Silent Hill 2 Review – Bloober Remake Includes What Makes Konami Classic

The fog-covered town of Silent Hill is a dark mirror, a glass prison that draws you in before reflecting back to you your worst qualities and greatest failures. So what happens when the city imprisons a development team with a spotty and authoritarian past?

Video games aren’t exactly known for their subtlety. Silent Hill 2 was revolutionary when it launched on PlayStation 2 because it didn’t insult your intelligence. It told an adult story about trauma and guilt with additional details in the margins. From enemy designs to 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 that the Silent Hill 2 remake was real and developed by Bloober Team, a studio whose last attempt at psychological horror in The Medium was as subtle as ‘an elephant in a high visibility vest. .

The name doesn’t help either – Bloober Team.

Bloody.

It looks like a sentient slime you’d find in the sewers of a JRPG, not the guardians of a legendary horror series.

Upon starting the game, the title screen of the Silent Hill 2 remake did nothing to ease my concerns.

One of the first things you see in Silent Hill 2 is the difficulty selection screen, which, like the original, lets you choose puzzle complexity separately from combat difficulty. Unlike the original, there is also an option for protagonist James to wear a Pyramid Head mask (made from a pizza box) on his head…

Funko Popification entertainment probably isn’t the flavor of psychological horror the team was going for, but here we are.

I blame Fortnite.

Once I recovered and selected normal-headed James, I snapped out of your restless dreams and out of the foggy city and my worries began to disappear. It wasn’t until Brookhaven Hospital that they almost completely evaporated, but even early on, in minor details, it’s clear that Bloober (lol) understands the source material.

In the first Silent Hill, a character makes Brahms the next town of Silent Hill, Maine. But the original Silent Hill 2 – either in a continuity error or a typo – had a road sign saying Brahms is 265 miles away, which, by the way, is pretty far away. Not quite the next town on the territory. For the fandom, this is an annoying inconsistency from decades that Bloober “fixed” here – the sign for Brahms is still there, but the distance in miles is erased.

Sure, it’s always shocking when you get a “Blunt Force Trauma” Trophy because you caved in enough female-coded monsters in your head, but it’s 2024, baby. We’re doing Trophies now – don’t think about it too much. I expressed my concerns”almost” evaporated.

There’s also a famous jump scare at the start of the original game that I thought Bloober had ruined, but now it’s a double bluff set up precisely to surprise fans who know what’s in store with new players. They may have a stupid studio name, but Bloober knows, loves, and most importantly, understands this game, treating it with the admiration and respect it deserves.

One of the things I disliked most about The Medium, aside from its fist-pumping story, was how prescriptive the puzzles were. Even if you understood something, you couldn’t progress until you were spoon-fed the solution. Silent Hill 2 is much looser. At one point I typed 0451 – the immersive simulation code – into a safe and it opened its contents ten minutes before finding a note with a math puzzle that I no longer needed to resolve. I don’t know why Bloober used the imsim code, but it’s cool that the puzzles are more than a series of steps you have to follow in order – there are some really inventive multi-step puzzles later .

I was also worried about the new over-the-shoulder camera. With Resident Evil 2 Remake, this wasn’t much of an issue, as it’s a series that thrived with fixed and dynamic cameras. However, much of Silent Hill 2’s atmosphere comes from these focused camera placements, pulling back to enjoy isolation and moving in close to simulate claustrophobia. Although sometimes the camera shakes and shakes when you’re near a wall, Bloober has done an incredible job of conveying those same feelings by combining clever level design with beautiful art.

When you’re stuck in one of the longer “dungeons” – the hospital, the apartments, and the prison – you feel trapped as you go deeper and deeper. When you finally return to the foggy streets of Silent Hill, a sense of relief washes over you – or at least it does when the fog doesn’t lower the frame rate.

Sometimes Bloober pulls back the camera for dramatic effect – usually either for cutscenes or for holes as well. You see, James is not a healthy man. If he sees a hole, he jumps in it. He puts his arm in the holes. Love a hole. The camera pulls back each time to stare into the abyss as James grabs and dives into the dark recesses of his Swiss cheese brain.

James is completely disturbed. His face is an emotionless mask and his line is detached and distant throughout. When emotion arises, it’s almost a fear in itself. The rest of the cast has similarly Lynchian, staccato performances that modernize the source material while understanding that it was delivered in a certain way to evoke a specific feeling of unease. It’s good material.

From the performances to the music to the sound design – industrial machinery, sirens, radio static and dragging chains – it all combines to create an incredibly oppressive atmosphere. The Silent Hill 2 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 the edge of the knife, always searching for a few bullets, limping to your next health kit. This remake does not balance the economy to create these conditions and does not use a dynamic system to check how much you carry. By the end of my first playthrough (on normal difficulty), I had 20 unused syringes (which fully heal you) and hadn’t died once. In addition to this generous health recovery saving, you also have a dodge button that you can press to avoid damage at any time. Once you get used to the timing of enemy attacks, you basically can’t get hit unless caught from behind.

Because of this, even the game’s best-designed enemies don’t seem like legitimate threats. I love what Bloober has done with the mannequins, which, thanks to the new camera, can hide behind, under and above objects, before jumping out at you – and they do it dynamically throughout the environment . You find yourself staring at them, wondering if it’s a bundle of clothes or the twist of a tied curtain before they notice you’re looking and lunge at your face. If you were worried they’d kill you, this would be brilliant horror game design, but they lack impact because you’re always so well equipped.

Otherwise, the Silent Hill 2 remake is a welcome surprise that respects the source material while still being fresh for modern gamers. It might not sell you in the first few hours, but stick it out until Brookhaven Hospital and you’ll embark on a breathtaking journey straight to hell.

Platform tested: PS5