The Many Ways Silent Hill 2 Remake Changes the Classic PS2 Horror Game

As scary as the game’s visuals are, it’s in the sound that all the horror magic happens. The score, by longtime series composer Akira Yamaoka, is unnerving and torturous in the most beautiful way, but when the music stops and the only sounds you hear are the moans and gargles of the demonic creatures lurking in the shadows, it’s almost unbearably tense. . And since so much of the combat is based on not knowing where your attacker is coming from, directional audio is absolutely crucial. Fortunately, the game offers an incredible sense of spatial awareness through its sound design at all times, making the experience completely immersive.

The sound design and visuals of the remake are technically far ahead of the original game, and I would argue artistically as well, although the brilliance of the original’s core designs are still the solid foundation upon which all modern technology is built. The Bloober team only implements current-gen techniques when they help reinforce the game’s sense of horror, resulting in an experience that looks spectacular but doesn’t compromise any of the original game’s artistic value.

Bloober Team’s artistic touch is on full display in the game’s completely reimagined cutscenes, which feature rewritten dialogue, performance capture, and a more nuanced approach to the sensitive themes addressed by the source material. The game’s narrative elements have all been reworked for the better, to the point where they frankly blow up scenes from the original game. Hell, these new cutscenes are so fantastic that they blow scenes from other modern games out of the water.

Firstly, there are the redesigned character models and animations – they look phenomenal. Most video game narratives featuring human characters struggle to be cinematic in a humanistic and intimate way because the character models are not emotive enough to convey the complex emotions the scenes require. Video game characters’ body language and facial expressions can often appear theatrical and unnatural to compensate for the lack of nuance in the models’ animation and articulation. But what we find in Silent Hill 2 remake are characters that look and move convincingly like real people, with little wrinkles in their eyebrows and twitches in their mouths that let us feel what’s going on inside a character’s head without them literally telling us.

Let’s go back to meeting Eddie in the meat locker. In the original game, after James (spoiler) kills Eddie, he falls next to him and shouts, “Eddie!” before muttering to himself, “I… I killed a… a human being… A human being…” Even by 2001 standards, this is B-movie level melodramatic dialogue. The original game is an all-time classic. times, but objectively, the dialogue and voice acting are bad. Like the original, James kills Eddie in the remake, but he doesn’t fall to his knees. He stands over Eddie’s body, slowly raises his hands, and looks at them in disbelief. Then we see him in close-up, looking both terrified and heartbroken, his eyes falling for a moment before looking up again. The scene conveys the same message as the original, only in a way that seems more sincere.

Every moment in the game’s story is more powerful and poetic in the remake, like when we discover what’s tormenting Angela, or when Laura gives James an envelope from Mary with his name on it. Most notably, the dark sexual undercurrents that drive the conversations between James and Maria are much more engaging this time around, thanks to the actors’ brilliant performances and reworked dialogue that, again, is more subtle and leaves room for interpretation. While the characters in the original game looked stilted and, you know, video game-like, the characters in the remake look and sound like real people. That makes all the difference in the world.