Why Silent Hill 2 Remake's Toluca Prison is even scarier than the original

The world of Silent Hill is a strange, liminal place. Here the threshold between the disturbing dream of the mist world and the industrial hell of the Otherworld can be as vague as bridging a small gap into a neighboring building, or a shift in mental state. But even within this existing framework of strangeness, Silent Hill 2Toluca Prison stands out as an anomaly, with your journey to it taking you down a seemingly endless staircase and a succession of holes that give the feeling that it exists outside the usual two Silent Hill realities. While its whereabouts in Silent Hill’s psychosphere are up for debate, it feels like a subdimension where James’ conscience and a poignant part of Silent Hill’s history bubble up together in a dark brine deep in the bowels of the Otherworld – or even underneath.

Toluca was once a prisoner of war camp for civil war soldiers and then a prison with a habit of carrying out executions and dumping bodies into deep holes. Toluca is steeped in bad memories. In keeping with the spooky season – and true to Team Silent’s original rendition – Toluca Prison is the point where Silent Hill’s dimensional spectrum ventures into the spectral, with Bloober keeping the little details that made the prison feel spooky (by powers other than those of James). guilt and horniness, that is). Long-dead prisoners whisper in dank cells, you can hear invisible horses trotting to take prisoners to the gallows, and a scream from beyond the grave – a brazen scare made all the more effective by the fact that the game features so few of them. – awaits those descending to Toluca.

Hell in a cell

Leon explores Toluca Prison in the remake of Silent Hill 2 — (Image credit: Bloober Team)

There used to be an older game here

Silent Hill 2 Remake Endings — (Image credit: Konami)

Silent Hill 2 Remake review: “An atmospheric and rewarding horror game that joins the Resident Evil remakes in reinventing a classic”

Bloober’s rendition also deviates slightly from the design of the original Silent Hill 2, which used a tight, top-down perspective, making it difficult to see the scuttlers and other creatures coming towards you. With the limited control we had over the camera in Silent Hill 2, we were often at the mercy of Team Silent’s creative cinematography, which deftly exploited it to claustrophobic effect. Even now, there’s certainly some weight to the claim that a fully controllable, all-angle camera is an aspect of modern game design that’s anathema to effective horror. To combat this, Bloober took advantage of an aspect of modern game design that was noticeably lacking during the time of the original: verticality.

Instead of looking down in Silent Hill 2 Remake’s Toluca, this time your attention is focused upward. At first you just hear something moving above you, but when you look up you see nothing but faint lights dangling from strings and disappearing into the darkness. As you try to get your bearings with static radio signals that you can’t yet see looming, you get some respite when you find a lever that turns on all the lights in the cell block. But that relief is short-lived when you realize that these lights have a timer, which audibly ticks faster and faster until you are once again plunged into almost total darkness. Ultimately, the precious seconds I would spend pulling the lever, compounded by that dreaded countdown, would generate so much tension that I would choose to simply sprint through the darkness rather than burden myself with the additional stressors.

Eventually, maybe when the ticking lights start to sputter, you’ll see them: the deadly new threats that haunt you. They’re essentially a new form of an existing enemy, the Mannequin – four prosthetic legs connected by essentially a torso. Toluca has been used in the game so far as hide-and-seek jump scares that swing around on two devious legs, giving the Mannequins a gruesome overhaul just as their original form is perhaps starting to become all too familiar. This variant scurries on all fours along walls and ceilings, like cockroaches darting in and out of the vents in a damp motel room, before leaping at you from all angles.

Leon explores Toluca Prison in the remake of Silent Hill 2

(Image credit: Bloober Team)

Once this insectile new form of the Mannequin notices your scent, it’s like he’s sending a signal to the others as they all seem to descend on you at once. Within moments you’ll be blasting them off the walls with your shotgun, while straitjacketed Lying Figures spit poison at you from their cells. In these moments, the horror of Silent Hill 2 Remake moves into Resident Evil 4 territory, as you’re besieged from all sides and – for the first time in the game – anxiously watch your ammo supplies dwindle. This shift toward a noisier, teeming brand of horror is a creative license from Bloober, but it works precisely because it’s an outlier from the rest of the experience. It also fits thematically with a setting steeped in violence, as you try to navigate what feels like an alien prison riot. There’s no way you can suppress it, you can only hope to survive it.

Even in the quieter moments as you wade through Toluca, the long industrial tones of Akira Yamaoka’s score reverberate and grind on your psyche (you know you’re in a bad place where the only relief comes from the barrage of noise and monsters through a pitch-black execution site). At one point you pick up a paranoid note from one of the prisoners claiming that another prisoner can reach him through the walls. When you get to this prisoner’s cell you notice that they have cut a hole in the wall through which you can escape, and as you squeeze through this escape route that comment about the prisoner chasing others through the walls sticks in your mind hang.

Perhaps Toluca is a reflection of James’ repressed conscience reaching a breaking point and trying to get out, or perhaps there really is some kind of paranormal activity going on here. The great thing about the Bloober remake is that it maintains the mystery surrounding this abandoned place, while adding a few edgy elements that elevate it to one of the most stress-inducing horror sequences you (or James Sunderland) could imagine.

The introductory scenes of Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil 2 show two different approaches to the survival horror remake, and both are valid