“You see it too? For me… it’s always like this.”
I have been dreading Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 since it was announced back in 2022. When I watched the announcement trailer, I remember having a very visceral and negative reaction when I saw that it was developed by Bloober Team. However, as early reviews came out, I started to have some sort of hope that the game might actually be good — and while I haven’t finished the game yet, I can safely say that the Silent Hill 2 remake is a “pleasant” surprise. Despite some issues, I think that this may actually be a great launching point for more Silent Hill games.
I’ve been very critical of Bloober Team being chosen to helm this remake, mainly due to my dissatisfaction with their previous games, especially Layers of Fear, >observer_ and The Medium. Their latter title is essentially a litmus test of whether they could make a good Silent Hill game. The franchise’s DNA all over this medium — dreadful atmosphere, melancholy tone, disturbing content and haunting score, which was co-composed by franchise veteran subtlety and takes a questionable approach to pedophilia.
All of these issues came together to make me worry about how they would handle the narrative of Silent Hill 2, a harrowing narrative that deals with grief, mental illness, guilt, sexual frustration, suicidal ideation and sexual abuse, among other serious topics. None of Bloober’s previous games proved to be able to handle these issues properly, but thankfully, they upped their game with their Silent Hill 2 remake.
This game is a beat-for-beat remake, with most of the dialogue being taken straight out of the original. There are changes here and there, but it almost feels like Bloober understood that it would be impossible to improve the story. Which isn’t to say that they didn’t attempt to make any improvements over the original, with the voice acting being one of the best elements of this game. It manages to retain the original’s David Lynch-inspired, surreal tone while also feeling more naturalistic. Not only that, but this level of realism manages to add a bit of weight to the game’s extremely dark subject matter.
The graphics and gameplay also go together to make a more modern feeling version of an over 20-year old game. The combat is still very clunky, but I’m almost willing to give it a pass since protagonist James is an everyman; it wouldn’t make as much sense if he was a skilled brawler like Joel in The Last of Us.
My biggest issue with this game is definitely its excessive length. For some reason, Bloober Team decided to pad their remake out to an approximate length of 18 hours, almost double the length of the original Silent Hill 2. Each setting in the game has been stretched out with multi-step environmental puzzles to move the story along, making the player spend a lot more time in those locations than they did in the original. While I love puzzles in survival horror games, they did start to get tedious after a few hours.
The thing about this extra padding is that it makes Silent Hill 2 an even more draining experience than it already is. This is already one of the most emotionally harrowing video game narratives, so essentially asking the player to spend almost 20 hours in this Jean-Paul Sartre-esque hell is a pretty big ask. Silent Hill 2 is a miserable game, and there came a point where I just felt like I needed to take a break and play something else instead.
All in all, I can safely say that Bloober Team delivered a solid remake of one of the best survival horror games ever made. While it doesn’t come close to topping the original Silent Hill 2, I highly recommend it to people who haven’t played the original and would like to play that same story with modern graphics and gameplay. As for my doubts that Bloober would mess this up: I am so happy that I was wrong.
RATING: 7/10 (so far)
