Anyone who adores the fixed camera angles and tank controls of classic Silent Hill games likely also enjoys the sometimes monotonous but often satisfying process of racing down a hallway full of doors, interacting with them to see if they’re locked or unlocked, and then reassessing their map afterward to visualize the progress they’ve made thus far. Thankfully, even with a wealth of new passageways and extended dungeons to explore, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake manages to adapt that sensation faithfully while adding new mechanics to aid in making exploration far more robust.
Bloober implements a mechanic in the Silent Hill 2 remake where players must repeatedly strike at unmistakably breakable walls, for example. Sometimes this mechanic is used purely as a means of having players initiate a squeeze-through animation to give themselves a narrow escape and precious respite from aggressive enemies, but more often than not it creates passageways into new areas. This would be all well and good if it was simply added for the sake of traversal, too, though Bloober took this as a big opportunity to reimagine one of the original game’s most iconic and obscure riddles.
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Silent Hill 2 Remake: 7 Reasons Why James Might Be in an Endless Loop
There are a few pieces of Bloober Team’s puzzle in the Silent Hill 2 remake that allude to the fact that the game’s events are a loop.
How Silent Hill 2’s Remake Brilliantly Adapts the Original Game’s Historical Society Well
Before entering Toluca Prison in the original Silent Hill 2, as James Sunderland progresses through the Silent Hill Historical Society and drops into a hole, players will find themselves seemingly trapped in a well encircled by a brick wall. The game gives players no clues about what to do here and tasks them with finding a way out, which leads to players attempting to strike the wall at different points out of sheer curiosity and a process of elimination with nothing else to achieve.
Players will know when they’ve hit the correct spot when the sound their melee weapon makes is noticeably hollow, with a text prompt confirming players’ discovery, and repeatedly hitting it will eventually reveal a door.
In the Silent Hill 2 remake, however, this riddle is made more intuitive by presenting players with a few distinct breakable walls whose visual language, not unlike white cloth behaving similarly to Resident Evil’s controversial yellow paint, will be wholly recognizable by this point in the game. The only actual challenge here is trivial since all players must do is strike at the brickwork and see which portion of the wall actually leads to a door, with the others being false, which is perfectly fine given how straightforward the original riddle is once players understand its gimmick.
Bloober appears to have thought macrocosmically about how this riddle would be adapted in the remake and decided to craft an entire mechanic around it that is also a profound element in level designs throughout the game. Even if the design process worked the other way with Bloober realizing its breakable wall mechanic would be immersive in the well, though, the implementation of a new mechanic for a nostalgic Silent Hill 2 riddle allows it to be simultaneously refreshing and faithful.
Silent Hill 2’s Remake Gives Traversal a Suspenseful Edge with Breakable Walls
The breakable wall mechanic in question is basically a three-parter animation where James hacks at unmistakably degraded patches of wall that are more or less outlined for the player and have white cloth strewn about them. Breakable walls may not be as satisfying to smack as breakable glass in the Silent Hill 2 remake, but it’s neat that Bloober considered various means of traversal aside from ordinary doors. Breakable walls can be suspenseful as well when enemies are at James’ back as he’s in the middle of caving a wall in with a metal pipe.
Likewise, nurses can actually follow James through the Silent Hill 2 remake’s squeeze-through passages that breakable walls create, meaning players aren’t safe simply because they slipped out of one room and into another. The remake of Silent Hill 2 plays almost nothing like the original in many ways, and breakable walls are a fantastic addition that navigation would’ve likely felt stale without.
- Released
- October 8, 2024
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ Due To Blood and Gore, Language, Sexual Themes, Violence
- PS Plus Availability
- N/A
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty