Game Review: Silent Hill 2 (2024)

I didn’t envy the Bloober Team’s task in this instance: remaking a legendary title like Silent Hill 2 in a way that wouldn’t trigger a mass of frothy internet hate from a large group of people seemed nearly impossible. Knee-jerk negativity born from pre-release trailers and screenshots abounded before the game was released, and seemingly any online reviewer followed by more than a hundred people had to get their own version of the same, stale, lazy take out early, lest the cool people on the internet who worry about these things fail to grasp that they, too, were underwhelmed by the Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 teaser content.

Coming out the other side with a complete and careful playthrough under my belt, I think the developer made the most of a challenging situation, and they did the most important things right. While the remake isn’t especially creative and there is a sense that some opportunities were left on the table, I think this effort will please far more people than it offends, and moreover, it is a applaudable return to a monumental property.

Rowing into the Fog

The place called ‘Silent Hill’ is many things. Most simply, it’s a town with a nightmarish alternate reflection where everything is decayed and rusting, and burnt-bulb interiors mirror their real-world counterparts like a diorama for Hell’s most charming recreation of a the average American town. It’s a place where heavy fog and impenetrable darkness work to hide horrors that are never fully glimpsed, but always felt. Silent Hill is also an intersectional space in the mind, where lost souls go searching for those who have departed, occasionally crossing paths as they wrangle with the otherworldly elements around them. Silent Hill is a malicious confrontation with that which troubles the human psyche, and it’s a place few escape.

In Silent Hill 2, the game’s protagonist, James, has been drawn to the mysterious town by a letter from his wife, Mary, asking him to meet there. The only snag is that Mary has been dead for three years, but James is just grief-and-guilt-ravaged enough to put hope before reason and head there in search of her. Or so it appears at the outset.

Almost immediately, James meets other people drawn to the fog-shrouded backwater town, each looking for someone they’ve lost, and despite the fact that all are soon caught up in a hellish dark world where grotesque monsters hound them at every turn, no one ever bands together, as each sojourn to Silent Hill seems to take place in its own time and reason even if the lines between these sometimes blur. In Silent Hill, you seek alone.

The town as it first appears.

The game opens with a long, measured intro where you just soak in the atmosphere and let the excellent score prime your mindset as James enter the town. Everything abounds with ambiance: a rusted out silo creaks as you pass, an overhead conveyor groans, and something unseen moves in the rot-dry cornfield next to the road. Drops of water fall from the sheet metal roof above and splash on concrete that was likely poured during the Eisenhower Administration. In these early moments, Bloober Team brings Silent Hill to life, visually and auditorily, in a way fans have never been able to experience. It’s a place out of time, an errant smear from the palette of Americana that is at once familiar and alien.

Both in this installment and previous entries, the Silent Hill series leans heavily on its iconic and oppressive atmosphere, and the developer deserves tremendous credit for how effectively they’ve recreated it here. It was probably the one aspect they truly had to nail, and they did; stepping back into Silent Hill for the first time in almost twenty years, I remembered exactly why this series was seared so deeply into my memory, and why I remember with remarkable clarity the experiences I had in this world. I felt a cold dread in mind, one I’ve only experienced with this particular series.

Silent Hill is filled with poignant, reassuring messages like this to help shore up your courage.

We Keep the 9mm Next to the Silverware

In the first few hours of playing Silent Hill 2, the voracity with which I pursued a fleeing enemy and brutally beat it to death with a chunk of wood was a reflection of my terror, not my courage. Combat felt gnarly, frantic, and violent, but also a touch anachronistic. Both the core mechanics and the animations looked like they were from a decades-old game, and in this instance and some others, it’s as though Bloober Team has safely chosen options that were ‘good enough’ rather than aspirational. I’m not going to say it’s the wrong choice–combat mechanics were always an afterthought in the series–but I would have loved to see this old masterpiece fine-tuned with gameplay that matched its aesthetics.

The foundation of the combat system is great: playing skillfully while relying on dodging and melee weapons means you have more ammo available for tougher encounters. However, this couples poorly with the game’s limited palette of enemies; there are really only two or three, each with minor variants, and none of them really call for different tactics. The level design further compounds this issue, as much of the game takes place in small rooms off of a main hallway. From an architectural perspective, how different is an apartment building from a hospital or a hotel? They’re all multi-floor layouts of rooms connected by a central corridor. These are three sections which easily make up 60-70% of the game, and they almost feel like reskinned versions of each other when playing. Not great.

One of Silent Hill 2’s less terrifying moments.

More broadly, level design is uninspired, thematically strong but shallow in its experience. You will search two-hundred drawers for one-hundred instances of one-to-five rounds of ammunition, and never really find anything more interesting than the occasional epistolary remnant. It’s an inorganic gameplay design leftover from the golden age of survival horror, and something Bloober Team apparently elected not to mess with too much, for better or worse. While the Silent Hill world is iconic, some of the level design was always dreadfully unengaging, and the former can’t carry the latter. This problem is perhaps best summed-up in that in both hour two and hour ten, I was spending significant stretches of time wandering nondescript halls and trying not to let mannequins sneak up on me.

Finally, there’s no getting around the topic of boss fights. These were considered a major weak point in the original 2001 title, but Bloober Team’s decision to keep conceptually faithful recreations of these in the remake feels like a great misstep. At best, they’re passable encounters and a welcome break from the too-similar regular monsters, and at worst they are exercises in tedium that rank among the weakest encounters in the genre. As a player, it just feels so obvious that these elements should be better, and the fact that they were allowed to remain in the released version of the game demonstrates to me that Bloober was more concerned with staying faithful than making something good.

I want to close this critical stretch by reemphasizing that the remake as a whole is very solid, even impressive, but it falls well short of peers in the category of recent survival horror remakes (Dead Space, Resident Evil 2 and 4)because of the decisions to stick with something passable where improvement was obviously needed. However, recreating a title that is more than twenty-years-old necessitates more than a graphical coat of paint, agile camera, and bare-bones third person combat.

The game’s visuals, particularly regarding the use of light, are absolutely stunning.

Sure Could go For a Siren About Now

At the top of this article I mentioned how the atmosphere and vibe of Silent Hill is the key element for making the series so iconic, and I’m not sure another game manages to be so effortlessly oppressive on a consistent basis, and keep the fear it engenders fresh. As other writers have expressed, playing Silent Hill 2 is kind of a miserable experience, and that’s part of why it’s so effective.

In the first ten minutes, I remembered why this world is so impactful: it’s not so much the horrors you see, but the perpetual promise that what lies around the next corner might be more than you are prepared to handle. The grotesque monsters and cryptic setting promise that there is always somewhere darker to go, and that place may keep a part of us with it, even if we escape. James’s flashlight drowns in the nighttime and otherworld settings, never showing anything good, and renders the player acutely aware of how much darkness surrounds them. Silent Hill 2 isn’t always fun or inspiring to play, but it is constantly, relentlessly unnerving in a manner that seesaws the mind, ratcheting up tension before pulling it back, but never completely. Very few other games can hold this note so long and so effectively.

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Speaking of notes, the title boasts an unmatched auditory experience with sound design that may well have no equal in video games. Are those gurgling pipes, or the guttural purr of something with a disfigured throat? Probably both, as it turns out. The ambient soundscape is brilliantly crafted, the score is impeccable, and subtle changes in the these do more to cultivate the oppressive atmosphere than a upturned paint can full of blood and scary statues ever could. I can’t tell you how many times my pulse quickened just because I had advanced through a place and the music changed slightly. A decent set of headphones is an absolute must.

‘...dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before’

The game’s pacing is quite good, even exquisite in stretches. With the day/night and normal world/otherworld cycle, there are natural caesuras built into the experience, and the game takes turns overwhelming your senses with invaluable quiet stretches where the player has a chance to simply reflect on the mystery developing around them. You really feel the quiet streets of Silent Hill, and chapters where James engages one of the other outsiders drawn to the town feel patient and mindful, meaningfully developing in their own right rather than just being pauses between each hellish gameplay hub.

On the narrative side, when Silent Hill reflects on human trauma, it plays with the knife a bit before driving it deep. Few games have such unflinching depictions of psychological turmoil as James and the other people drawn into the fog of Silent Hill are scarred human beings, and their suffering mirrors real human experience in a way we don’t often get to see in video games. The interaction masterfully gives us glimpses of the character’s background, and each feels like there’s so much more to them than what we get to experience.

While the highs are high and the game is deeply scary, it suffers from the occasional unwanted friction in its horror elements. The scale of the game’s world outpaces its contents, leaving too many stretches feeling sparse and uneventful. Particularly deserving of criticism is the Labyrinth, a lengthy late-game level of recycled assets that has so few distinguishing aspects, it almost feels like a poor series of randomized elements. I don’t recall how this appeared in the original title, but here it feels like something ripe for an update that was instead reproduced, or perhaps iterated poorly.

In practical terms, the game could have used a few more horror setpieces unrelated to combat, moments where the player experiences something to scare them but it isn’t an enemy bursting out from a corner or a sudden crescendo in the music where you learn something is chasing you. It would have benefited from subtler elements: an out-of-place sound, eyes peering back as you round a corner etc. as Silent Hill 2 just has too few tricks in the bag, and its terror elements are almost entirely atmospheric.

Final Thoughts

There’s a disappointing irony to Bloober Team’s 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2, in that, for a game which never allows you to feel safe, that’s exactly what this remake is. It’s almost so tightly tracked that even at the obvious expense of the player experience, it doesn’t allow itself to deviate from the source material in a meaningful way. There were clear elements—combat, boss battles, level design—where stronger efforts were needed, and while nothing is quite as it existed in the original, the alternatives aren’t always definitively better. Admittedly, the bar was set very high and Bloober Team made a valiant effort, so much so that the small span by which they missed making something incredible feel all the more regrettable. Still, they captured what is important about Silent Hill, and for that alone, this title is a must-play for horror fans, and a welcome return to one of the most critical worlds of survival horror in the genre’s history.

Bloober Team’s rendition of Silent Hill 2 is a solid reimagining of top-tier source material: the narrative is affecting, haunting, piercingly human in moments, and it handles difficult subject matter with deftness and care. Despite some unambitious combat mechanics and encounter design, this game is consistently and effectively discomforting, and it nails the legendary atmosphere that made Silent Hill a giant of the genre. In many ways, the game embodies the great hallmarks of Japanese horror : uncertainty of events, inevitability of succumbing to them, and a protagonist that might find resolution, but almost certainly without triumph. No one leaves Silent Hill unmarked. 

Score: 8.3

Strengths

• Brilliantly captures the essence of the Silent Hill series

• Rich storytelling and memorable characters

• Consistently scary

• Excellent, natural pacing

• Fantastic graphics

Weaknesses

• Mechanically unambitious combat

• Repetitive level and encounter design

You can purchase Silent Hill 2 on Steam and Playstation. Other vendors may be available.

You might also like: Dead Space (2023), Resident Evil 2 (2019), Alan Wake 2 (2023)