The fog-covered town of Silent Hill is a dark mirror— a prison of glass that pulls you in before reflecting your worst qualities and biggest failures at you. So, what happens when the town imprisons a development team with a spotty, heavy-handed history?
Video games aren’t exactly known for their subtlety. Silent Hill 2 was groundbreaking when it launched on PlayStation 2 because it didn’t insult your intelligence. It told an adult story about trauma and guilt with extra detail in the margins. From the enemy designs to the voice line delivery, understanding the subtext enriched your experience with Konami’s cohesive psychological horror classic.
That’s why I was terrified for all the wrong reasons when Konami announced the Silent Hill 2 remake was real and being developed by Bloober Team, a studio whose last attempt at psychological horror in The Medium was as subtle as an elephant in a high-vis vest.
The name doesn’t help either – Bloober Team.
Bloober.
It sounds like some sentient slime you’d find in the sewers in a JRPG, not the custodians of a legendary horror series.
Booting up the game, the title screen for Silent Hill 2’s remake didn’t alleviate my concerns.
One of the first things you see in Silent Hill 2 is the difficulty select screen which, like the original, lets you choose the complexity of puzzles separately from the combat difficulty. Unlike the original, there’s also an option to let protagonist James wear a Pyramid Head mask (made of a pizza box) on his head…
The Funko Popification of entertainment is probably not the flavor of psychological horror the team was going for, but here we are.
I blame Fortnite.
Once I’d recovered and selected normal-headed James, I stepped into the misty town from your restless dreams, and my concerns began to melt away. It took until Brookhaven Hospital for them to almost evaporate completely, but even in the early stages, in the minor details, it’s clear Bloober (lol) understands the source material.
In the first Silent Hill, a character establishes Brahms as the next town over from Silent Hill, Maine. But the original Silent Hill 2 – either in a continuity error or a cursed typo – had a road sign stating Brahms is 265 miles away, which, by the way, is quite far. Not quite next town over territory. For the fandom, it’s been an annoying inconsistency for decades that Bloober has “fixed” here – the sign for Brahms is still there, but the distance in miles is scrubbed off.
Sure, it’s still jarring when you get a “Blunt Force Trauma” Trophy pop because you caved in the heads of enough female-coded monsters, but it’s 2024, baby. We do Trophies now – don’t think about it too much. I said my concerns “almost” evaporated.
There’s also a famous jump scare early on in the original game that I thought Bloober had ruined, but now it’s a double bluff set up precisely to catch fans who know what’s coming by surprise along with new players. They might have a stupid studio name, but Bloober knows, loves, and, crucially, understands this game, treating it with the admiration and respect it deserves.
One of the things I disliked the most about The Medium, outside of its hamfisted story, was how prescriptive the puzzles were. Even if you had something figured out, you couldn’t progress until you’d been spoon-fed the solution. Silent Hill 2 is much more loose. At one point, I tapped 0451 – the immersive sim code – into a safe and it sprung open its contents for me ten minutes before I found a note with a math puzzle I no longer needed to solve. I don’t know why Bloober used the imsim code, but it’s cool that puzzles are more than a series of steps you must do in order – there are some really inventive, multi-stage puzzles later on.
I was also worried about the new over-the-shoulder camera. With Resident Evil 2 Remake, it wasn’t as much of a concern, as that’s a series that’s thrived with fixed and dynamic cameras. So much of Silent Hill 2’s atmosphere, however, comes from those purposeful camera placements, pulling back to take in the isolation, and coming in tight to simulate claustrophobia. Though sometimes the camera judders and shakes when you’re close to a wall, Bloober has done an amazing job of getting across these same feelings by combining smart level design with gorgeous art.
When you’re stuck in one of the longer “dungeons” – the hospital, apartments, and prison – you feel trapped as you delve deeper and deeper. When you do eventually step back out into the foggy streets of Silent Hill, a sense of relief washes over you – or at least it does when the fog doesn’t tank the frame rate.
Occasionally, Bloober takes the camera away for dramatic effect – usually either for cutscenes or for holes, too. You see, James isn’t a well man. If he sees a hole, he jumps into the hole. He sticks his arm in holes. Loves a hole. The camera pulls back to stare into the abyss every time as James grasps and dives into the dark recesses of his Swiss cheese brain.
James is perfectly deranged. His face is an emotionless mask and his line delivery is detached and distant throughout. When emotion comes through, it’s almost a jump scare in itself. The rest of the cast have similar staccato, Lynchian performances that modernize the source material while still understanding that it was delivered a certain way to evoke a specific sense of unease. It’s good stuff.
From the performances to the music to the sound design – industrial machinery, sirens, radio static, and dragging chains – everything combines to create an impressively oppressive atmosphere. Silent Hill 2’s remake is worth playing for that alone.
The only place where it falls apart a bit is the “survival” aspect of “survival horror”.
Survival horror at its best has you teetering on a knife edge, always scrambling for a few bullets, limping to your next health kit. This remake doesn’t balance the economy to create those conditions or use a dynamic system to check how much you’re carrying. By the end of my first playthrough (on Normal difficulty), I had 20 unused syringes (which heal you fully) and hadn’t died a single time. On top of this generous health recovery economy, you’ve also got a dodge button you can press to avoid damage at any time. Once you get used to the timing of enemy attacks, you basically can’t be hit unless you’re taken from behind.
Because of all that, even the game’s best-designed enemies don’t feel like legitimate threats. I love what Bloober has done with the mannequins, which, because of the new camera, can hide behind, under, and above things, before jumping out at you – and they do this dynamically around the entire environment. You find yourself staring right at them, wondering if it’s a bundle of clothes or the twist of a tied-back curtain before they notice you watching and lunge at your face. If you were worried about them actually killing you, this would be a brilliant bit of horror game design, but they lack impact because you’re always so well-kitted out.
Otherwise, Silent Hill 2’s remake is a welcome surprise that respects the source material while feeling fresh for modern players. It might not have you sold in the first few hours, but stick it out until Brookhaven Hospital and you’re in for a white-knuckle ride straight into Hell.
Platform tested: PS5