Silent Hill 2 remake hands-on preview and interview – horrific in a good way-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Silent Hill 2 – the remake is actually… good? (Konami)

GameCentral gets to play the controversial remake of survival horror classic Silent Hill 2 and speaks to developer Bloober Team about its creation.

It’s difficult to think of any game in recent memory that has been treated quite so sceptically as the Silent Hill 2 remake, purely because of the developer involved. Only a small percentage of gamers are even aware of who make the games they play but horror fans do tend to be a very impassioned community and despite its success with the Layers Of Fear games, Polish studio Bloober Team doesn’t have the greatest track record.

The big problem is 2021’s The Medium, which was heavily influenced by Silent Hill and yet was a shallow and poorly written flop. It seemed to suggest that Bloober Team was completely the wrong to choice to work on a remake of Silent Hill 2 – the best entry in the series and one of the greatest survival horror games of all time.

A series of underwhelming trailers (which were likely nothing to do with Bloober Team) led to them pleading with fans to ‘give us a chance’, as they insisted they’re now a completely different studio compared to when they made The Medium. They do seem to be, as when we attended a recent hands-on preview event the game was looking a lot better than we and other fans had feared.

Publisher Konami is clearly aware of the controversy, since the preview event allowed for three times as long on Silent Hill 2 as any of the other games there. There was also a lot of nervous looking faces amongst the organisers but, to judge from the roughly three hours we played, they have little to worry about.

Silent Hill 2 was originally released in 2001, on PlayStation 2, and widely praised for its atmosphere and more psychological approach to horror, compared to the enjoyable shlock of Resident Evil.

It’s easy to start playing Silent Hill 2 and assume it to be a relatively straightforward survival horror game, but the story has unexpected depth, revealed by careful observation – especially in terms of the symbology of the enemies – and piecing together the dialogue and text notes, not unlike Elden Ring.

We started playing the remake from the beginning, so we saw relatively little evidence of that, even if we already knew what was going on from the original. You start the game as James Sunderland (a different character from Silent Hill 1), who has travelled to the titular New England town after receiving a mysterious letter from his deceased wife.

James’ guilt over her death is at the heart of the game’s story but right from the start there’s a nightmarish, dream-like quality to the game, that makes it questionable whether any of it is literally real. Bloober Team has added new content, but most of what we saw was quite minor, such as more buildings in the outskirts of town and new and different puzzles at various points in the game.

The puzzles are interesting because we wouldn’t have been surprised if they had been removed or simplified, as in the original they were often quite hard, with most based around deciphering symbols and quasi-maths problems. In short, they were very video-gamey, and yet Bloober Team have not only kept them but added to them.

‘We expanded a lot on the level design and other puzzles. This is not a combat game, this is way more an exploration and puzzle game. And I feel our levels, we’ve remade them basically from scratch and I think that they’re powerful enough to make people want to play through the whole thing, to want to explore,’ says lead producer Maciej Głomb.

Silent Hill 2 – a very strange town (Konami)

‘We don’t want to have change for the sake of change itself,’ adds creative director Mateusz Lenart. ‘If you reach apartments, which is an area we redesigned completely from scratch… I think our biggest achievement in the remake is that, in my opinion, we captured the essence and atmosphere of the area – the memory that long-time fans had for that specific location – but at the same time they will be surprised at how the flow of the level is working and the structure and layout.

‘You will still encounter the same things as in the original, but they are redesigned in a way that they will be surprising for those long-time fans.’

What they’ve also done is add additional signposting, with bits of cloth waving in the wind around windows or doors that you need to go through. We had no problem with this though, not least because we managed to get lost and confused anyway, which is all part of the game as far as we’re concerned.

We were worried that they’d try and make the combat more entertaining, which would have been a serious mistake. That may seem an odd thing to say but one of the reasons Silent Hill works so well is that James is a completely ordinary person. He’s not a special forces operative or even a policeman and has little idea how to defend himself, least of all against demonic monsters.

‘Combat is not the point of the game and James shouldn’t be proficient with the weapons he’s using,’ agrees Głomb. ‘We’ve explored different solutions for how to achieve this feeling, as there’s also the other side, where you don’t want to create an experience that is frustrating for the player. We reached a point, at one time, we’re we added so many different mechanics to make the combat trickier, to make the combat harder for the player, that it became too much. So we needed to retrace, to find a middle ground.’

Silent Hill 2 – it’s quite a while till you get a gun (Konami)

Rather than combat, the biggest gameplay change is that Silent Hill 2 has a fairly standard third person camera, instead of relying on the mostly fixed camera angles of the original. It’s not as close in as Resident Evil, and sometimes does zoom out to mimic the original, but it can get confused in cramped spaces, especially during combat.

However, we’re loathe to describe that as a fault, since the original was like that too and that slight jankiness only adds to the atmosphere and the sense that James does not know what he’s doing when it comes to fighting.

Graphically, the game is not as good as the Resident Evil remakes, but the backgrounds are often very impressive. The facial animation is clearly a few rungs down from the best modern games, but the only element that put us off was the character model for the Lying Figure enemies, which are the first encountered and seem strangely low quality compared to all the others. Although perhaps that’s because they’re often seen out in the daylight (well, oppressive supernatural fog).

The sound design is also excellent, just like the original, although we were surprised the famous theme tune never played at any point, although perhaps we’ve just forgotten how and where it was actually featured.

‘We have a great audio team that were able to retain the atmosphere from the original game and expand on that, with lots of modern tools that allow you to layer it much more. So we’ve been able to expand on the original design and surprise the player in many moments,’ says Głomb.

After playing for around an hour we were then skipped slightly ahead to the Wood Side Apartments, which is where things start to really get into gear. At least at first, it’s just an ordinary block of flats but Bloober Team has perfectly recreated the feeling of unease and wrongness that is so key to Silent Hill’s very specific brand of horror.

The mannequins, in particular, are especially unpleasant to fight, not necessarily because they’re visually disgusting – although they’re always shrouded in darkness and you’re never sure exactly what they are – but because of the feminine noises they make and what they seem to represent.

Silent Hill 2 – alone in the dark (Konami)

Silent Hill 2 was making liminal spaces terrifying years before it became fashionable, as you fret about turning every corner and opening any door. This is made worse because you carry a radio which buzzes when monsters are nearby, although it’s very vague and it can be set off by relatively non-dangerous bugs.

We only had time to see a little of the Overworld – Silent Hill’s more hellish alternate reality, which closely mimics the real world – but it all looked suitably rusted and disgusting. We then finished off with the boss battle with the iconic Pyramid Head, which now feels much more dynamic than the original but still follows the same logic.

Even if Bloober Team weren’t involved, there would still have been concerns that the storytelling would be made more explicit, simply because that’s how most modern games are now. The original Silent Hill 2 left a lot open to interpretation, with most fans playing the game multiple times to properly understand what was going on (and to see the multiple different endings).

‘We didn’t feel the need to expand on the story that much, and create much more information,’ insists Lenart. ‘Actually, we used the technology to expand on the amount of environmental storytelling. A lot of characters have their own version of Silent Hill that they’re experiencing, and we expanded on this idea, through close encounters with the characters and going deeper into their psyche.

‘We actually restrict information from the game. In the original, many times the information about where to go was clearly set during the dialogue. In our version we sometimes base this merely on facial expressions.’

Some of the complaints about Bloober Team have gotten pretty nasty but they’re surprisingly laid-back about the whole situation.

‘Silent Hill means something different for everyone,’ says Głomb. ‘I think a lot of people at Bloober started their journey with game development after they played Silent Hill 2. They specifically wanted to work on horror games. So us working on the game is like us getting the holy grail and being able to do something that most of the people working on those games… they would never have expected to happen.

‘The biggest critics of ourselves is us. We expect the best out of each other. If some other studio was making this game, we would be the first people to go on Reddit and complain! We really want to make the best out of what we have, and we would never let something half-baked go through.’

According to Głomb they’ve even taken some of the complaints onboard, such as changing James’ appearance so he looks older, although he also insists that some of the other suggestions were things they’d already experimented with and rejected.

We were as sceptical as anyone when it came to this remake but everything we’ve played of it so far has been far better than we expected. It’s still possible for the story to be mishandled – especially as we never got to anything involving Maria – but at this point, and despite the previously controversy, we’re now prepared to give Bloober Team the benefit of the doubt.

Formats: PlayStation 5 and PC
Price: £59.99
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Bloober Team
Release Date: 9th October 2024
Age Rating: 18

Silent Hill 2 – the graphics can be very good (Konami)

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