Review: Silent Hill 2 (2024)

Remaking Silent Hill 2 is a paradoxically enviable and unenviable endeavor for anyone. I imagine that most developers with their fingers in the horror genre would love to get all handsy with what has long been considered one of the pinnacles of the art form. On the other hand, it invites endless scrutiny from its legions of passionate fans, and you will never, ever please everyone.

In fact, attempting to improve on the original is suggesting that it wasn’t already perfect. It wasn’t, but the sentiment is somewhat understandable. Without getting to the most granular of details, it’s hard to tell what compromises the original team had to make and what did and didn’t live up to their visions. What was informed by the technological challenges of the time? No answer is going to be correct in every fan’s mind.

So, the direction that the Silent Hill 2 remake chose is adding a lot while also changing very little.

Silent Hill 2 (PC, PS5 [Reviewed])
Developer: Bloober Team
Publisher: Konami
Released: October 8, 2024
MSRP: $69.99
If you’re new to the Silent Hill series, I want to tell you that you don’t need to play the first game to get into this one. Not only does it have a different protagonist with different goals, the story has a completely different focus. It still involves a guy looking for someone, but that’s mainly because in order to get a character to stay in a clearly unsafe environment, they need a strong motivation, and love has made fools of many.

In this case, we have James Sunderland looking for his wife, Mary. He receives a letter from her, telling him to meet her in the titular town of Silent Hill. The problem is, as James tells it, she’s been dead for three years. However, even though he is unsure why, he travels to the town anyway to try and find her.

When he arrives, he finds it shrouded in fog and completely deserted. And not recently, either. It looks like the place has sat to rot for quite a while. Worse, he quickly discovers it’s full of monsters. Nonetheless, he’s set on finding Mary, and won’t let anything stand in his way. Then things just get progressively weirder from there. The big twist to Silent Hill 2 is one of the most spoiled in video games, but I’m not going to add to that resonance. Besides, if you want to know more about its depth and execution, it’s been covered repeatedly by people far more devoted than me.

If you’re nearsighted, your place is in Silent Hill, where it’s always foggy, and if it’s not foggy, it’s dark. 23 years of added horsepower have certainly made things look a lot more active and detailed. Much of the time, the Silent Hill 2 remake looks fantastic. All of the time, it heightens the atmosphere of the original. It’s not quite as foggy, but the billowing plumes of white that block your vision still capture the right feeling. From one side of the street, you might only be able to make out the faint outline of the roof on the other. It’s even better when it’s dark, where the small pinpoints of light struggling to illuminate in the distance give the town an even more pronounced feel of otherworldly desolation.

The downside to this is that it’s a bit of a technical mess. I played it on PS5 and favored quality over performance, but the hit to the framerate isn’t really my problem. My biggest issue was with temporal ghosting, which is a common problem with Unreal Engine 5 games. Often, I just found this distracting, but sometimes it would affect gameplay by making some creatures visible in the dark just because of the streaks they’d leave behind as they moved.

There’s one particular fight in a meat freezer (you know the one if you played the original) where the enemy would move in the gloom, making them hard to track. However, because of the ghosting, I could usually see exactly where they appeared and where they were hiding. I suppose in Silent Hill you can explain everything away as the work of whatever supernatural power is controlling things, but it looks gross and clearly isn’t an intentional stylistic attempt.

The original Silent Hill was exceptional in a lot of areas, including art, atmosphere, sound design, and especially narrative, but the combat was legendarily terrible. Thankfully, it wasn’t really at the forefront of the game. There was a decent amount of it, but also long swaths without an enemy. Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that combat has been significantly improved. The bad news is it’s now a major focus.

There’s a lot going on with the combat. There’s an auto-targeting system going on for melee, which means James will often swing at things around him, even if you’re not directly pointing at them. The downside is that he sometimes will interpret an intended swing at an upright enemy as a stomp to one laying supine, but it’s rare enough that it’s not a problem. Meanwhile, for firearms, you can aim like any other over-the-shoulder action game, but James is about as unsteady as you’d expect from someone sleep-deprived and unfamiliar with guns.

You can also dodge, which is key. It essentially sets James up with a short moment of invulnerability, where he’ll react to whatever is coming at him, even when it’s extremely improbable that he’d be able to get out of the way. Sometimes, this causes an attack that clearly hits him to miss, but it’s probably better than it is undependable. It feels pretty good, and that’s what’s important. I’d definitely take the new fighting system over the old.

But that, unfortunately, leads me to my biggest complaint about the game, and that’s the length. The original experience was about 7-9 hours, whereas I clocked in at 18 hours on the remake, and that includes a bunch of dicking around the town. Some will understandably consider the substantially added length a good thing, but I don’t think it’s earned.

The narrative hasn’t been much expanded, which is definitely for the best. Everything plays out exactly as it did in the original, with a few additions and minor tweaks. But everything between the narrative moments has been bloated out. You’ll spend more time wandering the apartments and hospital fighting the same small handful of enemies and searching rooms that sometimes only include a monster, a bottle of health, and nothing else of interest. It’s worth noting that the bulk of the added length is in the interior sections. If they had instead focused on extending the moments you’re wandering the town immersed in the mystery, it probably wouldn’t have felt like such an issue.

Length is rarely a positive thing in horror games. The longer you play in a game’s world, the more comfortable you become in it. You feel more capable. You’ve seen the monsters enough to know how to deal with what the game throws at you. Surprises lose their effectiveness, tension turns to discomfort, and it becomes hard to stay invested. Some complain that Alien: Isolation is too long (and I agree), but I at least feel that a lot of that mid-game malaise pays off when the last twist is revealed, whereas the added fluff in the Silent Hill 2 remake just feels like content for content’s sake.

Whether or not that’s a problem will depend on your tolerance. Largely, while I felt that it was a detraction, I don’t feel like it’s a massive issue that completely ruined the game for me, it’s just an unnecessary self-inflicted wound that gets in the way of what most people are here for: seeing a beloved classic benefit from modern hardware.

Largely, the remake of Silent Hill 2 was a success beyond my expectations, but I had my expectations securely in check. Truly, much of its success comes directly from what was already established by Team Silent in 2001, but retaining the atmosphere while upgrading the visuals is a feat in itself. I also found that the redone cutscenes, while largely being shot-for-shot reproductions, have a lot more nuance with the added facial animations and details.

Some restraint when it came to the length of the remake would have done wonders. But aside from the needless bloat and technical problems, there’s still a lot to like. Remaking Silent Hill 2 could have gone horribly wrong, and maybe this modernization won’t replace the original for some, but it’s at least a worthwhile new perspective.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}