Silent Hill 2’s remake proves the doubters wrong

Regardless of how well the Silent Hill 2 remake does, you’ve got to hand it to Bloober Team for turning around a situation that killed so many other games.

Following the initial positive response to its announcement and its first trailer, subsequent gameplay footage was met with so much negativity that Bloober Team’s president actually had to come out and say it wasn’t responsible for the game’s marketing, and that it didn’t represent the game.

We’ve seen this story play out numerous times before, where the internet decides a game’s fate before it’s even released, the thumbs down icon on a YouTube trailer acting as the modern day equivalent of the same gesture that condemned Roman gladiators to death.

And yet, Silent Hill 2 hasn’t gone the way of Metroid Prime: Federation Force, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Concord, all of which were essentially destined to fail following online consensus. Instead, Bloober Team has managed to turn things around, via a combination of positive press preview coverage and a couple of genuinely brilliant trailers.

If the game ends up performing worse than Konami expected, then, it won’t be because of any ill-will among the gaming community. Where once there was concern about Silent Hill 2 – the combat, the character designs, the pedigree of the studio behind it – there’s now excitement. And for the most part, we can happily confirm that excitement is justified.

If you’ll forgive our immediate reference to Silent Hill’s long-time rival, this new take on Silent Hill 2 is more like the Resident Evil 4 remake than the Resident Evil 3 remake. Whereas the modern Resi 3 took the game in a wildly different direction to the original, the Resi 4 remake stuck a lot closer to its source material, and it’s this road that Silent Hill 2 also goes down.

While the puzzles are different, and there are extra scenes that aren’t found in the original – it’s not like you could bring up an old 2001 walkthrough from GameFAQs and use it here because it’s far from a complete facsimile – for the most part, the Silent Hill 2 remake follows the same story beats as the PS2 version, meaning long-time fans will get a kick out of seeing their favourite scenes being reimagined.

Many of the key moments from the original are recreated here, sometimes almost exactly. That anguished scream you hear coming from room 208 is just how you remembered it before, and Pyramid Head is still waiting for you, standing calmly behind the bars for that first uncomfortable sighting. So much is different, but so much is reassuringly familiar too (well, as reassuring as something so macabre can be).

It should go without saying – and yet here we are saying it – that Bloober Team has done an extraordinary job in making Silent Hill 2 look more beautifully disgusting than ever.

“Bloober Team has done an extraordinary job in making Silent Hill 2 look more beautifully disgusting than ever.”

It’s that classic situation where the team has managed to make a game that simultaneously looks exactly how you remembered the original in your head but is, in reality, significantly more detailed, to the extent that when you put them side-by-side, those three console generations of difference, really do shine starkly through in every possible way.

It sounds even better, especially if you can gather the courage to play it with headphones on. Akira Yamaoka’s reworked soundtrack is a thing of beauty, while the otherworldly noises that create a constant humming, squirming, whispering and screaming tension make it impossible to sit comfortably while playing (in the best possible way).

The trademark Silent Hill radio noise is back too, and should you decide that playing with headphones isn’t quite for you, you’ll get the radio noise through your DualSense too, adding to the immersion. It hits that perfect balance of building dread – as before, when the static gets louder it means an enemy is nearby – while also creating perfect jump moments when it deliberately stays silent for certain baddies.

When said creatures arrive, combat is a little better than it was before. Melee weapons are given more oomph, making it more satisfying to take down weaker enemies with your wooden plank (or later your steel bar), while the addition of a dodge move gives you the extra confidence to stay close and save your ammo for more dangerous beasties.

It’s still not entirely smooth – the nature of survival horror games means there always needs to be some sort of clunkiness in there, so you can’t swiftly dive your way out of any tricky situations – so encounters where you’re facing even three of the more basic enemies can get a little hairy if you don’t approach it carefully, but by and large the combat still feels more satisfying than in the PS2 version.

If it turns out you’re just rotten at fighting the enemies, the remake has a similar double-difficulty setting to the original, with the ability to set separate difficulty levels for the combat and the puzzles. Turning down the former lessens enemy respawns and lets you take them down with fewer hits, while the latter affects how abstract and complex the game’s numerous item-based puzzles are, meaning you can either have them practically spelled out for you, or make them brain-itchingly tricky.

While the remake is generally a success, there may be some players who bounce off certain elements of it, some of which are partly out of Bloober Team’s control. The source material has some repetitive elements, and these are carried over here too, but much of that is down to the game’s setting.

Silent Hill’s trademark fog is back – now for atmospheric reasons rather than technical ones – but it does make exploring the streets quite a samey affair when you can only see a few feet in front of you and can’t see the buildings either side of you when you’re standing in the middle of the road.

What’s more, large chunks of the game are set in certain buildings – apartment blocks, a hospital, a hotel – which by their very nature are multi-floor environments with lots of long corridors leading to rooms which mostly look the same by design.

“Large chunks of the game are set in certain buildings – apartment blocks, a hospital, a hotel – which by their very nature are multi-floor environments with lots of long corridors leading to rooms which mostly look the same by design.”

At times throughout your 16-20 hour playthrough there will be lengthy sequences where you’ll constantly be bringing up the map because the combination of constantly dark areas and a lack of diverse room designs means you can’t really use your surroundings to determine where you are.

When you’ve seen one apartment with a little square kitchen, a living room and separate bathroom and bedroom areas, you’ve seen them all, and it would be nearly impossible to remember what distinguishes each one, were it not for the way the game makes notes on your map to remind you which ones have key items or puzzles in them.

None of this will be a new problem for fans of the original Silent Hill 2, and in a sense that should be the perfect reassurance that Bloober Team has ensured its remake is an authentic tribute to the 2001 version, grotesque humanoid warts and all.

It may have had its doubters, but the Silent Hill 2 remake proves most of them wrong with a brilliantly atmospheric take that skilfully walks the line between the two worlds of new and nostalgia.

The studio’s love for the series was already clear in past games like The Medium (which feels like it could have passed as a Silent Hill spin-off), and with this offering, it’s made a perfect case for being given the keys to take it for another drive, should it want to.

Whether that would be a remake again or a brand new title, who can say – all we know is that we’ll be there, wooden plank in hand, ready to once again “see that town, Silent Hill”.