When Konami first announced that it was remaking the horror classic Silent Hill 2, I was an immediate skeptic.
The original game is one of those wholly unique creative visions that just felt impossible to replicate. How could a studio intentionally capture the stilted voice acting or jerky animations of the original, aesthetic decisions that gave that game an off-kilter unease that made it so special? I especially had reservations about The Medium developer Bloober Team taking up that task, as it’s a studio whose games have occasionally felt like they were trying a bit too hard to recreate an atmosphere born from PS2-era tech limitations.
After playing the first three hours of Bloober’s take on Silent Hill 2, my fears have melted away. It’s immediately clear that the studio understood the difficult assignment ahead of it. The remake keeps a firm handle on the visceral eeriness of one of the horror genre’s greatest games, all while expanding it in ways that are careful not to trounce on its signature mystique. While it’s sure to be divisive no matter what, the naysayers may be in for one heck of a surprise this October.
Return to Silent Hill
My lengthy demo covers a lot of ground, from the very opening scene through some puzzling in the unnerving Blue Creek Apartments complex. The similarities and differences are immediately clear from the first few minutes of that stretch. Its Unreal Engine 5 visual upgrade makes a splash right away as I get more nuance from James Sunderland’s tortured little face. It’s almost uncanny. When I make my way to the town cemetery and meet Angela, an iconic sequence from the original, it’s almost otherworldly. These hyper-detailed characters stand out in front of the cloud-like fog that billows behind them, like they’re floating in another universe.
I’m not sure what to make of it at first, but I’m slowly sold on it the deeper I get into the story. What makes those moments work is the remake’s new voice cast. Bloober Team worked with an experienced team of professional actors here, which is a notable difference from the hauntingly wooden performances of the original game. I worried that this approach could drive the script into overacted melodrama that’s lacking its weird edge, but that’s not the case. The cast is just intentionally stilted enough to make everything feel off-center. In an interview with Digital Trends, lead producer Maciej Głomb explained how Bloober approached the tricky task of recreating the original’s eerily unusual performances.
“We understood that the [off-kilter] feeling was a big part of the original, but at the same time, we wanted to flesh out the emotions of the characters much more,” Głomb tells Digital Trends. “Using professional actors allowed us to go much deeper into the psychology of those characters and create those arcs of their specific details of their emotions changing throughout the game. Recreating that feeling with the new actors wouldn’t be impossible, but it would be very hard to do it in a good way and not feel weird. You’ll never get the same feeling unless you use the same voice-overs, which wasn’t possible with the flow of the game.”
How do you create horror without having as much control over what players see?
I can especially feel that philosophy at play when I meet Eddie. The baseball cap-wearing character is perhaps the most unsettling cast member in the original game due in no small part to an alien voice performance. The version of Eddie I met here — cowering in a dilapidated apartment — leaves an impression too. He’s more manic, laughing and crying through vomiting fits. Though it’s a more controlled performance from a professional actor, there’s still something off about it that makes me feel like I’m on another planet. Creative director Mateusz Lenart explains that moments like this mark the biggest difference with the remake’s performances, which take physicality into play.
“Having actors with a lot of experience helped us a lot with the actual shooting process,” Lenart tells Digital Trends. “They often had their own ideas of how to make a scene more interesting. Maybe with some very subtle show-don’t-tell techniques, actually selling a specific feeling or emotion without telling it to players’ faces. As long as the notes from them actually made sense in terms of the story, we were more than open to explore them. That’s the biggest change.”
A new angle
That interplay between old and new ideas becomes more apparent once I get deeper into the remake’s gameplay. My three-hour session showcased expanded exploration, more involved puzzles, and a completely reworked combat system. That’s where it’s clear that Bloober Team is putting its own mark on the remake – and in impressive fashion. Głomb notes that this is the biggest jump in scope yet between the studio’s projects and that shows. Its systems feel much more involved than the comparatively stripped-down The Medium. Lenart adds that this design approach comes from the way the studio split the game into two.
“We made a very clear distinction from the very beginning to divide it into the story part and the gameplay part,” Lenart says. “For the story part, we always felt like what was there in the original we didn’t need to change. We might tweak a few things here or there to flesh out the story even more, but we wanted to keep the core as it was. But gameplay was a completely different story. We needed to overhaul all the systems because of the transition to a third-person camera, which impacts all the level design and monster AI … How do you create horror without having as much control over what players see, because we didn’t have access to the fixed camera?”
I can feel that challenge as I play. Sometimes, the lack of fixed angles takes a bit of mystique away from the original. James’ introductory walk into town is notably less tense than the original with a camera trailing behind him instead of fixed angles obscuring what’s hiding in the fog. On the flip side, that dynamic pushed Bloober Team into making some sharp creative decisions that make up for any lost horror.
That’s on full display in the Wood Side Apartments, where I meet the remake’s fiendish enemies. Mannequins, for instance, love to flank players like they’re auditioning to be in a Dark Souls game. They often pop out of corners in my blindside and latch onto me with their gnarly limbs. To push the paranoia more, a few apartment rooms leave some inanimate mannequins standing around, causing me to let a bullet loose at motionless statues. It’s dastardly level design.
My personal favorite enemy behavior is that some foes will skitter away when I shine my flashlight on them. In one room, I see an enemy book it to the right as soon as my light hits it in the doorframe. I know that it’s somewhere in that apartment, but I have no sense of how that space is arranged once I chase after it. I may have full control of the camera, but Bloober’s more reactive world means that they’re still the ones with the power. My jumpy reactions throughout the demo proved that.
Shattered memories
When it comes to expanding the gameplay, Bloober finds varying degrees of success. The town is roughly the same, but there are a few more storefronts that I can pop into to scavenge for supplies. That’s important because the remake goes all-in on item scarcity with limited ammo and health pickups that have me on edge until the end. Bloober doesn’t go overboard either; this isn’t a needless open-world overhaul. Instead, it’s measured in its design, adding a few spaces and rooms that feel thoughtfully handcrafted to give the town more depth.
Also successful is the remake’s much bigger emphasis on puzzles. When I get to Neely’s Bar, I discover a jukebox that’s missing both a record and a number two button on its keypad. Through exploring, I find two halves of a record and some vinyl glue around town. After putting them together using a Resident Evil-like combine feature, I need to pull the right disc tray out with some tactile manipulation of the machine’s internal parts. Once it’s in, I figure out which buttons to hit to play the record, and I get a key for my troubles.
Another involved puzzle has me collecting medallions with iconography on each side and slotting them into a machine in an order based on a series of poems that act as hints. Later, I have to crack a safe code through a similar riddle, one that has me shining my flashlight in a graffiti-covered room to illuminate doodles and the corresponding numbers attached to them. Each one is more involved than any puzzles in the original game, giving the project a Bloober signature that neatly fits right in like a “bird key” to its “bird room lock.”
What’ll be a bit more polarizing, I imagine, is the remake’s greater emphasis on combat. The apartment complexes are especially infested with enemies that are hard to simply skirt around as one can in the original game. Instead, players have to either whack them with a wooden plank or fire at them with their handgun from an over-the-shoulder perspective not unlike Capcom’s Resident Evil remakes. James even has some defensive capabilities, as he can dodge in any direction to avoid attacks.
It’s not terribly inventive, but it’s all functional. Bullets are precious resources, and it’s easy to waste them as enemies unnaturally and unpredictably contort around. In several encounters, I need to make split-second decisions on whether or not I’m going to waste my ammo or try knocking an enemy down before it can swipe me, forcing me to dip into my small stash of Health Drinks. The trade-off is just that there are a lot more enemies walking around in the remake. That cuts into the unnerving isolation of the original and makes monsters feel a little expected after a while (radio static always telegraphs their appearance, so they’re never a surprise anyways). In the early hours, the system feels just a bit too shallow to justify so many starts and stops to deal with the creeps.
That’s one of only a few concerns I have here — and that’s much less than I had going into my preview. I’m still not sure how well Bloober will deal with such a sensitive story about mental trauma, something it notoriously mishandled in The Medium. The iconic introduction of Pyramid Head seems to imply that Bloober has perhaps toned down the original game’s more grotesque moments to account for that. A scene that’s been long read as a sexual assault now plays out in a vaguer manner that reads a bit more like the hulking monster chopping up a body that’s just off-screen. How changes like that will impact the overall tone and story, both for better or worse, is yet to be seen (talk to me again when I get to the original’s bed monster).
There’s always the chance that the directional shifts could slowly move the remake off the rails by the end, but I’m much more optimistic now than I was before playing it. Bloober hasn’t been shy about how much its games are influenced by Silent Hill 2, and that admiration for the source material shines through so far. It’s still unsettlingly weird in the right ways, and its changes largely feel like thoughtful ways to retain the original’s psychological horror while shifting to more modern gameplay.
The best thing I can say about it is that even with its glitzy visuals and high-end voice acting, the remake still feels unlike any big-budget game I’ve played since Silent Hill’s heyday. That’s both a testament to the original game’s foundation and a credit to Bloober Team for knowing how to stay true to that vision while threading in one of its own. If the full game can keep that momentum up, the keys to the series may finally be in safe hands.
Silent Hill 2 launches on October 8 for PS5 and PC.
