When Bloober Team was announced as the developer of Konami’s aeons-awaited remake of Silent Hill 2, the fandom gave a collective groan loud enough to drown out the slobbering howls of the titular town’s most gruesome inhabitants.
The apprehension was understandable: despite a back catalogue of credible horror titles, Bloober’s approach to the genre and their handling of complex issues like mental health has frequently leaned far closer to a ‘sledgehammer to the face’ approach than the original game’s celebrated and nuanced storytelling.
I shared these concerns; Silent Hill 2 is my favourite game of all the time, my home littered with merch, a fanmade wallpaper happily adorning my desktop even as I type this review.
Even for someone who has spent an unhealthy number of hours rummaging in Silent Hill’s blocked toilets and gore-soaked basements, a botched reimagining would have been hard to stomach. Nevertheless, I clung to the glimmer of hope provided by Observer, Bloober’s often-overlooked cyberpunk horror title; one of the last works to feature the acting talents of the great Rutger Hauer, it is an excellent game and expertly conjures the atmosphere of creeping dread that the best Silent Hill games are famous for.
Like James Sunderland wondering whether he’ll survive yet another leap into a gaping black abyss, I needn’t have worried; this is almost as perfect a landing as anyone could have hoped for.
Bloober have managed to repackage the original game’s heart-wrenching and harrowing story – even enhancing it with superior voice performances and subtle additions to dialogue and pacing, as well as with jaw-dropping and grotesquely beautiful environments – without losing sight of what made the game a revered classic: the relentlessly bleak tone, the mood of otherworldly sadness, a narrative as soaked in grief as the town’s streets are shrouded in mist.
They’ve also reminded me of another key component of Silent Hill’s best outings: this game is absolutely disgusting. Without veering into schlocky B-movie gore or corny jump scares, Bloober have crafted some truly repulsive locations and encounters, with the afore-mentioned bile-clogged loos joined by cockroach-infested hospital wards, goo-puking baddies and nurses who appear to have misplaced a few scalpels inside their own heads. It is horrible, nauseating, and not remotely played for laughs.
But it isn’t just these sickening design sensibilities that will cause players to hesitate before opening one of the game’s (many, many) doors; the creatures, and the sound design that accompanies them, are absolutely terrifying. When not shambling murderously towards you, those nurses will occasionally freeze in place while their heads judder maniacally like something from Jacob’s Ladder (a movie inspiration amusingly referenced by the presence of ‘Jacob’s Lager’ on draught in one of the town’s bars). The first clue to an enemy’s presence is usually a sinister crackling from James’s portable radio, made all the more viscerally chilling by emanating not from your TV speakers but from the DualSense controller gripped tightly in your clammy hands.
This leads to some delightful horror moments when you know an enemy is nearby, but don’t have a clue exactly where they will strike from, or even which of the game’s deranged menagerie is closing in for the kill. On other occasions, frightening bangs and blood-curdling screams are chucked in purely for a laugh, the developers following the lead of original sound designer Akira Yamaoka in this regard – Yamaoka returns here solely on soundtrack duty, and his bottom-up rebuild of his own iconic music is as hauntingly melancholic and clankingly frightening as ever.
The radio isn’t the game’s sole mechanism for administering scares; the static burst is glaringly not enforced for the multi-legged mannequin monsters, adversaries that were barely a threat in the original game, but are now elevated to show-stealing prominence by their love of hiding in plain sight, perhaps crouched beneath a rusty bed frame or pressed against a wall as you tiptoe past. They don’t trigger the radio until after they lunge at you, meaning their presence keeps you constantly on edge, even when your trusty wireless isn’t shrieking a warning. The later-stage twist on this enemy type is a great example of Bloober’s ingenuity in expanding upon the original’s limited bestiary without incorporating any glaringly new, fandom-triggering additions.
Any discussion of Silent Hill 2’s rogues’ gallery is of course incomplete if it doesn’t feature one particular triangle-wearing gentleman. Bloober have thankfully resisted the urge to mirror the movies’ musclebound depiction of Pyramid Head, instead returning to the original game’s leaner, meaner, weirder incarnation. He hasn’t been this scary since he first glowered at me from behind bars at the end of a long corridor back in 2001.
In short, Bloober team have really nailed it here. The divisive studio has created a remake that is simultaneously respectful to the original game and its difficult themes, without alienating a new generation that’s been denied a good Silent Hill game for an entire decade.
The Polish developer’s accomplishment has defied the baleful hordes that at one point seemed to be queueing up to dismiss this title from the moment it was announced; thankfully, the only people still spewing vitriol are the town’s scuttling horrors themselves.
VERDICT: 5/5
This game was reviewed by Jon Richter, dark fiction writer, video game developer and co-host of the Dark Natter and Hosts In The Shell podcasts. Follow him on Twitter @RichterWrites, Instagram @jonrichterwrites, or visit his website at www.jon-richter.com.