Idle Thoughts

Look, grandpa remade his old game! (★★☆☆☆)

There’s a reason Silent Hill 2 is considered the grandfather of “psychological horror” games. Before that, in Resident Evil for example, things were scary, sure, but once you killed the big monster at the end, everything was basically all right with the world again. The first Silent Hill was still pretty much like that too. Silent Hill 2 was a different case, that’s why it’s the one everybody is still talking about.

The original Silent Hill 2 still had monsters and bosses to shoot, sure. What else would you do? But there was more to it than that. The town of Silent Hill itself is under the influence of forces beyond human understanding. They’re certainly out of reach of your guns. More importantly, the characters carry trauma that no mere violence will ever solve. The Evil is Within, if you will. The game isn’t shy about telling you that what plagues the town and what ails the characters is linked, or is even one and the same. Will killing a big boss at the end solve James’ underlying mental issues? You tell me.

I played the first Silent Hill when I was a teenager, if even that. It gave me some pretty bad nighmares. What was the ESRB doing? I played Silent Hill 2 as an older teen, or young adult maybe. I didn’t quite get nightmares this time, but even when not playing, I had a feverish sense of needing to get back to the game as soon as possible, to end the madness by going deeper and getting at the bottom of it.

An exceptional amount of care went into making the original Silent Hill games… and by that I mean the first four. Any “real” fan knows that the “real” SH games are the first four, duh! The games were never gross just for the sake of being gross. There were some rules. For example, the faces of the dead were not shown unless it was part of the plot. It certainly wasn’t torture porn and in fact what was actually going on was ambiguous. How much of all this is real? The games were also consistently weird. Why, there is a game show voice-over inside an elevator! And you know what, the games weren’t afraid to rock either. Most horror games would never dare to have a hopeful, almost jubilant song like Theme of Laura.

I also religiously consulted Silent Hill Media and The REAL Silent Hill Experience from the good old days of Fungo and Rosseter. Say what you want about these guys’ tone, they went into excruciating detail about what made Silent Hill tick. It really wasn’t usual for the time to go into a multi-hour rant about a video game series. I suppose it was the kind of series to inspire such dedication. Youtube changed a lot of stuff. Now I’m sure there are 30-hour video rants about Bubsy’s relevance in the current cultural climate. Hell, there’s even a video essay about Fungo and Rosseters video essay now.

There was a video game conference in the aughts in my city. It had an “academic corner” which was unusual for the time. One of the panelists was gushing about Silent Hill 2 and how good its story was. He showed a clip of Mary getting brutally killed, completely without context. He was beaming: look at how emotional this is! I felt it was pretty gross honestly. Of course, I was in the know. I knew how great Silent Hill 2 was. But even then, I had a feeling we shouldn’t exaggerate how spectacular and mature the game was.

All this to say that I’m a big fan of Silent Hill, but you can’t just play the same game with some visual upgrades and expect to have the same feelings. I have no interest in 1-for-1 remakes. This is especially true for psychological horror, which thrives on novelty. You can’ put someone off balance if they know exactly what to expect. Besides, it’s been twenty years; you’re going to tell me anyone interested in playing the game doesn’t know what the twist is? Don’t tell me you don’t know Bruce Willis has been dead all along?

Now that that’s out the way, what about the remake? Well, I think the devs at Bloober Team looked at the Resident Evil 2 remake and said: let’s do just that. So you get the expected refinement of the mechanics: third-person action, dodge button, the directional buttons switch guns, melee weapons are always equipped and triggered with another button, etc. It also follows the same formula for the rest of the content: you basically hit all the same story beats and go to the same areas, but the layouts and puzzles are slightly different. It’s more like a light remix than a remake.

It’s not hard to figure out why Bloober Team played it safe when remaking Silent Hill 2. After a catastrophic remaster, a lackluster set of sequels and ten years of dormancy, they needed a sure bet.

The visuals are fine. Well, they’re exceptional, but I’m not even remotely hard to please in that regard. They might be wasted on me. Pearls before swine and all that. Despite being technically excellent, there’s a lot that annoys me about the graphics.

For one, it’s really, really hard to see where you’re going. The game is ungodly dark and one rotten corridor basically looks like any other. You need to hug the walls to even see where you’re going, but you also need to bump against every “fake” door to figure out the real ones. It’s really not obvious which is which. Then there’s the fog on top of that, thick as pea soup. The fog used to cover up the draw distance, among other things, do we still really need it? I took a look at the mod that removes the fog and holy crap, the game looks way better. It’s even more “atmospheric” without the fog. Sacrilegious, I know, but GUYS, it’s not atmospheric if you have to open the map every ten seconds to figure out what’s a few feet in front of you.

The cast is also noticeably frumpy. Look, I get it, having supermodels run around in a world of rust and gore makes no sense. On the other hand, it’s a tale about one man’s quest for his idealized wife and her doppelganger, created as an icon of temptation. My first reaction shouldn’t be: “Her?” Please don’t try to poledance ma’am, you’re bound to break a hip.

The monsters are also the same, for better or worse. A big brownish sack inside a bed frame doesn’t quite hit the same way in ultra super HD than it did in the days of the PS2. There’s all of three enemies in the game, six if you count each has an Otherworld variant. That’s not a lot to cover a 10-hour plus run time. The Mannequins stand out in particular. They make the most of the new perspective by playing peek-a-boo, so you need to pay attention to your surroundings. In fact, their behaviour is nicely ambiguous, sometimes seemingly more fearful than treacherous. Later on, then even like to crawl vertically like makeshift spiders, so now you have a reason to look straight up as well.

All the bosses have been considerably reworked. Since you’re much more agile now, the bosses needed to be a bigger threat. Whereas they used to be doormats, they now have multiple phases and new tricks up their sleeves. They’re engaging enough to be annoying, really. I mean, the action mechanics are fine, I just don’t know why I’m being asked to time the invincibility frames of my dodges in a Silent Hill game.

In the remake, the music is barely noticeable. It certainly isn’t ever front and center. I’ve listened to the original soundtrack countless times and I’ve sometimes had trouble recognizing the new tracks. The Theme of Laura has been reworked to be melancholic. Why? Simply put, the remake is afraid to rock.

The Otherworld is still oppressive, strange and plain uncomfortable. It feels like meeting an old friend all over again, except that friend is an abusive junkie. At least the Otherworld plays to Bloober Team’s strengths. Layers of Fear’s gimmick of changing the world while your back is turned can actually pay off here. It was a game of jump scares for the sake of jump scares. Here, it could mean finding a different route or new enemies potentially in wait for you. A jump scare with consequences is a gank. It happens mostly in the first Otherworld, though. I wish they’d have done even more things like this.

The remake also keeps a lot of the more tiresome quirks of the original. It’s a long game, full of dead time, dead ends and almost zero freedom of choice. There’s only the one place to go, the one key item to find. At best, the game lets you fetch three key items in a different order. You’re only allowed to wander in the very first segment of the game and all that basically means is: “here are 4 optional rooms you’re allowed to go in, each with two or three collectibles in them at most.”

What compounds this problem is that the game has a whopping eight endings, including two new endings in the remake. Yeah, they kept the tedious system from the original: the game is secretly grading you ending-wise OR you have to painstakingly find items in obtuse and arbitrary spots to get a special ending. The new endings are actually pretty good, certainly better than the gag endings from the original. Then again, I just watched them on Youtube. It doesn’t make that much sense to replay a 10-hour game for a 2-minute cutscene. This remake isn’t a rip-roaring 2-3 hours like the Resident Evil remakes. Oh no, those 5-10 hours are filled with downtime as well. Sure, save scumming can help, but still. To add insult to injury, New Game Plus is basically nothing at all. All it does is add the opportunity to unlock the “secret endings”. Whoop dee doo.

They didn’t throw in any new items to keep the action interesting. In fact, they removed some from the original. You spend half the game picking nothing but handgun ammo and health drinks. The only items they added that I felt were noticeably different were strange polaroids. Aha, I thought, you can’t fool me! The sameness is an illusion; those photos are going to be the key to unlock a whole new facet of the game that wasn’t in the original. What can I say? Hope springs eternal. After painstakingly hugging the walls to find those polaroids, it turns out they do… nothing? I knew the game was cruel, but this? Perhaps they are part of some super-secret secret, the kind Bluepoint add to their remasters, but that’s just the kind of stuff we’ll learn about the day someone figures it out.

Now, if I were to get the Silent Hill game of my dreams, I’d go whole hog and make the entire town open world. That’s how you could make the franchise relevant again. “The whole town was our special place.” What could Mary mean? Let the player wander the town and figure it out. The answer, and the ending, could be different according to where the player goes, what items they find, who they meet. Is it the lakefront? Should I just follow Maria around instead? Maybe I should focus on helping Laura escape? Heck, just let the player turn tail and leave town… at first. Giving up is a perfectly valid solution. Call it the “Reasonable” ending. You can have James sitting in a cafe, years later, thinking: “It must have been a prank, I made the right choice, it can’t have been real, right? Right?” If you want the player to actually choose their ending, why not make their choices matter in the game instead of crappy hidden variables and pixel hunting items? Make the game shorter, less linear, allow sequence-breaking with prior knowledge. That would be ambitious, perhaps even foolhardy.  I don’t think this was ever in the cards, though. This is a “safe” remake after all.

Finally, there are the characters and the dialogue. Perhaps those were revolutionary in 2001, but now, not so much. The dialogue has stayed mostly the same. Frankly, the cutscenes are almost painful to watch. Most of them are written on the same template: “I’m looking for someone. Me too. Have you seen them? No. You? No. Should we team up? No. Ok bye.” Either that or the other character rambles about something and James gives them noncommittal support. James basically exudes gentlemanly indifference. It’s hard to tell if he’s feeling remorse, fear or just constipation. To be fair, the conclusion of each character’s story arc is still as poignant as ever. “For me it’s always like this.” “You should do something about that cough.” “The Old Gods haven’t left this place.” If you know the game, you know what these lines mean.

But what about the rest of the game? Why are we still saddled with quest NPCs with no quest to give, filling obligatory downtime with wooden dialogue? I wish those characters would just talk to each other instead of at each other. What else are these characters about, except the immediate cause of them being called to Silent Hill? Perhaps relate a bit more with each other, maybe even get into that whole trauma thing, y’know? Not out of voyeurism or pain porn, but to flesh out the characters, to get the sense that they can recognize each other’s pain. That being said, in a way each character is already too far gone in their own head to really connect with anyone else. That’s why they’re in Silent Hill after all. But that’s not an excuse for mediocre dialogue.

James doesn’t fare too well without the nostalgia goggles either. He doesn’t even qualify as a tragic hero. We just don’t know enough about him. No great flaw or quirk of character. Except for the twist at the end. He’s just a vaguely romantic hero on his quest to find his idealized dead wife. Perhaps his story seemed “mature” back then, but it feels somehow barely a step above “save the princess”.

What I’m really getting at is that a lot of stuff happened in 20 years. You can’t just show up with the same old tricks while everyone else has upped their game:

• Resident Evil 4 basically revolutionized the modern third person shooter genre in 2005. So many games owe a debt to it, including the present remake. Heck, RE4 also remade itself successfully last year. If anything, the Silent Hill 2 remake would have been bolder if it chose to go retro and stuck with the fixed camera. However, even that is a thing now (Crow Country, Alisa, Hollowbody).

• The Last of Us, while passable as a survival horror game, is a masterclass in how to gradually build powerful relationships between characters through great dialogue.

• For all its creepy effects, the Otherworld is all bark and no bite. Mere parlour tricks. If you want a game that’s actually setting you up to fail, or at least indifferent if you live or die, there’s Fear and Hunger.

• Maybe you’re wondering why the remaking started with Silent Hill 2. Well, technically Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a remake of the first game. Say what you will about it, but you can’t fault it for not being original. It might have Nintendo-ified Silent Hill, but it wasn’t afraid to subvert your expectations of the original.

Then there’s Signalis. It’s basically Silent Hill 2 meets Blade Runner, but anime. Does that make sense? Anyway, Signalis basically rips off everything from Silent Hill 2. The game starts with the main character looking in a bathroom mirror mumbling about a promise to their dead girlfriend. Then there’s the red squares for saving. The obsession with holes. The doomed knife-wielding secondary character on a similar quest. The ambiguous memento the hero carries in their inventory. The ending system based on player performance or on secret items. Mysterious islands. Resurrection. Fleshy sack monsters. Heck, they even copied Silent Hill’s Otherworld wholesale. Signalis is shameless.

But Sigalis doesn’t just leave it at that. It superimposes on that stuff a whole other layer of retro-futurism in a Germanic fascist society. It steals themes from Blade Runner, like an emphasis on the human eye and reflections on the nature of memory. And it has impeccable style too. It has jarring switches from third to first person, rapid cuts to text in German or Japanese(?), top notch sound design with the droning of number stations, the whirring of old hard drives, etc. There’s a lot of recurring themes, like an obsession with the number 6.

In other words, there’s a lot going on in Signalis despite the fact that it’s a no budget game made by two developers. I thought stealing the premise of Silent Hill 2, but making it about a lesbian love story between an anime robot chick and a psychic white-haired girl (in spaaace!) would cheapen the emotional impact of it. Now I’m not so sure. After re-experiencing Silent Hill 2, it just feels so plain and wooden.

You know, the Silent Hill 2 remake even has in it the Isle of the Dead painting by Arnold Böcklin, which is prominently featured in Signalis. Now who’s aping who? I’m not even sure anymore.

Really, you can’t just play a remake and expect to relive the magic of something you felt years ago. It’s a fact of life. And yet… you know, I did get the tingle for a while. That fever, that need to go deeper, despite the surrounding malignancy encroaching from every direction. It’s the good kind of madness you know? Perfect for Halloween. And then, I was hit by the linearity, the murky graphics, the lack of interesting items, the aging dialogue and basically the absence of originality.

All this to say that the Silent Hill 2 remake is a very nice game, but in 2024, there’s nothing really special about it.