Silent Hill 2 Review

Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 revival is the tale of two games. On the one hand, it’s a remake of a survival horror classic that clearly has a strong reverence for the source material. At its most faithful, Silent Hill 2 dances on the precipice of brilliance. But in the process of expanding upon and modernizing the original experience, some new elements have been introduced that run contrary to the spirit of the 2001 masterpiece. Both aspects are entwined, and the end result is an interesting, albeit messy, return to the town of Silent Hill.

For those who have been living under a rock for the past twenty years, Silent Hill 2 is a survival horror game with an emphasis on the psychological. It is set in a twisted world that exists as both a physical space, but also a metaphorical one. The characters trapped within it are all haunted by their pasts, with James Sunderland, the character you embody, chief among them.

Bloober Team has nailed the look of Silent Hill itself. Classic locations are a joy to stroll through in high fidelity, and the iconic fog has been brilliantly reconstructed, obfuscating your surroundings and disorienting you as you traverse the barren streets of this titular town. I often found myself stopping just to take it all in, engaging in a little Silent Hill tourism, if you will.

Unfortunately, Silent Hill 2’s new animations weren’t given that same level of love and attention. James is incapable of swinging a bludgeon. To watch him attack is to experience the uncanny valley in motion. His elbows remain tucked for too long, he doesn’t torque his hips enough, his shoulders remain oddly stiff. Everything just feels… off. And you’ll be seeing a lot of his awkward, janky swings throughout the campaign. James is an ordinary dude, so I wouldn’t expect him to swing a two-by-four like Shohei Ohtani swings a bat, but even the most uncoordinated human being would swing a weapon better than James Sunderland. The dude needs to get over his dead wife and learn how to swing a piece of wood.

This extends to the rest of his animations as well. James doesn’t typically open doors, he gestures in their general direction, his run is stiff and robotic, and when switching between melee weapons and firearms, weapons just magically transform in his hands. Enemies look fine in motion, so it’s unfortunate Bloober didn’t iron some of these inconsistencies with James’s animations out because so much of it feels cheap and janky.

This uneven execution extends to the sound design. While the atmospheric soundtrack – courtesy of returning composer Akira Yamaoko – is strong, the cacophony of screeches, gurgles, wails, creaking of rusted metal, and signature Silent Hill-brand static can occasionally undermine that atmosphere.

It’s all cranked up to 11 here, and that excessiveness doesn’t always serve the game’s atmosphere. This emphasis on abrasive loudness is also front and center in the most unfortunate inclusion: jump scares. While the original had one or two cheap thrills, the remake places an undue emphasis on them. You can look forward to dozens of monstrosities popping out and screeching at you constantly.

The further you get into the remake, the better the sound design becomes. As the world degrades, and the environments become more surreal, it starts to better benefit your surroundings. As the game progresses, it utilizes silences more effectively instead of constantly burying you in sound. The popping of old insulated pipes expanding and contracting in the later prison area is more effective because it feels like it belongs. It provides a sense of place in which you can’t escape, and in survival horror that sort of sensation is paramount.

I strongly recommend lowering the music volume in the options menu. I wanted to hear Yamaoka’s score too, but the preset values were way too obnoxious. While in the settings menu, remove the ridiculous “low health vignette” and “splatter vignette” they are
extremely
garish.

Voice acting, on the other hand, is an unmitigated success. While I’m sure it won’t be everyone’s bag, the lines are all delivered in a disembodied, dreamlike manner. It is all slightly off-kilter, but in the best way possible. The performances are better than the original while carrying forward the same surreal, Lynchian qualities that so many hardcore fans adore. Silent Hill is, on some level, a manifested, twisted dream. These performances serve to sell that aspect of Silent Hill nicely. You never quite know what is real and what isn’t, and to deliver that might be the remake’s greatest achievement.

All the performances do a great job of keeping the spirit of the original games story segments alive, but my favorite performance is probably Eddie. His actor absolutely nailed the underlying air of resentment while simultaneously sounding utterly disassociated.

Unfortunately, Silent Hill 2 is made weaker by leaving the original’s fixed camera angles behind, opting instead for a third-person perspective similar to Dead Space, Resident Evil 4, or any other triple-A horror title from the past decade.

I don’t fault the remake for going in this direction; rightly or wrongly, fixed camera angles are now seen as antiquated. But as a consequence, the original’s cinematic framing and disorientating sense of direction is lost. And much like the overwrought sound design, this hurts the atmosphere.

Alongside this new camera perspective, James becomes a far more competent fighter. Monster encounters in Silent Hill 2 are more enjoyable in the moment, but James’s new dodge provides a shocking amount of invulnerability. I frequently felt pretty comfortable going one-on-one with most of the creatures I encountered. Maybe a little too comfortable for a horror game.

Silent Hill 2 also decides to take some inspiration from Resident Evil 4 and allow you to vault over waist-high walls. Giving you more options to create distance when you want to heal or separate groups of enemies from each other. These changes all culminate in a palpable lack of danger that doesn’t do the game’s atmosphere any favors. I wanted to feel unsafe and unsure of what awaited me around the next corner, but more often than not, I could take them down without much trouble.

While you can set the combat difficulty to hard, it typically results in longer, more drawn-out encounters, not more difficult encounters. I’d recommend just sticking to the normal difficulty for combat.

That being said, the boss battles deserve some praise. While they certainly aren’t any scarier, they’re far more entertaining, featuring multiple phases, and an added variety of attacks. A number of them also add some fun spectacle into the mix. Where you were once fighting a monstrosity in a closed space, you are now being chased through hallways that the creature tears to pieces with their attacks. While the encounters are definitely sillier and ripe with schlock, all of them are memorable.

Puzzles throughout the game have also received a welcome touch up. Delightfully, Silent Hill 2 often takes the original puzzles and remixes them, adding new elements and striking a nice balance between familiarity and novelty.

A handful of new puzzles and enemy encounters have also been added, so Silent Hill 2 purists won’t be able to run through the remake with their eyes closed.

Unlike some of the other additions, the new puzzles serve to improve the end product and feel like they truly belong. Especially for long-time fans. This is less true of puzzles when you lower the difficulty setting to anything other than hard, which all feel comparatively pedestrian.

But what of the story? Did Bloober Team manage to capture its essence? Kinda… The original script is nearly untouched, but not unaccompanied. Alongside it are a whole host of additional scenes that, while not distractingly awful, rarely serve to improve the story. It feels like these additions were added to drag the runtime out, while beating the player over the head with already-established themes. It isn’t like the original Silent Hill 2 was the most subtle story ever told, so piling on in this way feels unjustified.

One particular new scene has Maria telling James about the folklore behind a statue, which ends with a frustrated James wondering why they are wasting time talking about legends; I’ll give this new story segment one thing, I have never felt more aligned with James than in that moment. Speaking of Maria, her additions have the unfortunate effect of Flanderizing her a touch too much. Maria being playfully seductive was always one of her core attributes, but it is now cranked up multiple notches. Did we really need to see her come onto James while caressing a stripper pole? Subtlety, thy name is not Bloober Team.

The funny thing is, the majority of the original Silent Hill 2 is buried inside of this remake, and it often isn’t too far beneath the surface either. Bloober Team’s version of Silent Hill 2 often feels like a high fidelity version of the original with remixed puzzles and item locations. The combat is reasonably satisfying, the boss encounters have been improved, but what is fundamentally a great horror game is partially undermined by the over-the-top sound design, injection of jump scares, and general lack of restraint.

Much like James Sunderland, we have returned to Silent Hill, but what was once our special place has changed. Thankfully, enough of what made it special remains and will likely warm the cockles of nostalgic hearts and newcomers alike, even if you’ll have to look past some of the garish new additions in the process.