I’ll do my best here to talk around spoilers, but there is going to be a little bit of discussion of the endings up top here, because it sums up things pretty nicely:
When I got to the final boss, I felt pretty confident I knew which ending I was going to get – mostly because I’d played the game more or less identically to how I’d played the original. I figured that if I didn’t end up with one of the new endings, which I had zero knowledge of how to go for, I would at least probably end up with the Leave ending.
The final cutscene before the boss fight started and played out just about how I assumed it would. Except…
“Did I fuck this up,” I asked my brother, who was watching me via the magic of Discord screen share.
“I don’t know, did you?”
“I feel like James does not sound like he’s doing great,” I said, and then we went into a boss fight that for some reason Bloober Team decided needed to have three phases. I guess that just gunning down the specter of your inability to let go of your dead wife wasn’t epic enough, we had to do multiple stages.
Then the final cutscene started, and James was sitting in his car.
“What the fuck, James,” I shouted, feeling a sense of betrayal, “We’ve talked about this!”
“You dumb motherfucker,” my brother laughed, “I can’t believe you fucked this up!”
I watched the ending play out (In Water), and then immediately ordered my brother to look up just what the fuck I’d done wrong. It turns out that they did, in fact, add some additional variables to what determines your ending – although I was, apparently, borderline enough that I was able to load up my last save and, by simply avoiding the error I’d made before, get through the end and achieve the ending I’d expected to get (Leave, if you were curious).
Don’t Fuck it Up
In that moment I was forced to hand it to Bloober Team for doing exactly what I, at least, want any developer of Yet Another Remake to do: make it feel different enough that I’m not just going through the motions I already know without sacrificing too much of what makes the original game, you know, worth playing in the first place. In this sense, the remake does its job: I was legitimately surprised by the ending I got, and I’d grown attached enough to James that I wanted to do it again so that maybe I could get him a better conclusion to his time in Silent Hill.
I say “attached” here because I do not necessarily like the guy, but the new vocal performance in the remake does make him feel far more human – so much so that in spite of, you know, everything, I still felt like I wanted to give him something at least approaching a happy ending. He’s tired and depressed and also maybe did a horrible thing, but there is a warmth and a genuine kindness to most of his interactions with the other people unfortunate enough to find themselves wandering around Silent Hill.
The voice acting overall, in fact, is really good! So is the story, and more of the extra stuff they added was either inoffensive or legitimately good than annoying. I never thought we would see the day where Konami does not fuck this up somehow (more to the point that Bloober Team would not fuck this up somehow), but they did not, in fact, fuck this up! Somehow!
A More Traditional Rundown
Let’s get something out of the way: the game looks amazing. I have, in my old age, gotten increasingly less impressed by high-fidelity graphics which chase realism – Alan Wake 2 was the last time I was blown away by a game’s looks and that was more because of the style and the use of lighting and the blend of FMV with in-engine stuff. I’m also a sucker for basically every menu that Atlus has put in a JRPG since like… Persona 3.
Silent Hill 2 – the original version, I mean – had a style of its own, inasmuch as it was aiming for something like realism on the PS2 circa 2001 and also happened to have some of the best creature/environmental artists and sound designers on god’s benighted earth. The further away we get from the PS2 era, the more its somewhat clunky looks become a style of their own – and the more nostalgia comes into play when evaluating its looks versus the looks of the remake. It looks, if I’m being brutally honest, like every other UE5 engine game aiming for realism out there – or it would, if not for the fact they were drawing on some truly iconic creature design. It also helps that Bloober is (and was even in the Medium, which is the only nice thing I will say about the Medium) very good at dilapidated environments, which is basically the entirety of Silent Hill. Environments look run down and shitty in a way that, as someone who has done a little urbex now and again, is accurate. The look of the Otherworld draws a little more on the rust aesthetic of Silent Hill 1 and 3 at times but mostly the Otherworld version of the world is more decaying and moldy and jam-packed full of nasty holes that James can stick his hand into.
I do not have enough good things to say about the sound design in Silent Hill 2. Yamaoka was back to help and help he did, just some incredible fucking soundscapes and the soundtrack is just as good as it ever was. The redone tracks are also good – the updates to them are, in general, appreciated even if they did add a sort of porny bass line to Null Moon that… actually I guess it fits, given Marie’s whole deal. It was still a little weird.
A New Coat of Paint on Old Characters
For the most part, I think the new takes on the characters are good. I have some quibbles with how they handle Eddie (it leans a little too far into the “look at the gross fat guy” with him at one point by having him just eat melted ice cream out of a bucket with his bare hands, a thing nobody would ever do (you would drink the melted ice cream, obviously). He’s not even eating it either, he just sticks his hand in and then licks it off. It doesn’t make any sense, and it doesn’t do anything to flesh out his character that wasn’t already accomplished by just having him house pizza instead. It’s like the redesign of the Ministers in Demon’s Souls – it’s just going for the cheap “ew, fat people” vibe and it’s maybe the most Bloober Team thing they do in the game). The voice acting is, as I already mentioned, good across the board – and the characters are well-animated too, with one glaring exception where the vocal performance does not match up at all with the facial performance – you will know it when you see it, I assume, because I saw it and it took me out of the scene entirely.
Still, Bloober managed to get vocal performances that still feel off-kilter and occasionally surreal in the way that matches the off-kilter feeling of the original except these voice actors can also act, or they are not fighting their Australian accents like Donna Brooke was for Angela’s performance. Angela’s character – the one everyone who played the Medium was worried about – actually gets treated well, up to and including her final scene which is just as heartbreaking as it was in the original. Maybe more so, because her updated design looks so much younger, meaning she actually comes across as the teen she is supposed to be. It’s well-done, even if it means we lose the old “…Lost?!” delivery from the original.
It ain’t Perfect
Now that I’ve said how much I liked the game, I can safely now say there are some big problems too. Three come to mind, in fact – and we’ll start with the easiest one:
It simply does not run stable on the PC. Now, don’t get me wrong – I had it humming along at an average frame rate of around 65-70 fps on my rig with the settings on High and DLSS set to Quality. The problem is that whenever you come to a transitional moment in the environment – you know, a part where the game needs to stream in the next chunk – the framerate takes a fucking shit. I’m talking 10-15 fps, and this was running the game off of an NVME drive so don’t give me any shit like “oh well you were running off a normal ssd” because I wasn’t. It’s a UE5 thing, I think, and it fucking blows to have a transitional cutscene bug out and look like dogshit because the new trend in video games is “never show a loading screen ever.” I’ll take that over the framerate going into the toilet any day of the week. It wasn’t a deal breaker for me, per se, because it didn’t happen often enough for it to really fuck anything up, it’s just a bummer and annoying as fuck. I haven’t seen it happen to people on the PS5, so hey I guess chalk one up for Sony’s machine.
Second thing: While the movement and combat does feel surprisingly good – there’s a real meatiness to James’ melee swings in particular, and his shitty aim with firearms makes narrative sense and is never so bad that things become unpleasant – there’s simply too fucking much of it. This is particularly egregious in the prison section, where you are constantly getting clocked by mannequins – Bloober’s go-to “ooh jumpscare” creature at a rate that just gets tiresome. It’s not difficult, it’s just boring. After you see your third poorly-hidden mannequin with its ass hanging out from under a table or whatever you start to just sigh heavily and roll your eyes. Silent Hill has never been about the combat for me – and it’s always shown real thought and care with how it deploys its monsters (okay, at least in 1-3, to be fair, I haven’t gotten around to 4 and I’ve never touched any post-Team Silent entry except for this remake). It’s not just spooky because there’s lots of monsters trying to kill you, it’s spooky because you keep thinking there’s a monster but there isn’t one (until there is). Especially since there aren’t loading transitions between going into and out of rooms (meaning monsters in a room can just follow you out), the game could have gotten away with about half the number of monsters and still been tense and scary as shit.
Final thing: You can get through Silent Hill 2 in like 6-7 hours, even if you are being pretty thorough in your exploration. That’s how long it took me to get through it all when I finally sat down and checked out the Enhanced Edition on PC earlier this year, anyway. This was, obviously, never going to fly for a modern, €70 release. The market simply won’t accept it – so it wasn’t a shock to have the game balloon to an 18 hour experience (at least for me, who was being pretty thorough in my explorations). Unfortunately, while some of the new puzzles and locations add more to the story and experience in a way that is delightful – especially if you’ve played the original version, even more so if you are familiar with Silent Hills 1,3, and 4 as well – other things are very obviously padding of the worst sort. Boss fights become multi-stage affairs (sometimes good, sometimes just annoying), and other puzzles are just feel needlessly overcomplicated or have extra steps to them that don’t add anything else they’re just there to whack another 10 minutes on to your time.
This is bizarrely placed next to sections which are meant to hurry you along – the wind will pick up and the fog will get thicker and you’ll feel pressure to stop exploring and please go to the next environment now. I don’t mind them adding a little more signposting to the game (the map in particular is great) but again, it makes the pacing feel a little haphazard at times. It may not bother you, but it bothered me and who the fuck is writing this review, huh?
The Silent Hill 2 of Record
Ultimately, where I come down is this: if you are going to play a Silent Hill 2, play the original version. It’s abandonware, and there’s a fan-made Enhanced Edition patch that basically makes it perfect. It is, I feel, a fucking crime of negligence on Konami’s part to not make it available for purchase, and I desperately hope that one day they correct that grievous mistake, because there’s something about that original game that is special! I don’t even have nostalgia for this shit, I played through the game for the first time like two weeks ago, but I can tell you it’s got the juice in a way that the remake almost does, but not quite.
Without getting into the whole discourse around remakes, I think it’s fine to have a remake of the game out there – I paid a princely sum of €80 to play the game a little early, even! – but I fundamentally dislike what seems like a strategy of saying “nevermind that old shit here’s a fancy remake, this is now the Silent Hill 2 that we will allow you to buy and no other.”
Contrast this to what Konami’s doing with Metal Gear, which is to say, remaking MGS3 but also giving you a way to play the original version. Maybe we’ll get a Silent Hill Collection the way we got a Metal Gear Solid collection in the future – I’ll pay you money for it Konami, I promise – but until then it’s the unpaid work of series fans making sure you can still experience the original. That’s a bummer!
There are, of course, a bunch of rumors that we’ll get a Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 remake – with the runaway success of this game, and with Konami slowly-but-surely coming to the same conclusion Capcom did with Resident Evil years ago that “hey people will pay us to put out new versions of old games” I reckon it is inevitable – and if the remakes of those games come out as good as the remake of this game, I’ll be pretty thrilled with that.
I’ll just be keeping my abandonware copies of Silent Hill 2 and 3 close too. This Silent Hill 2 Remake is impressively-crafted and shows real care and a love of the original from the developers (they even put complete staff credits for the original Silent Hill 2 at the end of the game!), but it’ll always just be a remake. A good remake, and one worth checking out, but with some too-obvious padding and an overreliance on combat, one that can’t quite reach the heights of its predecessor.