Silent Hill 2 is surprisingly good for a game that’s impossible to remake

Silent Hill 2 is not just the best horror game ever made. It’s one of the best games the medium has ever produced. It’s also an enigma. While it has some of the most effective horror in games, it’s so eccentric and off-kilter that it’s proven tricky to translate into the modern day. 

Even ports simply updating the game to newer hardware have completely gotten it wrong (although, not using Comic Sans for the Silent Hill sign was probably an easy fix). There’s a special sauce of weirdness to the game that feels almost impossible to replicate, and while Silent Hill 2 has some awkward and unintuitive aspects, they blend together to make this strange and unique cocktail. 

You can try to fix the gunplay with modern conveniences. You can point things out to the player a little more clearly. You can make the people in the game talk to each other like they are real human beings, not aliens trying to speak to one another for the first time after reading about how conversations should work.

In a lot of ways, it’s video games’ Twin Peaks. If you’re a fan of that show and you heard it was being remade, you’d likely have the same concerns. 

If you sand down Silent Hill 2’s “problems” in a remake, you make something that fundamentally is different and likely inferior to the original. You lose the unreal, hallucinatory feeling that existing in this world has on you. It’s key. Like a boxer taking a punch to unease an opponent before a knockout blow, Silent Hill 2‘s odder aspects put you off balance, ready to be jabbed with a dose of terror when it decides to ratchet it up. 

That’s why this is a seemingly impossible task – even before you consider Bloober Team’s inconsistent output in the past.

However, when given the chance to play the game for a little over three hours recently, I had to see how this was shaping up. Despite entering with an open mind, I came in expecting my trepidations to be justified. That’s not what happened. Dare I say, I even left a little surprised. 

In my restless dreams, I see that town… 

Silent Hill 2’s opening section is one that lives long in the mind. I have fond, if not uneasy memories of wandering around the streets as James, confusedly looking for a place to go, as horrors slowly but deliberately began to encroach closer and closer. This is one of those things that were key to the feeling of Silent Hill 2: being lost in those streets, marinating in its thick layer of spookiness. 

This beginning section, up until the point where you first fight Pyramid Head, is what I got to play of Bloober’s remake.

To the team’s credit, they’ve done a great job of recreating this space. I was still navigating it largely from memory, mirroring James’ forgotten dream-like state as I navigated somewhere that was previously familiar, but now strange. For all its perspective change and shiny graphics, it was nice to revisit those streets in this newer context. 

Playing through this opening act again, the best way to describe it was that the bonuses of modernizing this story shone through, and the things you might think would make it a terrible idea were muted.

I’m just James

A good example of this is the combat system. In the original, it’s a pain in the ass to fight these monsters. It’s ugly, slow and cumbersome. But in many ways, that makes it feel all the more realistic. You had to laboriously aim your weapon, all while unsightly monsters clambered ever closer. 

This works because James isn’t really a fleshed-out character. He’s just a guy, and we’re given no reason to believe he has military or firearms training. However, modern players expect things to be slick and action to be tight. Making something that feels bad on purpose isn’t going to gel with a lot of players. 

Thankfully, Bloober has, from what I’ve played anyway, subdued any urge to have James start being a gun-toting badass to pull it closer to the likes of Resident Evil 4‘s remake. The combat, while more fluid and easier to assess, still feels janky and awkward in a way that works. 

While Bloober has improved James’ gun handling, the balance has been tipped back towards the monsters who have more dodges, moves, and resources to avoid bullets. It makes it much easier to miss enemies with your shots – and those remain very scarce.

One thing the developers have done well is stick tightly to the survival-horror aspects of the game. You often will find yourself in fights with only five bullets, and several enemies that will take a lot more than that.

This is another area of convenience Bloober might have been tempted to sand down for modern audiences, but I commend them for keeping James’ gun as a luxury, not a necessity. You’re definitively going to be getting familiar with that board and nails. 

I look like Mary, don’t I?

One change I was less hot on initially was James sign-posting where to go a lot more. James makes some pretty overt notes on the map to better point the player to where to go and what to do. 

This is a reasonable change that any new player would expect. It’s something that makes logical sense. Players should know where they’re going, and not be expected to walk around lost for hours. However, it’s one of those things that just helped make the original game what it is. Sanding that off removes some of the best hours of the original game. 

Indeed, I ran around solving puzzles pretty fast, blasting through the space far, far quicker than before. Thankfully, Bloober Team told me all of this is optional. You can turn off the help and augment it to be in line with the older experiences. 

But again, Bloober has put thought into how this convenience has been implemented. They could have just put markers on your HUD pointing where to go, and what to do, but instead, they rely on heavy suggestions scribbled onto the map. I still missed a couple of things and had to backtrack.

While these new tools are more than I would have liked, Bloober isn’t trying to completely slick down the edges.

Silent Hill revelation

Despite being surprised at how well Bloober’s vision of Silent Hill 2 works, the purist in me still had and has doubts. Again, this game is nearly impossible to remake because the reasons to remake something generally run counter to what works in the classic. 

However, partway through playing, I sat down with Creative Director Mateusz Lenart who said something that really unlocked the vision for me. A perspective that eases those concerns.

“What helped me was to imagine we are not going back to 2001, but imagine a situation that James is still inside Silent Hill after 20 years. He’s in this constant loop. The nightmare still repeats. The nightmare changes details, but the outcome is always the same. That opened the doors for me.”

And that was it. That allowed me to view this remake as something that can, maybe even should, exist. Of course, it’s important to remember this isn’t necessarily canon. This is a design principle that allowed a team making a pretty radical remake of a beloved game to operate within its framework.

Still, it’s this quote that put some of my concerns at ease for the rest of the playthrough. The constant fear that change would ruin what makes a classic eased and I was able to let go in favor of jiving with what Bloober is doing – which is easily their best work to date. 

I’m not crazy… at least, I don’t think so

Bloober Team is putting together a surprisingly good rendition of Silent Hill 2 from what I’ve played. It’s clear pretty early on what their vision is for this: a third-person, over-the-shoulder, modernized horror game.

What they are doing is a great version of that. If you come in with an open mind, you’ll leave far more convinced that this could at least be a novel rumination on the original game. A new interpretation of James stuck in this loop, forever locked in Silent Hill, experiencing his torment again and again. 

However, Silent Hill 2 Remake still has some way to go if it hopes to really capture what makes the original so special. Even after spending a while with it – and walking away far more positive than I was expecting – recapturing the game in 2024 just feels impossible.

That’s okay, though. Silent Hill 2 Remake is (so far) a good version of the game Bloober Team is trying to make.

Does that make it an excellent remake of the game that came before? Maybe the answer to that matters less. Maybe the game just has to introduce enough of what works of the original and offer it up to a new audience who never would have gone back and played the original anyway.

If Bloober can stick its landing, maybe its interpretation of this classic, while not supplanting what came before, will at least be valid. 

Silent Hill 2 is out October 8 on PC and PS5.