Disclosure: As a critic for Screen Rant, I attended a preview event for Silent Hill 2’s remake hosted by Konami two months before the game launched. Details of the event can be found by reading both my Silent Hill 2 preview for Screen Rant and watching this video on my YouTube channel, where I hosted an AMA about Silent Hill 2’s gameplay changes. The original Silent Hill 2 has also been one of my favorite games since it was released over 20 years ago, and I’ve spent far too much time since thinking about it.
You can tell Bloober Team is full of Silent Hill 2 fans. I know it for a fact because the project’s Creative Director told me so a few months ago, but even if he hadn’t it’s been evident in the company’s entire catalog leading up to this point. For Bloober to actually impress Konami enough to be offered the Silent Hill 2 license is an achievement in its own right, and one they absolutely did not take for granted.
A few things first: I was one of those insufferable people who complained about James’ face in the original Silent Hill 2 remake reveal trailer, and I’m glad Bloober Team made the adjustments they did to it between then and now. There’s been a lot of even more asinine complaints since then, however – at the time of writing, the current target is the neon sign inside Heaven’s Night. This is dumb for a large number of reasons, many of them not even worth bringing up, but it does show that the vocal minority doesn’t even understand the game they are criticizing, let alone the original Silent Hill 2. It also shows that people – even people like me – should not jump to conclusions.
The Silent Hill 2 remake is good. I knew the Silent Hill 2 remake would be good about twenty minutes into playing it during the aforementioned preview session, and I’ve spent the last two months anxiously waiting to see if everyone else would feel the same way I did. Thankfully, it seems like they do. I’m writing to you now a few hours after finishing the game for myself, and I would like to discuss all aspects of the experience, so if you have not yet finished yourself or care about spoilers (and not just story spoilers for the main plot of 2001’s Silent Hill 2, but spoilers exclusively focused on the remake) then, please, bookmark this column for later and turn back now. This is your one warning.
We com to Silent Hill
Let’s get the things I felt didn’t work out of the way first. I think Eddie comes out worse in the remake. Losing the scene with Eddie shoving pizza in his face at Pete’s is fine, but the replacement does not solidify his relationship with Laura as much. I can’t really see this version of Eddie giving Laura a ride to Silent Hill in his van, while in the original I always ascribed to that bit of agreed-upon lore, largely based on their interactions inside the bowling alley. His voice is also dumb.
I’ve brought it up before, but I still miss Angela’s original delivery of the word “Lost?” in the graveyard at the beginning of the game. However, this is easily forgotten by the quality of Angela’s performance throughout the game. All the actors besides Eddie, really, do a good job with the material.
Of course, nothing is ever going to top the original Mary/Maria performances from Monica Taylor Horgan, but the most important character (James himself) works quite better than I thought he would, and his thoughts are conveyed particularly well through minuscule facial and limb animations – an eye twitch, a tapping leg, an inhale, all these things that weren’t really viable options for cutscene animators until recently. This sold James’ indecisive, passive nature more than any amount of dialog ever could.
The Silent Hill 2 Remake Cast:
- Luke Roberts as James Sunderland
- Salóme Gunnarsdóttir as Mary/Maria
- Gianna Kiehl as Angela Orosco
- Evie Templeton as Laura
- Danny Kirrane as Eddie Dombrowski (model)
- Scott Haining as Eddie Dombrowski (voice)
- Iga Górecka as Nurse / Lying Figure
I love that Bloober Team kept the ridiculous elevator game show, and the end boss transformation into an evil hospital bed monster still feels as weirdly out of nowhere as it always has. Most of the new puzzles are pretty good, and none of them were quite as moon logic as “horseshoe + wax doll = iron grate handle”.
No, wait, this was supposed to be the negative thoughts section. Let’s get back on track. There are too many mannequin legs and it starts to become rather silly, especially when you spot them hiding ahead of time. That being said, I do enjoy the expanded prison section that has all of them crawling up and down the cell block walls – oh biscuits, that’s positive again isn’t it?
What else? Laura is missing her giant forehead and is less annoying now… is that a negative? Inconclusive. I’m sure some people will find the fact that James can smash a bunch of windows a little silly, but I’ve been able to clear that with my own headcanon. I’ve seen some complaints about the amount of “callback” areas there are, as if its Bloober saying, “Ooh, look what we changed!” I’ve been able to clear this with my headcanon, too, as well as pretty much all the other complaints both that I’ve seen and that I’ve had myself, and if you press X twice to jump into this hole with me, I’ll tell you how.
The Silent Hill 2 Remake Canon
I think James is stuck in a purgatorial cycle, not just subjecting himself to the judgmental powers of Silent Hill after the murder of his wife once, but over and over and over again. We have done this to him, us players, putting him through not just the same events (the original Silent Hill 2, and its consequent New Game Plus runs) but variations on them (the Silent Hill HD collection), and now this Silent Hill 2 remake as well.
Look at the way James reaches for, and then does not remove, the sheet covering the body in the room early on in the apartments. Look at the remnants of the original game’s puzzles. Look at Maria’s face before James leads her to her first in-game death scene. She knows it’s about to happen. James knows he can’t reveal what’s under the sheet yet, because his brain isn’t ready for it. James can’t look himself in the face.
That’s why he hates glass and reflective surfaces so much. That’s why he goes through Silent Hill smashing car windows, store displays, and televisions. I’ve played Silent Hill 2 more times than I can count, but this remake was the first time I was able to take James’ melee weapon and smash every television screen I saw. I did it purposefully, angrily. If you’ve played the game, you know how good not just the soundtrack, but the sound effects, are. The crash of an attacked television is one of the best sounds in the game. James knows there is only one screen waiting for him.
It’s also something James, an emotionally frustrated, occasionally violent person, would do. Especially this version of James, someone who has definitely punched a hole through drywall at one point between the ages of 16-23. This can be expanded to his clumsy combat dodge and awkward targeting (although more forgiving than in the original). James isn’t someone who knows how to dodge out of the way of an attack, but he is absolutely someone who has seen people dodging attacks on TV and thinks he is capable enough to do it himself. This works, sometimes, if you are a good enough player. If you are average, James’ dodges are subpar at best. Even though so much emphasis and conversation has been put on the new combat mechanics, I can’t help but feel like James is still pretty bad at all of it. And he should be.
You may have already seen that more technologically adept players than myself on PC have used [insert jargon here] to noclip through the barn next to the “Silent Hill Ranch” sign, and inside is the much-derided sign with the Comic Sans font from the Silent Hill HD Collection. This is funny, to be sure, but it also supports my purgatorial cycle theory. James has done this before. It’s blatant evidence of the old being replaced with the new. You have done this before. We have all been here before. Angela and Eddie, too. The jury’s still out on Laura.
I could go a step further and try to explain the excess of mannequin legs, even. Mary was bedridden, stranded in hospital, and then at home. If she had better legs, she could have gotten up by herself. Even discounting all of the sexual aspects of the Mannequins, maybe James wanted her to have stronger, better, more legs. I still think all of the claims made in Stephanie Sterling’s Silent Hill 2 review about the excess of Mannequins are valid, but – for me, specifically – I can exclude them. Get me drunk enough, I’ll tell you how the complaints I’ll outline five paragraphs from now are actually incorrect, and the reason it’s still called Silent Hill 2 is actually [editor’s note – removed for length and lack of clarity]
Responding to a comment on my YouTube channel about the Silent Hill 2 remake back in August, I said “It’s not the same Silent Hill 2 game you already played, it’s more like an alternate world version of it. There’s a part early on when, if you already played Silent Hill 2, you are definitely expecting there to be a THING here, but it’s just… not. The THING is somewhere else, and you are not where you think you are anymore. And you can tell James thinks the THING should be there, too. If you look at it like that, it begins to give the whole ‘There was a hole here. It’s gone now.’ phrase a whole third meaning that was not present in the original, and I think that’s neat.” After playing and beating the game in full, I can honestly say that all of this is still (if not even more) true.
The Silent Hill 2 Remake Conundrum
Why Some Remakes Are Justified, And Some Aren’t
This is the first Ludology Now! column, and as such there’s an urge to make it feel important, overly substantial in some way, although even that comes with a fear that subsequent entries will be lackluster in comparison. So far, we’ve half-reviewed a game I said I wasn’t going to review and I’ve provided justifications for what many other people have said are detriments to the original concept, even though I claimed to be, at the very least, as big a fan of the original as those people, if not more. Off to a good start.
I’ve thought a lot about remakes this year, not just because of Silent Hill 2 (although it’s undeniably one reason) or Konami’s current plan to remake Metal Gear Solid 3 (again, another undeniable truth) or even because of Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 Remake (wait, that was last year???). No, it’s because of Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, Mafia: Definitive Edition, and Balatro. Hear me out.
Like Silent Hill 2 and Metal Gear Solid 3, Dead Rising is one of those games for me. I mean that as literally as possible – when I first joined Facebook, back when it was just ending the “this is only for college students” days, the Dead Rising cover art was my profile page image. I had a Dead Rising T-shirt I bought at either Spencer’s or Hot Topic. One of my best friends still has that T-shirt and wears it regularly. They are the same friend who had to sit next to my CRT and read the text on the screen while I played the game, because Dead Rising was not optimized for cheap TVs. The point is, I am as close to that game as I am any game, even Silent Hill 2, and I loved the Deluxe Remaster because it was just a slightly optimized version of more of the same.
Silent Hill 2 (the remake, ugh, how I wish it had some sort of clarifier, from now on let’s just call it Silent Hill 2‘24 and be done with it) does not do this. Metal Gear Solid Delta is a shot-for-shot remake of the original and it gets a new title, but Silent Hill 2’24 is an expanded, different game with new actors, new puzzles, and new locations, and it is just called Silent Hill 2. Makes no sense, onomastically speaking. Anyway. Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster and Silent Hill 2’24 are two completely different ways to remake a game, and I enjoyed them both immensely. Why?
The Thing About Remakes Is, Are They Cash Grabs Or Not?
I think it has to do with accessibility and intent. Dead Rising is still available. Resident Evil 4 is still available. Both games hold up, you can play them if you want the originals, or you can play the new ones if you want something that looks better and controls more in line with modern titles. However, in both cases, the games do lose a bit in translation. Dead Rising loses less, Resident Evil 4 loses much more. I think the Resident Evil 4 remake is a worse game than the original Resident Evil 4, for reasons I outlined in my original Resident Evil 4 remake review, but I don’t think I could say that about Dead Rising. DRDR is a different game, very slightly, but it is not worse a worse game.
Silent Hill 2’24 is a different game, very greatly, but it is not worse either. What Bloober Team did to make that happen is commendable. When you are dealing with subject matter this serious, this important to so many people, it’s incredibly difficult to get it right. Dead Rising is camp. Resident Evil is camp. Capcom, as a company, is pretty camp. Silent Hill is not. Silent Hill 2, specifically, is perhaps the least camp out of all of them (apart from that elevator scene), and serious is hard to get right.
Bloober Team did get it right, and given everything we know about the studio’s history it’s clear that this wasn’t just Konami trying to cash in on Silent Hill‘s popularity once again, but that this was a project incredibly close to Bloober’s heart. When I speak about intent, I think they had the proper intent to do right by the original while adding their own flourishes, and it very largely paid off. I also think this intent can be interpreted as them desperately trying to say, “We are not removing the old Silent Hill 2. That still exists. This is just another interpretation of it.” Another spin on the purgatorial cycle.
What worries me the most about remakes is the erasure of the original game from history. This isn’t unfounded – remember what Rockstar tried to do when the GTA Definitive Editions were released? Public opinion brought the originals back, but what about next time? This is why I harp on things like names and will insist on calling Mortal Kombat (2011) Mortal Kombat 9 – which Ed Boon did when I spoke with him recently, thankfully – or this remake Silent Hill 2’24. When you say Prey, what game do you mean? When I say let’s play Mortal Kombat 1, what does that conjure in your head? I can call the new Solid Snake game Metal Gear Solid Triangle and my friends know what I mean, but what if I said I played Resident Evil 4 last week? Which one?
I Can’t Not Recommend Silent Hill 2’24
I wish Silent Hill 2’24 had a subtitle or a clarifier. I wish I didn’t have to come up with one that looks like a measurement. I wish Silent Hill 2 was able to download in its original form on consoles and PC without any hassle. But, as none of those things are true and speaking from the perspective of someone who, when Silent Hill 2 released, would always make sure their Metal Gear Solid 2 game booklet was face up when they fell asleep so the Silent Hill 2 advert couldn’t stare at them, this game is absolutely worthy of sharing at least part of the name.
If you never played Silent Hill 2, then why have you read this far? Go play Silent Hill 2’24. Don’t worry about playing the original. Play it after, though. See the history. Know where it came from. But if you bounce off it because it’s old, that’s fine. If you can’t even get ahold of it because it’s only available once in a blue moon selling for way too much money on eBay, well, that’s not fine, but it’s understandable. It’s inexcusable (and Konami, that’s on you), but it’s not the player’s fault. Play this one. It’s worth experiencing. For everyone else, please, enjoy it. This is the best-case scenario for us Silent Hill 2 fans who have had nothing but pachinko machines to keep us warm for the last decade. As the adults pretending to be kids say, Bloober cooked with this one. Also, the soundtrack is fantastic.
There’s also the Mafia: Definitive Edition and Balatro angles to cover, but we’ll have to save those for another time, as we’ve run far over our allotted space for this week. Thanks for joining me for Ludology Now!’s introductory entry, feel free to let me know what you thought of Silent Hill 2’24 in the comments if you’ve played it, and if you enjoyed this column please share it around!
Further Reading:
Silent Hill: The Terror Engine by Bernard Perron
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