Silent Hill 2 and the best horror games for Halloween

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James Sunderland gets out of his car and looks out over the misty forest. He still thinks about the letter he just received from his wife, telling him to come meet her in the remote town where they once shared a romantic getaway. The reason he suffers from it: his wife died three years ago. The letter can’t be real. But he can’t let it go and goes to the city to find answers.

The setup of the classic horror game from 2001 Silent Hill 2which just got the big-budget remake treatment may evoke familiar horror tropes, but what comes next in James’ journey felt surprisingly fresh when it was released. While previous games in the genre aimed to scare players with jump scares and bloodshed, Silent Hill 2 was one of the first to put psychological horror on the map, and is remembered as an atmospheric masterpiece that remains truly disturbing in its themes, images and unrelenting bleakness.

Halloween is a time when gamers often reach for horror releases, and this year has already seen a bumper crop. As a medium, games have the potential to be even scarier than movies, because you don’t passively watch a character go through a nightmare, but experience it yourself. The games are most effective when played in a dark room without distractions and, most importantly, with good headphones to fully realize each chilling sound effect.

In the Silent Hill 2 remake, it’s the sounds that first get under your skin. The sparse, ominous score, the sound of James’ footsteps echoing in the deserted streets, and the unearthly sounds of the monsters – whether real or figments of James’ grief-stricken imagination, they gurgle and rasp with authentic menace. Your fear is heightened by the thick fog that envelops the city. At the time of the original’s release, the fog was implemented due to hardware limitations on how much could be displayed on screen, but for this remake the developers wisely kept it in place as an aesthetic choice, realizing that nothing is more frightening than not. knowing what horrors lurk just meters away.

Fans were unsure if this remake would do justice to the original, as series creator Konami had practically ignored it Silent Hill since 2012 and this remake’s developer, Bloober Team, has a decidedly mixed track record. But the result is a welcome success, selling 1 million copies in its first week. The remake stays true to what made the original so terrifying: evoking fear through atmosphere and environmental design, alongside a plot more interested in psychology than the supernatural, tackling taboo subjects such as incest and domestic violence with surprising maturity addressed. Where changes have been made, they are thoughtful and welcome: the camera controls and combat have been updated in line with modern standards, and several locations have been expanded or remixed to extend the original’s short running time.

It’s not the only new horror game whose history dates back to the Silent Hill series. The original creator of the franchise, Keiichiro Toyama, who left the series after the first installment, has a new original game, Cutter headwill be released on November 8. The tone is very different: this is a campy, ultra-violent slasher rather than a psychological horror. The premise adds a twist to a classic story: a police officer finds a body at a crime scene with an empty eye socket and missing brain. Shape-shifting monsters, the titular Slitterheads, prowl the streets in search of human prey. But instead of playing the cop, you actually control another monster: an ancient ghost that can possess human bodies and must jump from host to host to hunt down and eliminate every last Slitterhead.

It’s less of a strict horror and more of a horror-themed action game, with a fun layer of complexity added by switching between human hosts mid-battle. The game encourages you to view them as disposable and instructs you: “Although people are weak, their numbers alone are a powerful weapon.” The visual design is captivating too, from the stylish cityscapes of the fictional East Asian setting, inspired by the films of Wong Kar-wai, to the monsters themselves, a nightmarish tangle of tentacles, claws and mouths that telescope nauseatingly from human bodies.

If you’re still looking for the perfect Halloween scare, there are other strong candidates available. Alan Wake2a postmodern horror fable about a cursed writer, one of the best games of last year, heavily inspired by Silent Hill And Twin peaksgets a new mystery with the downloadable expansion Lake House. For those looking for a spooky experience that prioritizes story over action, check it out Still awakens the depththe atmospheric cosmic horror set on a Scottish oil rig, released earlier this year, or the new remaster of Until sunrisewhich follows a group of teenagers who go into the woods and realize something terrible is happening to them. So they do what horror heroes have done since the genre’s inception: go to a creepy place and immediately make questionable decisions. The only difference is that here the choices are yours.