Silent Hill 2 is completely miserable (and that’s why it’s great)

Warning: This article contains mild thematic and environmental spoilers for Silent Hill 2.

The Silent Hill 2 remake is the most miserable experience I’ve had with a game in recent memory.

With an opening sentence like that, you’re probably expecting to read a very negative review of developer Bloober Team’s recreation of Konami and Team Silent’s survival horror classic. But, in this very rare case, total and relentless misery is actually positive. The original Silent Hill 2 is perhaps the darkest, bleakest game ever made, and Bloober Team has managed to preserve its wretched magic, ensuring that this remake is a deeply effective descent into truly uncomfortable terror.

This journey begins with sound and vision. The thick, opaque fog that cloaks the town of Silent Hill is part of the story’s instantly recognizable iconography, and the remake’s impressive modern volumetric effects mean it feels thicker and more insulating than ever. Getting away from the monster-infested streets should feel like an escape, but instead you’re forced to find refuge in some of the darkest, most depressing residences you’ve ever seen. Much of Silent Hill 2 is themed downhill, and there’s a clear gradient in the visual texture of each area that communicates this downward spiral. The places at first seem neglected and abandoned, like apartment buildings with peeling wallpaper and empty closets. But keep going and the architecture becomes more and more oppressive. Recognizable shapes and textures are replaced by rougher, broken alternatives, and eventually the entire area becomes a rusty, rotting husk. What starts off as annoying turns into a nightmare the more you dare to go further.

Minimal lighting helps with all of this, as horror tradition demands. You’re locked in dark buildings for most of the game’s long duration (12 to 18 hours, depending on your playstyle). This becomes increasingly punishing, especially when exploring Toluca Prison: the facility’s lights can only be turned on for a few seconds at a time, forcing you to run between switches in an attempt to practically doomed to fail to hold back the darkness. Being deprived of sunlight for such long periods of time means that the mere sight of daylight is like gasping for breath after spending what seems like days underwater. It’s deeply and unpleasantly effective.

This visual palette is accompanied not so much by a musical score, but by the most oppressive collection of noises your ears have ever experienced, provided once again by Silent Hill 2’s original composer, Akira Yamaoka. This is particularly effective late in the game, when what looks like an approaching beast is dynamically integrated into the orchestration during periods of high tension. It makes you second-guess every sound you hear, and over time it erodes your sense of reality. It’s not easy to simulate madness, but this soundscape is as close as you can get to achieving it.

Effective art and sound design have been hallmark features of many horror games, but these disciplines are only the surface of the experience. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way – the surface is vital – but it’s what’s underneath that truly cements the terror. Games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space are, in reality, action games with horror masks and are therefore rarely truly scary. Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, is a horror game down to the nerve endings and bone marrow. Its environment and objective design draw on similar threads of art and sound, constantly seeking new ways to disturb you. Each location visited is an obtuse puzzle to solve. You’re forced to navigate circuits of each floor, backtracking to find keys or hidden entrances to rooms that will once again take you backwards to progress. This almost spiral-like journey through apartments, hospital, hotel and more forces you to endure increasing mental exhaustion.

This fatigue, combined with the seemingly endless length of each area, robs you of hope. It’s especially gruesome in the final third, when you’re forced to go through the prison and ensuing maze back to back, without any respite. These locations feature long stretches of near-impenetrable darkness, thematically dark puzzles, and the most aggressive and grotesque enemies in all of gaming. The resulting emotional toll effectively communicates the mental space that protagonist James Sunderland finds himself in. And that’s Bloober’s, and by extension Team Silent’s, most impressive and disturbing achievement: the ability to inflict empathy through gameplay design.

Silent Hill 2’s miserable tone is maintained through a number of other gameplay tricks. As previously mentioned, the story revolves around James’ descent into horror, and this is depicted both metaphorically through visual design and literally through a frequent need to jump into black holes. Each jump requires you to press the action button multiple times, replicating his hesitation and reluctance to launch into the unknown.

As the atmosphere becomes more and more unbearable, nothing is built into the campaign to offer any levity or security. In the Resident Evil series, for example, you gradually amass an increasingly powerful arsenal, allowing the endgame to be a thrilling, explosive adventure through blood and guts. It also plays with its dialogue and monster design, often opting for goofy characterization that gives the series its beloved “cheesy horror” credentials. Last year’s Alan Wake 2, while clearly inspired by the work of Team Silent, features absurdist humor and a Lynchian direction to lean into the weird instead of the horror, allowing the laughs to cut through through the tension. But Silent Hill 2 has none of that. For the most part, your weapons are a broken pipe and a pistol, and even when you have access to something a little more hard-hitting, it’s nothing more than a simple shotgun or a rifle with a long reload time and limited ammo. Alongside a difficulty curve that sees familiar enemies become erratic, wall-crawling monsters, Silent Hill 2’s atmosphere constantly finds ways to suffocate you.

It’s not usual for a review to use terms like “suffocating”, “oppressive” and “miserable” as positive, but horror is not a usual genre. It is one of only two categories of entertainment built around uncontrollable audience reaction (the other being comedy). Horror is a machine for manipulating emotions, and the genre’s most effective stories can force us to experience feelings that we don’t typically encounter in our daily lives. Horror films spend their entire runtime exerting varying levels of pressure in order to achieve this manipulation and the most effective images burned into our minds that continually reappear when the lights go out.

Video games are a very different medium, however, and their experiential nature allows them to manipulate us in more intense ways. Rather than asking us to observe, they demand that we interact, usually for four, five, sometimes even 10 times longer than the average horror film. This can force us to experience a very different reality. Although parts of the gaming community frequently insist that games are solely for fun entertainment or escapism, this is often not the goal of many developers. Sometimes that goal is to communicate uncomfortable ideas, and the path to doing that involves exposing ourselves to a deeply unpleasant reality. Silent Hill 2 isn’t about having fun, rather it’s about exploring grief and guilt – aspects of the human experience that we traditionally avoid. Strangely, there’s an uncomfortable thrill to actively exploring these ideas via a video game.

The technical limitations of the 2001 original helped add some thorns to this painful experience; the semi-fixed camera made the environments restrictive and claustrophobic, and the awkward aiming installed a sense of despair into each encounter. The Bloober Team remake prunes out these thorns and replaces them with modern third-person controls that make the experience a bit friendlier to play. But those are the only significant concessions made, so while the fight sequences are perhaps a little less panicked than they once were, the nightmarish vision of Team Silent is preserved. This means that the remake is a modern reminder not only of a time when Konami was a master of survival horror, but also of the significant power of Silent Hill 2’s relentless misery.

Matt Purslow is IGN’s senior features editor.