Silent Hill 2 is back and it’s more terrifying than ever

Meet me in our special place,” reads the cryptic note from the deceased wife of main character James. That special place is Silent Hill, a Maine town straight out of the Stephen King playbook that may once have been picturesque but is now a festering slum shrouded in deadly fog. As you pass through the miasma, you can just make out the shapes of horrible, misshapen things thrashing and writhing in their own rhythm.

Silent Hill 2 is of course one of the most iconic video games ever made, still talked about in hushed tones decades after its release on the PlayStation 2 in 2001. It was revolutionary, using the deeply unpleasant environments and oppressive, desperate gameplay to tell a truly horrific story of guilt, trauma and psychological breakdown.

I vividly remember sitting alone in my college dorm room, wearing headphones, yelping audibly with every jump, dreading the inevitable appearance of the iconic – if somewhat ridiculous – antagonist Pyramid Head.

Recreating such a revered title requires not only technical skill, but a real grounding in the original text, a sense of what made Silent Hill 2 so utterly and compulsively terrifying. That task fell to Team Bloober, a Polish developer with a reputation as the “maybes” of survival horror, with a string of indie games to their name that ranged from inspired (Layers of Fear, Observer) to disappointing (The remedy) to absolute nonsense (Blair Witch). Luckily, Silent Hill 2 is their magnum opus, the moment when they finally lifted the fog and arrived in the mainstream.

Their Silent Hill maintains the sense of helplessness, the sense of dread as you slowly peer around corners hoping not to spot a psycho-sexual monstrosity (enemies range from what appear to be gimps zipped into fetish gear made of human flesh to bloodied nurses in Halloween Costumes ) but drags it into the modern gaming era. If you hated being asked to squeeze your arm into a questionably squishy hole to grab a tube of glue, then you can now look forward to doing it in ultra-high resolution!

The remake is more accurate and responsive than the original, but manages to retain the feeling of being a man hopelessly out of his depth, bumbling his way through encounters and barely able to comprehend the horror of it all. Every time one of the strange sex monsters came running towards me screaming, I felt wild and furious. Sometimes when enemies are knocked to the ground they writhe away, so I found myself stomping on their prone bodies, often long after they were clearly dead. This isn’t helped by the fact that your portable radio crackles with a painful intensity when you’re close to danger: sometimes I’d kill whatever was in front of me just to make the sounds go away; If that isn’t the definition of madness, I don’t know what is.

Silent Hill 2 became shorthand for excellent horror because it did so many things so well, combining a uniquely creepy set of locations – festering flats, an abandoned hospital, a pitch-black prison – with an unbearably menacing sound and a story that really sells the feeling of slowly going mad. This remake captures all that. Now that I’m replaying it 23 years later, I’m back in my special place: Silent Hill.