Silent Hill 2 is Silent Hill 2
Rhianne Ward
You know, as much as I hate to hand it to Bloober Team, Konami, or the entire video game remake industrial complex, I cannot deny, Silent Hill 2 Remake is really fucking good. Like, I saw all the positive reviews and coverage, which was so overwhelming that I was incentivised to play a game I had less than zero interest in, and even then I went into it anticipating a flop. There’s no way the minds behind Blair Witch and Layers of Fear, two games I played and kinda hated for their portrayal of mental illness, could ever do a retelling of a masterpiece in redemption and empathy like Silent Hill 2 right. Right?
As it turns out, wrong! The Silent Hill 2 Remake is a pretty incredible achievement in atmosphere and tension, through a culmination of exceptional sound design and thoughtful visuals which toe a careful line between high fidelity graphics and readable environment design. The realistic approach to characters adds even more nuance to a game already overflowing with it. So much is communicated in a wordless look, a shaky pair of hands, a blank stare…all of these things were basically unachievable for the original 2001 release due to technical limitations, but it ultimately does add to the overall narrative experience in meaningful ways. Of course, none of that would matter if the creators didn’t have a strong grasp of the original story’s vision, but thankfully there’s plenty here in the attention of details which suggests that Bloober Team understood Silent Hill 2 intimately. It’s always nice to be pleasantly surprised; Silent Hill 2 is a treat from beginning to end.
However, as with almost all games, it isn’t without issues, and it is those, or rather the ways in which those issues compound upon one another, which I want to focus on here. They’re interesting because they are problems that I tend to find in most AAA games these days, because their origins can be quite easily traced. For one, the game has an overhauled combat system, which in and of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To be honest, it’s actually really fun! There’s a beautiful tension to the action, requiring an intricate weaving of well timed dodges and carefully planted melee attacks, all the while being careful not to waste too many bullets by targeting particular body parts and praying the shots land. You never quite feel safe or secure during any of these high-stakes moments, which is exactly how you ought to be feeling in a survival horror game. When all those systems come together, it’s an absolute thrill to come out the other side of encounters by the skin of your teeth.
So what’s the issue? Well, it’s less a problem with the implementation and more so a question of its existence in this game specifically at all. I’m not the first person to make this point, but James Sunderland isn’t some soldier or cop. He’s truly and completely just some fuckass guy in way over his head. It begs the question, then, why a man like that is capable of attack cancels and conjuring i-frames capable of slipping through giant sword swings. For a game about an office worker looking for answers in a mysterious town, the whole thing feels shockingly video-gamey. My question, I suppose, is this: should the combat of Silent Hill 2 be fun? It’s certainly not fun for James, and I feel like we’re supposed to be experiencing this story vicariously through him. Perhaps it’s possible that he finds a bizarre catharsis through all of this violence; a release from the endless emotional torment of a wife lost, now possibly found.
However, that then led me to asking an even larger question of the original game: should Silent Hill 2 even have combat? In that game, it definitely isn’t the focus, and if anything it feels like an afterthought in the wake of the far more compelling cutscenes and plot twists. That isn’t me saying the game would be better off as a movie or something; far from it, I think Silent Hill 2 benefits greatly in the ways it marries its mechanics with the story to dictate the ending you get. Examining certain items too closely, the way you treat the people around you, the time you spend truly engaging with the game’s most uncomfortable truths… it’s all given narrative significance in ways impossible for a film to achieve. It being a video game lends the story a personal angle that invites the player themself to look inward and understand James and the rest of the cast from their own perspective. All of this is perfectly achievable without the implementation of combat, as evidenced by the many games which have done so since.
But then, the combat of Silent Hill 2 does serve a utility in the ways it regularly made me feel disempowered. Victory against foes in that game never felt like a particularly big challenge, but their existence as an interruption between stretches of quiet reflection in dark, moody hallways had me feeling like I needed to get through them in order to reach the next story beat. As such, the original game feels surprisingly vibey and contemplative, and what horror exists is usually harmless, existing only in the mind, which I find to be much more compelling. By comparison, SH2 Remake is constantly stressful, bringing the combat into much sharper focus, to the point where the emotional experience tends to supersede the story’s best moments. In a way, I guess that makes it a more consistent experience, but OG SH2 is made iconic by its fluctuation between emotional highs and lows. Remake is more engaging in its minute-to-minute beats, but OG lingers in the mind like a memorable dream.
It doesn’t help that the pacing in Remake is kind of frustrating in many ways. The game is capital-B Big, with many new areas added and existing sequences expanded with more complex puzzles and increased encounters. There’s even a few brand new story scenes which tie into the overall narrative in really compelling ways. There’s a lot to like about what’s been introduced here, but at the same time, this approach does have the habit of killing momentum at certain points. This is quite noticeable in the otherworld sequences, which see you navigating maze-like, multi-layered areas for hours at a time, but for the most part the game is still enjoyable so I didn’t mind it so much.
Where it began to actively annoy me was right near the end during the Hotel stage. It comes right after an exhausting trek through an underground prison housing some of the most stress-inducing enemies in the entire game, followed by a long time spent rowing aimlessly across a lake, praying you’ll somehow find your way through all the fog. Walking through the hotel entrance, I was ready to come face to face with the truth behind Mary and why she called James back to their “special place”, only to pick up a map of the area, notice how fucking huge it was, and feel the dread deep into my soul. Admittedly, it’s still a very well designed area that exemplifies some of the game’s best qualities, but for the sake of the story, I could’ve done without it.
The game overall feels bloated in many ways. What’s added isn’t even bad – on the contrary, it’s all quite brilliant – but it feels like a series of roadblocks on the way to what we’re all really here for. Maybe that’s the point – to imbue the same frustration James likely feels in the player by forcing them to endure countless tiring trials – though I can’t imagine the intended feeling from that experience was supposed to be tedium, which is what ultimately ended up happening.
So why do this? The original game caps out at around 10 hours if I’m being generous, and it’s still deeply beloved by fans and critics alike. The remake, by comparison, hit credits after about 15 hours. There was no need to extend the runtime of a game that already works as it is. Except, the gaming world we live in is not the same as that of 2001. No, we exist in an era of excess, of lengthy development cycles and exorbitant price tags. Spending £60 on a new game creates the expectation of “getting your money’s worth”, rather than letting the game’s value as a work of art speak for itself, and in a flooded market where attention is already hard to hold on a good day, it’s better safe than sorry to make a game feel as big as its entry fee. That would explain the greater focus on combat; the visceral thrills of a fight mean the mind has little space to wander.
I guess that’s my takeaway from playing Silent Hill 2 Remake. In many ways, it’s phenomenal; a resounding success in adapting a beautiful, timeless story for modern audiences, with a level of care most wholly original games sometimes lack. In other ways, it’s a deeply cynical creation, whose handful of mechanical changes can be easily understood less as an honest crack at something new, but rather as a response to market pressures, and an understanding that, in all likelihood, a game like Silent Hill 2 releasing today as it is would likely fade into obscurity.
But then, in saying that, the original Silent Hill 2 wasn’t exactly free of these concessions either. Like I said, the combat feels like an arbitrary inclusion, because horror games of the time were simply expected to provide that kind of challenge. In that sense, AAA games, for all their large budgets and tireless marketing campaigns, are just as tied to constraints as any other game. It’s just that the elements they must cave to are of a more sociological kind, rather than lack of ability or resources.
Silent Hill 2 is a game about James Sunderland, a man with nothing to lose, beckoned by his long-dead wife to a mysterious town occupied by strange monsters and even stranger people, where terrible secrets oft ignored are dragged out into the light. Silent Hill 2, the game, is a story of a team of passionate creatives, fighting against incredible odds and tremendous expectations to realise something truly special, in spite of the many concessions it makes to placate a market and executives which would otherwise reject it.
Silent Hill 2 Remake is incredible. It is also not Silent Hill 2. The emotional experience of playing it is simply not the same. However, in many ways, through unintentional means, it is exactly like Silent Hill 2.