Brendan Caldwell
No game protagonist is more willing to stick his hand down a toilet than James Sunderland. Why is he doing this? You would have to ask him or the psychiatrist he badly requires. And it’s unlikely he’d explain himself. This isn’t the type of story in which the protagonist has difficulty accepting the existence of horrors, nor struggles with the surreality of what he needs to do to get through a locked door. In the opening minutes, James finds a well with a glowing red square floating inside, stares into it (it saves your game), then makes a calm remark about the odd sensation he feels, and moves on. The human corpses that pepper the town of Silent Hill are noticeably that of James himself, his head bludgeoned and bloodied beyond recognition but his jacket and boots unmistakable. He makes no remark on this. It’s probably nothing.
When I say it like that, it’s funny. But it all compliments Silent Hill 2‘s ghostly and Lynchian psychological horror. Characters barely understand that they exist, never mind that they may be prisoners of a shame-triggered nightmare or manifestations of some unholy trauma. Your protagonist’s muted response to the atrocious lake town fits with what we later come to learn about Jim “Dirty Hands” Sunderland. As a player, you not only need to embrace James’ unquestioning acceptance of bizarre item-combining puzzles, you also have to be willing to accept a certain lack of naturalism to everyone’s dialogue and behaviour. A lot of what happens will not make sense on a human level, including people’s motivations. In exchange, you get what might be a masterclass of symbolism, or a mish-mash of morbid motifs – it’s sometimes hard to tell.
As a third-person shooty-scare, it isn’t particularly worse off for that mystery. The setup is the schlockiest thing about it. A man travels to the town of Silent Hill on the beckoning of a letter from his wife. The thing is… his wife has been dead for three years… [mysterious piano notes]. What follows is nowhere near as narratively rote: an anxiety tour of an unsettling locale, familiar to James and (probably) to you. For an actually thoughtful take on how Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 2 overlap like two distorted memories recorded on the same VHS tape, please read Edwin’s article that discusses who is remaking who.
This, on the other hand, is a review, so I’m going to talk about graphics! Combat! Puzzles! The act of remaking a beloved horror game is not one I envy, especially one as rose-tintingly remembered as this. Therefore the act of reviewing it carries with it a similar (if far less potent) sense of pressure. I’ll try not to use the word “visceral” , not even when I’m talking about the shiny, anatomically accurate guts.
It’s clear mountains of work has gone into giving the world its distinctly desaturated sense of reality, right down to the way the flesh on James’ trembling hand deforms when he massages it, or the cloth of a handkerchief as it falls in natural folds when you examine it. When you peer at a note scribbled on a sheet of paper, you can flip it over and you’ll still be able to make out the writing through the other side of the thin sheet. The sound design too is a disturbing aural landscape of squelching mud, distant gurgles, creaking gates, and the faint tone of payphones hanging off the hook. Every now and then you hear the faint gasp of some unseen woman in trouble, as if right next to you, a small but important touch that I appreciated.
The rusted car bonnets, the drifting leaves, the glistening reflections in wet asphalt – it all underscores a devotion to realism that will leave some impressed and others mildly bored. I don’t want to get bogged down in an argument about the merits of realism for realism’s sake vs realism as an art direction. I don’t know why developers Bloober Team went so hard on this stuff, but suffice to say: big puddle look gud. (If you’re deadly into these things, James has you covered with the best performance settings.)
Meanwhile, the town’s ever-present fog (a visual effect of morbidly intense significance for many Silent Hill fans) is recreated with particular focus and attention, although it often billows like smoke, rather than existing as a simple haze, making it feel a little overworked when standing against all the other finely crafted detail. I wanted to make a joke like “If you think remaking Silent Hill 2 is about recreating weather, you’ve mist the point.” But on reflection, the mist is the point. At least partially, in the sense that it is as irremovable from Silent Hill 2 as any of the town’s troubled characters or the worrisome map-reliant exploration.
And what about that exploration? Mostly it remains an old-fashioned affair of checking doors and finding an object in one place and bringing it to another. You will collect coins and broken records and valves and porcelain figures and dozens of ornate keys. You will pick them up before you know why you’re even doing it, pocketing seemingly random objects like a kleptomaniac let loose in a mall at midnight. You will stick your arm into dark holes in the wall that smell like rot without stopping to wonder why. All this certainly lends it the distinctive feeling of a PlayStation 2 game circa 2001, and fits with the surrealism of the piece at large. But it was impossible not to laugh the fifth time I was asked to leap into a big hole in the ground, or to stick my bare arm in a bath of bubbling acid “just to see”.
Many of the objects you pinch end up clicking into centrepiece puzzles – music boxes and tricky paintings and zodiac-adorned cabinets that lie in some central space, which require tinkering and toying with to reveal the most key of key items. These puzzles can be hit and miss. One later puzzle, involving some poetically morbid riddles, seemed to just be trial and error lever pulling, despite having a thematically strong setup (you are choosing which “criminal” to hang at a gallows). This puzzle, like others, will change according to each playthrough. So it’s possible I just got a particularly shonky combination of riddlepoems that made the goal unclear. It felt broken.
Yet many other puzzles are strong tests of logic, intuition and understanding. These benefit from pausing and taking a moment to think things through. To spoil one very small example, you become locked in a tiny room full of respawning insects. To escape you have to input a three number code on the door. There doesn’t seem to be any hints around. Until you realise there’s a pattern of blood on the keypad. Great! Try all the bloody buttons, my brain said. Game designers love to paint the answer on for you, right?
Nope, those combinations weren’t working. I frowned. Then, perhaps remembering that one picture of the WW2 bomber with all the bullet holes, I tried combining the buttons without the blood. Ding ding, door opened. This is exactly the level of puzzle I like. Obvious in hindsight, but one that makes you feel clever in the moment.
And then you get kicked in the head by a monster hiding around the corner. Despite recent assertions by Bloober Team that they value atmosphere over jump scares, the game is absolutely full of monster closets, ambushes, shrieking sound effects, and sudden surprises. Combat is mostly the straightforward third-person shooting that has been with us since the dawn of Dead Space, with some wildly magnetic melee combat thrown in for good measure. Enemy corpses stick around and may get up again, as in the big elephant-shaped remake in the room, Resident Evil 2. But it’s worth knowing that Pyramid Head (the butcher-aproned antagonist that hounds James throughout his hellish holiday) is not given the full Mr X treatment as a being who walks around after you while you explore. Silent Hill 2’s approach to boss fights and enemy encounters is to play it utterly safe.
This is a decision that extends to all aspects of the game. It’s a great-looking, tonally faithful reproduction, if dry as an act of adaptation. It sometimes refers to its own place in video game history to keep you interested – little scenes of the old game lie scattered around as clearly signposted easter eggs, and the screen wobbles and chirps with recognition when you discover these, even if you don’t remember them yourself, the game will elbow you gently as if to say: “remember this wall with the scratches on it!”. You might. I did not.
It also starts to drag quite a bit in later acts which see James lumbering around a tormented labyrinth, traipsing down abstract corridor upon abstract corridor, leaping into abyss after abyss of his own wretched psychology with an unquestioning anti-resolve the original game’s 8-10 hour playtime did not demand. Sticking his arm into every unsanitary cavity he can find. James “loves a hole” Sunderland. James “elbows deep” Sunderland.
Again, I can’t help but compare James’ Jolly Jaunt to Leon’s Laudable Lark. Where Resi 2 often feels like a playful reimagining of its source material, Silent Hill 2 often feels like the same game from 2001 turned into a perfectly fine third-person horror. The window-blocking planks and the stomping pursuits from Mr X made Resi 2 mechanically interesting in a way that James’ window smashing and crate moving does not. If Bloober play any cheeky memory games in the vein of Raccoon City Police Station’s first “licker” (the remake puts it on a different floor than you remember), then I didn’t notice it. But it’s possible I just don’t have as fond a memory for Konami’s wife finder as I do for Capcom’s much shorter corridor waltzer.
Consider also the much-altered storytelling of Final Fantasy VII‘s ongoing remake. The revamped Xen of Black Mesa. The thorough Majima-ing of Yakuza Kiwami 1 and 2. Next to these, Silent Hill 2 feels unambitious in all aspects but the admittedly excellent technical craft. Like I say, I don’t envy Bloober Team’s job here. They are not going to please everyone – some will find it does not steer close enough to their memories and expectations. Others, like me, will find it conservative and unwilling to take risks, mechanically or otherwise. I learned a theory the other day about adaptations – that each adaptation of a known work can be measured by both faithfulness and by the “piquancy of surprise”. Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 is both rapturously faithful and as mild as bottled water.
Whether the taste of horror game Evian bothers you will come down to personal taste. I like it when a remake bites. I want Tifa to die in Final Fantasy VII, just to see how it plays out. In the inevitable Dino Crisis remake, I want to play as a velociraptor. So for me there is a vague feeling of a missed opportunity, like I’ve seen this Silent Hill 2 for more than 20 years. The spiced-up puzzles and niced-up puddles only add so much. At twice the length of its original, the scares and creepiness also started to wane long before the story wrapped up. If you know what’s coming in the final act, the mystery of James’ grief can’t carry those hours either.
For me, the impact of Silent Hill 2 has dissolved into history, like a freaky twitching monster fading into fog. Even in 2001, I wasn’t blown away by the jumble of psychological symbolism that friends found fascinating enough to venerate. That’s not to say I would have preferred Bloober to de-mystify the disjointed dialogue and unreliably shifting world. It goes without saying that the more you relish tossing yourself into the abyss of literary pareidolia, the more you will enjoy this particular brand of Blue Velvet-inspired horror. But you probably knew that in 2001, when the original game first introduced you to the fuckedest-uppest of Internal Family Systems – the broken psyche of Jimmy Sunderland, aka, the worst Orpheus.
And so, I have sometimes struggled to enjoy it in the same way as I enjoy written fiction with the same style of storytelling. The longer I spent in James’ personal hellscape, the more I could accept it as the video game equivalent of Alisdair Gray’s Lanark, but I also don’t have the patience to analyse every detail within its 16 to 20-hour story, as some will. And ultimately, I can’t help but feel underwhelmed by how much its sacred history has chained this remake down.
In the options, beside a lot of good accessibility features, you can find colour-altering visual options that allow you to play the whole game through a “90s” filter, a “CRT” filter, or a “pixelate” filter. In remaking Silent Hill 2, Bloober and Konami have passed their entire classic horror game through a similar 2020s filter. It looks different, but it’s the same game.
ranzware
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