When it was announced that Bloober Team would be the developer behind Silent Hill 2, a great many were convinced they couldn’t do it. For a solid year plus, I watched as Silent Hill subreddit members took turns gleefully eviscerating every screenshot, every trailer, and every detail. Over time, more and more fans chimed in with calls to lessen the negativity, which eventually happened as we got more looks at the game, but it never truly went away until reviews rolled in. Bloober Team has indeed done a terrific job with this remake of Silent Hill 2, but not everything it does necessarily fits or improves upon the original.
Fans need no introduction to this story. James Sunderland receives a letter from his deceased wife, Mary, who implores him to come to the titular town and find her in their “special place.” He drives there and heads into town, only to find the place covered in fog and crawling with strange monsters. He and the audience both learn that not everything is how it seems. It’s difficult to argue that the remake doesn’t blow the original out of the water in terms of story presentation.
The original game’s cast was filled with amateur Westerners living in Japan, so the acting was far from great (not that their performances weren’t plenty charming, mind you.) This Silent Hill 2 cast is very much made up of professional actors. The performances are mostly subtle but powerful, adding a lot to the game’s characters. Seeing the story play out this way is an absolute treat as a fan. Most of the familiar beats are here, from finding Eddie puking in the apartments to visiting Heaven’s Night with Maria. It’s all impeccably done.
At its core, this is still very much Silent Hill 2. You walk city streets and through dark environments confronted with locked doors nearly every step of the way. It’s funny to see jokes pop up on social media about just how often players need to have their noses buried in their maps, but I still find that preferable to having icons and yellow paint everywhere. Speaking of which, strips of cloth are placed on areas you can interact with, so it’s not like no modern accessibility touches exist. But, for the most part, this game is extremely faithful to the original.
Most of the events play out similarly too, but things are stretched out. This game is probably double (or more) the size of the original, so certain parts just take longer. It took me nearly half the original game’s playtime just to get out of the apartments, for instance. Having more Silent Hill 2 is hardly a negative, but there’s definitely an argument to be made in favour of the original’s pacing. Having more to do doesn’t necessarily make a game better of course, and while I did occasionally find some bloating, it still all works well.
One change that I absolutely can’t say is for the better has to do with combat. Fighting in the original trilogy was on the simple side. Here, Silent Hill 2 is practically an action game. Enemies are far more fierce than before, with more complicated movesets. While you could really just stunlock most opponents to death in the past, now you have to be extremely careful, lest you take damage. You’ll find that you typically can’t get more than a couple of hits in before a foe is ready to retaliate. This lends a sort of stop/start rhythm to the combat.
This time, though, James can dodge. The dodge grants invulnerability frames and cancels out your strikes. This is necessary, as you’ll often need to dodge out of the way immediately once enemies counterattack. Alongside the game’s behind-the-shoulder camera that replaces the fixed camera from before, I was often reminded of playing the recent God of War games. The combat’s good, but I don’t really want to fight like this in a Silent Hill game. The series tried this before with Homecoming – a game with too much combat. As it stands, I do think the game has you spend far too much time fighting.
Enemies roam the streets in the town, but they’re easy enough to avoid. However, ones in tighter spaces often can’t be left alone, as they’re so aggressive that repeatedly moving between rooms and hallways means that you’ll possibly end up taking substantially more damage than you would otherwise, so beating them down often feels necessary. There are times where you’ll easily fight half a dozen enemies in the span of a couple of minutes. Not only did all this fighting start to detract from the overall experience for me, but it eventually makes the enemies much less scary too. Enemy variety is also a problem at times, as you’ll be fighting the same monsters over and over again.
It’s hard to be scared of a monstrosity when you’ve beaten 50 of them to death and memorised every facet of their movesets while staring them in the face. Due to the increased reliance on combat, there are just so many healing items and tons of ammo. You can even shoot some enemies in the leg and then follow up with a melee attack like you’re playing Resident Evil 4. I thought this was supposed to be psychological horror, not Condemned 3: James Beats All Sorts of Monsters to Death. The good news is that when the game isn’t treating you like a prize fighter, this is still a Silent Hill game through and through.
It’s necessary to carefully search the environments for items needed to either open the way forward or solve puzzles. Puzzle difficulty makes a return, but it can only be selected at the start of the game, unlike the difficulty settings. Even on standard difficulty, the puzzles can be challenging, plus there are new puzzles here that I enjoyed solving. Sometimes you’ll be able to use items to open the way to hidden caches of supplies, which I thought was a good choice. Another new addition is the ability to squeeze and crawl through openings, once again reminding me of God of War.
Silent Hill 2 isn’t an incredibly long game and will probably take most players around 14-18 hours or so. For me, I constantly reload encounters to get through with taking as little damage as possible, so that doesn’t really apply, but still. Once you beat the game and receive one of a bunch of different endings, you can start a new game plus, further enhancing replay value. This aspect is kind of weird to me since part of the fun of the endings in the original was that it wasn’t too big of an ask to see them all since the game wasn’t all that long. The remake makes this iffier, although speedrunners will absolutely be able to do the game in very little time by only sticking to mandatory aspects.
Performance on PC could be loads better. On a 3090 and 5700x, I hovered around 50 fps on ultra settings. Even with an upscaler on, I still found some areas where the framerate drops way too much, even if I’m inside. It’s also not uncommon for the game to stutter. While the game does mostly look good, it really doesn’t look so good that these issues are justified. I will say that the game looks very much like it was made in the Unreal engine, for better or for worse.
Silent Hill 2 is undoubtedly a great remake, even if I’m sometimes annoyed by all the fighting, plus how uncharacteristic of the series some of it is. Still, Bloober Team has done quite the job remaking this beloved entry. I also need to point out that, while the original never really scared me all that much, this one is one of the scariest games I’ve seen in recent memory. Standing staring into a dark hallway, listening to the uncomfortable radio sounds has rarely been more unsettling. Anyone who likes horror games will greatly enjoy what’s on display here, unless playing Punch-Out with hundreds of monsters is a dealbreaker.
Silent Hill 2: Terrifying and cerebral in equal measure, Silent Hill 2 is a great remake that should have gone a little lighter on the combat. – Andrew Farrell
Take a look at our previous review:
Ys X: Nordics PC review — Shiver my timbers, shiver my sails |
