with peeling wallpaper and empty cupboards. But push onwards and the architecture becomes increasingly oppressive. Recognisable shapes and textures are replaced with rougher, broken alternatives, and eventually the entire area becomes a rusting, decayed husk. What starts as unnerving transforms into truly nightmarish the further you dare to press on.
Contributing to all this, as horror tradition demands, is minimal lighting. You are locked inside dark buildings for the majority of the game’s lengthy runtime (anything from 12 to 18 hours, depending on your playstyle). This becomes increasingly distressing, particularly during exploration of Toluca Prison – the facility’s lights can only be turned on for a few seconds at a time, forcing you to sprint between breaker switches in a mostly doomed attempt to hold back the darkness. Being starved of the sun for such long stretches means that the mere sight of daylight is like gasping for air after spending what feels like days beneath water. It’s deeply, unpleasantly effective.
That visual palette is accompanied not so much by a musical score, but by the most oppressive collection of noises your ears have ever suffered, provided once again by original Silent Hill 2 composer Akira Yamaoka. It’s particularly effective in the late game, when what sounds like an approaching beast is dynamically woven into the orchestration during times of high tension. It makes you second guess every sound you hear, and over time it grinds away at your sense of reality. It’s not easy to simulate insanity, but this soundscape is as close as you can (un)comfortably get.
Effective art and sound design has been the flagship feature of many horror games, but these disciplines are the surface of the experience. I don’t mean that disparagingly – the surface is vital – but it’s what’s beneath that truly cements the terror. Games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space are, in reality, action games with horror masks, and so are rarely ever truly scary. Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, is a horror game right down to its nerve endings and bone marrow. Its environment and objective design pull on similar threads to the art and sound, constantly seeking new ways to unnerve you. Each location visited is an obtuse puzzle to be solved. You’re forced to walk circuits of each floor, backtracking to find keys or hidden entrances to rooms that will once again send you backwards to progress. This almost spiral-shaped route through the apartments, hospital, hotel and more forces you to endure increasing mental exhaustion.
This fatigue, combined with the seemingly relentless length of each area, robs you of hope. It’s particularly horrible in the final third, when you’re forced to navigate the prison and the subsequent labyrinth back-to-back with absolutely no respite. These locations feature long stretches of near-impenetrable darkness, thematically grim puzzle work, and the most aggressive, grotesque enemies in the entire game. The resulting emotional toll effectively communicates the mental space that the protagonist James Sunderland finds himself in. And that’s Bloober’s, and by extension Team Silent’s, most impressive, unsettling achievement: the ability to inflict empathy through gameplay design.
The miserable tone of Silent Hill 2 is maintained through a number of other gameplay tricks. As mentioned earlier, the story revolves around James’ descent into horror, and that’s represented both metaphorically through the visual design, and literally through a frequent need to jump into pitch-black holes. Each leap requires you to press the action button a couple of times, replicating his hesitancy and reluctance to leap into the unknown.
As the atmosphere becomes increasingly unbearable, there’s nothing built into the campaign to offer any levity or security. In the Resident Evil series, for instance, you gradually collect an increasingly powerful arsenal, allowing the late-game to be an exciting, explosive romp through blood and guts. It also toys with its dialogue and monster design, often opting for goofy characterisation that secures the series its beloved ‘cheesy horror’ credentials. Last year’s Alan Wake 2, despite clearly being inspired by Team Silent’s work, features absurdist humour and Lynchian direction to lean into the weird instead of horrifying, allowing for laughs to cut through the tension. Silent Hill 2, though, has none of this. For the most part your weapons are a broken pipe and a pistol, and even when you do get access to something a little more hard-hitting it’s nothing more than a simple shotgun or rifle with a long reload time and limited ammo. Alongside a difficulty curve that sees familiar enemies become erratic, wall-crawling freaks, Silent Hill 2’s atmosphere consistently finds ways to suffocate you.
It’s not usual for an assessment to use terms like ‘suffocate,’ ‘oppressive,’ and ‘miserable’ as positives, but horror is not a usual genre. It’s one of only two entertainment categories built around eliciting an uncontrollable response from the audience (the other being comedy). Horror is an emotion-manipulating machine, and the genre’s most effective stories can force us to experience feelings we typically don’t encounter in our everyday lives. Horror films spend their entire runtimes exerting different levels of pressure in order to achieve that manipulation, and the most effective etch images in our mind that continually reappear when the lights go out.
Video games are a very different medium, though, and their experiential nature enables them to manipulate us in more intense ways. Rather than ask us to observe, they demand that we interact, typically for four, five, sometimes even 10 times longer than an average scary movie. This can force us to experience a very different reality. While there’s a frequent insistence from some parts of the player community that games are only about fun or escapist entertainment, that’s often not the goal of many developers. Sometimes that goal is communicating uncomfortable ideas, and the path to that is through exposing us to a reality that’s deeply unpleasant. Silent Hill 2 isn’t about having fun, it’s about exploring grief and guilt – parts of the human experience that we traditionally avoid. Strangely, there’s an uncomfortable thrill in actively exploring those ideas via a video game.
The 2001 original’s technical limitations helped contribute a few thorns to that painful experience; the semi-fixed camera made environments feel restrictive and claustrophobic, and the awkward aiming installed each encounter with a sense of desperation. Bloober Team’s remake prunes those thorns, replacing them with modern third-person controls that make the experience a little friendlier to play. But those are the only significant concessions provided, so while combat sequences are perhaps a little less panicked than they once were, Team Silent’s nightmarish vision is preserved. It means the remake is a modern reminder not just of an era where Konami was a master of survival horror, but also the significant power of Silent Hill 2’s unrelenting misery.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.