Silent Hill 2 Remake PS5 Review – There were HATERS here. They are gone now. | Games | Entertainment

When Bloober Team was announced as the developer of Konami’s highly anticipated Silent Hill 2 remake, the fandom gave a collective groan loud enough to drown out the drooling howls of the titular town’s most horrific inhabitants.

The apprehension was understandable: despite a back catalog of credible horror titles, Bloober’s approach to the genre and the way it deals with complex issues like mental health has often come much closer to a “sledgehammer in the face” approach. than the celebrated and nuanced narrative of the original game. .

I shared these concerns; Silent Hill 2 is my favorite game of all time, my house is filled with merchandise, a fan-made wallpaper happily adorning my desktop as I type this review.

Even for someone who spent an unhealthy number of hours scouring Silent Hill’s blocked bathrooms and waterlogged basements, a botched reimagining would have been hard to stomach. Still, I clung to the glimmer of hope provided by Observer, Bloober’s oft-forgotten cyberpunk horror title; One of the last works to showcase the acting talent of the great Rutger Hauer, it’s an excellent game and expertly evokes the atmosphere of creeping dread that the best Silent Hill games are famous for.

Like James Sunderland wondering if he’ll survive yet another leap into a dark abyss, I needn’t have worried; this is about as perfect a landing as anyone could hope for.

Bloober has managed to restructure the original game’s moving and harrowing story – even enhancing it with superior voice performances and subtle additions of dialogue and pacing, as well as grotesquely beautiful and jaw-dropping environments – without losing sight of what it did. the game a revered classic: the tone relentlessly dark, the mood of otherworldly sadness, a narrative as drenched in sadness as the city streets are shrouded in fog.

They also reminded me of another key component of the best Silent Hill games: this game is absolutely disgusting. Without straying into B-movie gore or cheesy jump scares, Bloober has created some truly repulsive locations and encounters, with the aforementioned bile-clogged bathrooms accompanied by cockroach-infested hospital wards, goo-spewing villains, and nurses who look like they’ve lost some scalpels inside their own heads. It’s horrible, nauseating, and not even remotely played for laughs.

But it’s not just these sick design sensibilities that will make players hesitate before opening one of the game’s (many, many) doors; the creatures and accompanying sound design are absolutely terrifying. When they’re not staggering murderously towards you, these nurses occasionally freeze in place as their heads bob maniacally like something out of Jacob’s Ladder (a film inspiration amusingly referenced by the presence of ‘Jacob’s Lager’ on draft in one of the town’s bars). . The first clue to an enemy’s presence is usually an ominous crackle from James’s portable radio, made all the more viscerally chilling by emanating not from the TV’s speakers but from the DualSense controller gripped tightly in his clammy hands.

This leads to some delightful moments of terror when you know an enemy is nearby but have no idea where it will attack, or even which of the game’s wild animals is closing in for the kill. At other times, frightening rumbles and blood-curdling screams are thrown in just for laughs, the developers following the example of original sound designer Akira Yamaoka in this regard – Yamaoka returns here only to work on the soundtrack and its bass-to-bass reconstruction. on top of his own iconic song is as hauntingly melancholy and haunting as ever.

The radio isn’t the game’s only mechanism for managing scares; static blast is clearly not applied to the multi-legged mannequin monsters, adversaries who were barely a threat in the original game but are now elevated to scene-stealing prominence by their love of hiding in plain sight, perhaps crouching under a rusty bed frame or pressed against a wall as you tiptoe past. They don’t activate their radio before attacking you, which means their presence keeps you constantly on edge, even when your trusty wireless isn’t issuing a warning. The later twist on this enemy type is a great example of Bloober’s ingenuity in expanding the original’s limited bestiary without incorporating any glaringly new fandom-triggering additions.

Any discussion of Silent Hill 2’s rogues’ gallery is obviously incomplete without featuring one particular gentleman wearing a triangle. Fortunately, Bloober resisted the urge to mirror Pyramid Head’s muscular depiction in the films, instead returning to the leaner, meaner, and weirder incarnation from the original game. He hasn’t been this scary since he first looked at me from behind bars at the end of a long hallway in 2001.

In short, the Bloober team really nailed it here. The divisive studio has created a remake that is both respectful of the original game and its difficult themes, without alienating a new generation that has been denied a good Silent Hill game for an entire decade.

The Polish developer’s achievement defied the sinister hordes that at one point seemed to have been lining up to dismiss this title from the moment it was announced; thankfully, the only people still spewing vitriol are the city’s horrors themselves.

VERDICT: 5/5

This game was reviewed by Jon Richter, dark fiction writer, video game developer, and co-host of the Dark Natter and Hosts In The Shell podcasts. Follow him on Twitter @RichterWrites, Instagram @jonrichterwrites or visit his website at www.jon-richter.com.