Silent Hill has a messy, up-is-down relationship with time and history, so let’s go about this hands-on with the Silent Hill 2 Remake in a messy, up-is-down way. Developed well over two decades ago, the original Silent Hill 2 is the magnum opus of Polish horror stalwarts Bloober Team. Running on then-innovative “Unreal Engine 5” technology created by Jazz Jackrabbit publishers Epic MegaGames, it’s a wonderful abyss of a game that remains perfectly playable today, given a certain amount of tolerance for the quirks of the era.
It begins with your character, James Sunderland, descending from the road towards the eponymous Midwestern nowhere-town. Like many games of the period, Silent Hill 2 uses a third-person, over-the-shoulder manual camera, which allows you to glance fearfully up at the monstrous pine trees that fringe the path – each rising from a bulging tide of fog that menaces with the suggestion of approaching figures. There is moisture everywhere, gushing from drain pipes and dribbling down concrete barriers. As you amble into the murk, deathly chords and groaning, unmechanical motifs reverberate from somewhere deep underground.
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The route winds organically through the forest towards a graveyard, where you meet a woman rummaging among the headstones. From there, you wander past a morose cornfield into a desolate farm, where a scarecrow watches from afar. A locked gate obliges a detour to a garage where, after hopping through a window advertised by dangling cloth ribbons, you find a key on a worktable below a pin-up girl poster. James has come to Silent Hill in search of his wife, from whom he has received a mysterious letter, years after her death. The winking postergirl is an obvious, cheeky allusion to this. It’s your first concrete indication that Silent Hill at large is a multitude of mirrors.
The manual third-person camera compliments the crushing grandeur of these spaces. There’s a grain elevator in the farm, and walking beneath it is like strolling under a guillotine. It makes your breath catch. But there are a few choices that sabotage the mood, marking Bloober’s game and its quaint Unreal middleware as products of bygone trends and expectations. There’s a spinning leaf effect in the woodlands which might have been pasted-on for the sake of a magazine screenshot caption. The flapping cloth on the garage window speaks to a contemporary enthusiasm for signposting traversal opportunities, the long-forgotten “yellow paint” trend, though Bloober use this navigational device very sparingly.
On the whole, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 sometimes seems more… visually led than it should. There’s an innocent airiness and spaciousness to it, for all the shadows and grime, with puddles that grandly reflect the clouds and sumptuously imagined interiors that speak to an antiquated fixation with extravagant lighting effects and photorealistic fine-detailing for its own sake.
There are pitch-black corridors to navigate, but the world seldom feels wholly obscure and mazelike, the way you sense it wishes to – the nearest it gets, in the first three hours, is during a visit to an apartment complex, which is spread across three floors’ worth of blocked routes and secrets. The manual camera also makes it easy to spot and avoid the game’s early monsters, the Lying Figures – tottering pus-bags sewn into effete straitjackets of purple flesh, some of them prone beneath parked cars. Subsequent, four-legged marionettes are harder to evade. You’ll often find them in blindspots, posing behind entrances, with another creature or spotlit object to distract you in the middle of the room.
These are fleeting criticisms. Even 20 years later, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remains an engrossing, accomplished work of horror which dips into a deeper well of torment than most peers, before or since. It’s an easy sell for a spooky night in. But you can see the potential for something more driven, disorienting and unforgiving. The forthcoming Silent Hill 2 Remake, created by Japanese developers Team Silent using bespoke lo-fi Konami technology, shaves back the layers of Bloober’s game to produce a new kind of claustrophobia.
Junking the over-the-shoulder camera, it gives you a landscape frayed to chunks that are explored using a blend of fixed and on-rails perspectives. The opening descent now begins with the view facing towards James, provocatively hiding the forest. The camera spins around soon after, but there is little to see. The forest has been gutted, simplified to pillars canting from fog that now pours toward you like ashen surf, as though trying to shove you away.
In place of the Bloober game’s archaic Unreal showiness, Team Silent offer up purposefully crude outlines and bruised pixelation representative of more recent trends in video game art direction and graphics. The sense of disorder now extends to your understanding of the software; the textures are scars in the simulation itself. With visual detail eliminated, the sound effects are also more pointed: you’ll hear shambling footsteps that radiate from nowhere, as though they’re coming from behind your eyes. It’s a striking revising and reducing of Bloober’s fable, although sometimes, I think, Team Silent’s erasures go too far. The detour into the garage with the poster has been removed to keep the focus on the descent, for example, at the cost of some useful foreshadowing.
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In Team Silent’s hands, Silent Hill itself is lower, less dramatic, and more disconnected. You sense that there’s nothing behind the walls and windows save mist. Bloober’s original and more opulent version of the town synchs up interiors and exteriors, letting you freely break the glass and scour deserted shops and eateries for puzzle pieces and health drinks. By contrast, Team Silent’s urban geography is artfully butchered by loading transitions, almost out of spite towards the Bloober game’s expansiveness and fluidity.
It’s never handsome or authentic, just disjointed and spectral. It’s a fey jumble of corridors and clearings that are being eaten alive by the pixel grain. Both the interior spaces and the external layouts are less complicated than in Bloober’s game, with fewer puzzles and fewer moving parts, but they feel more elaborate because coherence is withheld by the tyrannical camera composition. The game doesn’t even let you look across the street: the camera points itself relentlessly at the gutter, and the result, again, is that sound comes to the fore. You can no longer scry the creatures under the cars, or observe their meandering routes in the distance. Instead, you must depend much more heavily on the warning crackle of James’s radio to escape detection.
And then there’s the combat. In both the old and new Silent Hill 2, it’s something to endure. James is a regular bloke out of water, amassing a small arsenal of improvised spiked bats and a couple of guns, for which you’ll seldom have enough ammunition. The point is never to overpower – and certainly never to farm foes for crafting materials or XP, as in other less well-preserved games of the period, like Diablo 4 – but Bloober try to cultivate a sense of growing mastery. Their comparatively rugged version of James is equipped with a lateral dodge and a quick-turn for deft evasion and fallback manoeuvres. The over-the-shoulder perspective allows for easy measuring of engagement distance, and there are discrete, context-sensitive animations that glamorise the bludgeoning and instil a sense of frenzy.
Team Silent’s game deletes these flourishes. Cramped camera perspectives coupled with disruptively “tanky” turntable movement puts greater pressure on the player, and there are no dramatic wind-ups and followthroughs to spike the endorphins. The Japanese studio also has less patience for stagy build-up or pedagogical due process. The first time you meet one of those Lying Figures in Bloober’s game, for example, it’s after a drawn-out flirtation of pursuing it between backyards, crawling into a garage, and recovering the aforesaid radio from a chair, only for the monster to burst through the wall behind you. If there’s a sense of mounting threat, there’s also a sense of being shown the ropes, with tooltips punctuating the dread. It’s a reminder that in Bloober’s heyday, even horror games were focus-tested to the extreme to minimise uncertainty: there was less trust in the player’s ability to find their way.
In Team Silent’s reworking, you merely follow the wobbling entity through the fog to a barricaded tunnelmouth, and the camera awkwardly captures the ensuing struggle from inside the tunnel. It feels unglamorous, indistinct, unvideogamey. I do admire Bloober’s approach to combat encounters for the line it treads between rewarding dexterity and making you feel overwhelmed, but here as elsewhere, it feels like Team Silent have cut to the heart of the ancient masterwork, and dragged forth an aesthetic of powerful negation it wasn’t quite able to realise with the techniques and technology of its time.
I’m writing about the Silent Hill 2 Remake in this scrambled, back-to-front, obnoxious way partly to piss off whoever edits this (to be 100% clear, Team Silent are the creators of the original Silent Hill 2, which Bloober are remaking), and partly to make a point about remakes: that they tacitly or openly position the original game as an “obsolete” museum piece in need of replacement, dismissing the old artistic choices as primitive and incomplete, re-defining the old creative parameters as constraints that need to be lifted. It’s all in the service of the market’s cannibalistic mania for the new, its structural need to ceaselessly bury “the past”, often by directly obstructing non-commercial preservation efforts, and sell you Progress that starts to wither and fade the second you peel away the cellophane.
I think it’s a useful thought experiment to flip the poles and portray the Remake as the outmoded classic, in need of restoration, but it’s also thematically appropriate. Because Silent Hill knows a thing or two about burying the past. It knows that you can’t. The past is always present, however spurned. It’s entangled with the consciousness much as the town’s rusty, seeping Otherworld inhabits the geometry of its everyday self. The past’s “pastness”, its air of monstrous decay, is a product of the desire to deny it. James Sunderland, specifically, is so much in denial about his wife’s death that he has become a mobile singularity, his surroundings a scraping, shrieking distortion of what he refuses to see.
Silent Hill is happy to accommodate James’s delusions. Again, the town is a multitude of mirrors, a kaleidoscope of doppelgangers and projections, mashed into a thick pop-historical sediment of occult devices and abuses. It reconfigures to fit the tormented psyche of every fresh protagonist and every non-player resident, bringing their demons to life. As such, it’s incorrect to suggest that you ever visit Silent Hill “for the first time”: the point of going to Silent Hill is realising that you’re already there, trying to leave. To officially “remake” a Silent Hill game, therefore, is to fall prey to a basic bit of narrative irony, and inadvertently portray remaking video games as psychological repression carried out at industrial scale. Or possibly, it’s to embrace these things.
Bloober have been living in Silent Hill for a while, putting down roots. From the unspoken multiple endings of Layers Of Fear to the cyberpunk apartment complex of Observer, they’ve deployed Silent Hillian devices to investigate their own heritage as Polish developers, negotiating their own present in a landscape of wounds and looming, anxious futures.
This isn’t to say that Bloober’s games have no being without Silent Hill: they are their own, substantial worlds, born of many inspirations. Nonetheless, Bloober making a Silent Hill game has the weight of inevitability. It’s as though you’d shuffled through a crawlspace in The Medium and emerged into the wavering light of Neely’s Bar. I think it’s fun and possibly helpful to characterise Bloober as one of the lost souls caught in Silent Hill’s web. What could they be in denial about? Definitely not the undying appeal of tank controls and fixed perspectives.
Framing Bloober this way also helps us see Silent Hill 2 and the Remake as simultaneous, not sequential, made up of distinct and equally intriguing approaches to an obstinately “timeless” setting where the economic death-drive embodied by Remaking can be turned back on itself, revealed for the demon it is, perhaps even punished. I’ve positioned the Remake as less captivating, here, and made some cheap alt-history jokes about wider industry developments like the yellow paint stuff, but I’ve really enjoyed the three hours I’ve spent with the Remake, not least for having the ghost of the original Silent Hill 2 in my head throughout.
There is so much to say about how the old and new games speak to each other – and this, for me, is the only thing that makes the remaking craze worthwhile. Come at it with the right mistrust toward the rhetoric of technological rebirth, and you get to see different generations of game-makers in dialogue, like stars at varying distances forming a flat constellation, excavating a shape from the darkness. I say “excavating a shape”, but in this case, of course, the stars are framing a hole. It’s gone now.