After years of disappointments and half-measures, Silent Hill fans can finally take a breath. In what is one of the great surprises of the year, the Bloober Team remake has turned out to not only not be bad but to be very good. And it’s a great opportunity to catch up with a legendary title that many players (and new generations) had not had the chance to try until now.
The original Silent Hill 2, however, should still be a game on everyone’s mental wishlist. Released in 2001, two years after the first one was launched on PS1 (another unexpected success at the time developed by a group of novices at Konami), Silent Hill 2 is not only one of the best survival horror games ever made, it is a piece of video game history that is worth preserving in its original form.
A unique nightmare that set the bar
From the underappreciated tank controls (which could be removed in this sequel) to the fixed camera angles, through those robotic and unsettling CGI cinematics or the usual messing around with menus, the game presented a fine balance between technological limitations, design quirks of the time, and creative decisions that came together to create a meticulously measured experience.
Unlike the original game, where the story arrived late in development for a team too busy figuring out how exactly to play their game and how they would have to build it, the story was one of the first priorities for the sequel. A title that took inspiration from novels like Crime and Punishment and that was sold from the beginning as an even more cinematic experience than the original. The first contact with the game at E3 2001 was, in fact, with a trailer that emphasized the narrative.
The seventh art was always essential in the creation of the game. Several of the creatives at Team Silent were die-hard cinephiles, and it is known that their devotion to films like Jacob’s Ladder or the works of David Lynch helped conceive this universe. That love, in fact, was what built one of its most unique elements: those quirky performances by a team of actors who had to make an effort to sound somewhat inhuman, somewhat alien, and who along with the characteristic graphic style came together to achieve that famous dreamlike touch that has made the saga so unsettling and inimitable.
The changes at the gameplay level were more subtle, but it still featured welcomed advances such as better collision detection in combat and more complex enemy AI. It was the technological improvements that ended up directly impacting gameplay. The new sound design allowed players to detect the position of enemies more accurately, and the game has one of the most memorable uses of sound to terrify the player. The protagonist fog, moreover, could now perform many more tricks on PS2. A volumetric model that allowed for a more organic integration into the scenario.
The result is a terrifying game that manages to give you chills even by today’s genre standards. Its atmosphere and storytelling are timeless. Many of its mechanics feel modern, and the level design (which facilitates an almost perfect structure when alternating between exploration, combat, and puzzles) helped set a standard in a formula that has remained unchanged through countless spiritual successors over the years.
The shorter duration is also an important reason to play it. While the remake takes the original and expands it, doubling its duration, the PS2 version remains a compact experience of about 8 hours that you feel is neither lacking nor excessive. More linear and intense sequences are organically followed by more reflective ones. The city, full of blocked streets and closed doors, is a desolate place that discouraged you from lingering even a minute longer than necessary, and subtly guided you to follow its tragic story.
With its numerous quality of life improvements, Bloober’s remake is an experience, sometimes enhanced and sometimes simply different, that adds new layers to an already well-rounded game. For veterans and newcomers, it is an almost essential version of the game, but for genre fans, it is perhaps even more fascinating to discover that many of the great virtues of the title were already there more than twenty years ago.
The original is quite difficult to get, though
If you are convinced by the paragraphs above, now comes the negative part. Playing Silent Hill 2 currently is not an easy task and involves dusting off old consoles. PS2 copies (whether of the original game or the Director’s Cut) are hard to find and the PC version is equally elusive and notoriously bad, inspiring a fan-made remaster that was only completed very recently.
The easiest yet less appealing alternative is the Silent Hill Collection HD, a remaster hated by fans and an interesting piece of history in itself. The inexperienced team at Hijinx Studios did what they could to rebuild a masterpiece through the unfinished original code, as Konami had lost the final version. This resulted not only in a release full of technical issues that the original did not have, but also in artistic changes such as new voices (which could be changed) and environmental details that irritated players for years like an infamous sign written in Comic Sans.
Still, and considering very specific changes that only matter to the most hardcore fans, the Silent Hill 2 in this collection is creatively and technically close enough to the original to be more than adequate for first-timers. Of course, it also involves getting a seventh-generation console video game and knowing that, in a way, you are not fully experiencing the original game.
With this, the release of the remake has reopened the debate on preservation in video games. There is much to celebrate in Bloober’s work, whose result has the potential to become one of the favorite games of many just like the original was in its day. But in the process of updating, there is also some homogenization, of following current industry trends at the expense of overwriting old ones. And those whose many virtues should still be experienced today. It’s a shame to think that these technologically powerful yet tasteful remakes are also a way in which the industry is erasing its own history.
With the arrival of Silent Hill 4: The Room on GOG in 2020, fans have been wishing for the rest of the saga to be available legally and accessible on modern platforms, and that doing so does not necessarily involve completely rebuilding them. Perhaps and hopefully, this latest remake is just the beginning of another beautiful chapter for the series, one in which Konami is willing to embark on such initiatives.
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