Review of Silent Hill 2 – Bloobers Remake understands what makes the Konami classic

The fog-shrouded city of Silent Hill is a dark mirror – a prison of glass that draws you in before reflecting your worst qualities and greatest flaws back at you. So what happens when the city locks up a development team with a spotty, inept past?

Video games aren't exactly known for their subtlety. Silent Hill 2 was groundbreaking when it came out on PlayStation 2 because it didn't insult your intelligence. It told an adult story about trauma and guilt with additional details added in the margins. From the enemy designs to the voice acting, understanding the subtext enriched your experience with Konami's related psychological horror classic.

That's why I was scared for all the wrong reasons when Konami announced that the Silent Hill 2 remake was real and being developed by Bloober Team, a studio whose last attempt at psychological horror in The Medium was as subtle as an elephant in a warning vest.

The name doesn’t help either – Bloober Team.

Bloober.

It sounds like an intelligent slime you'd find in the sewers of a JRPG, rather than the guardians of a legendary horror series.

When I started the game, the title screen of the Silent Hill 2 remake did nothing to assuage my concerns.

One of the first things you see in Silent Hill 2 is the difficulty selection screen, which, like the original, lets you select puzzle complexity separately from combat difficulty. Unlike the original, there is also the option of having the protagonist James wear a pyramid head mask (made from a pizza box) on his head…

The Funko popification of entertainment probably isn't the kind of psychological horror the team was going for, but here we are.

I blame Fortnite.

After recovering and choosing normal-headed James, I stepped out of your troubled dreams into the foggy city and my worries began to fade away. It took until Brookhaven Hospital for them to almost completely dissipate, but even in the early stages and in the small details, it's clear that Bloober (lol) understands the source material.

In the first Silent Hill, a character establishes Brahms as the next town across from Silent Hill, Maine. But in the original Silent Hill 2, either due to a continuity error or a bloody typo, there was a street sign that said Brahms was 265 miles away, which is pretty far, by the way. Not quite the next town over the territory. It's been an annoying inconsistency for the fan base for decades that Bloober has “fixed” here – the sign for Brahms is still there, but the distance in miles has been scrubbed away.

Sure, it's still unsettling when you get a Blunt Force Trauma trophy for bashing in the heads of enough female-coded monsters, but it's 2024, baby. We're making trophies now – don't think about it too much. I expressed my concerns.”almost“ evaporates.

There's also a famous jump scare at the start of the original game that I thought Bloober would have ruined, but now it's a double bluff aimed precisely at catching fans who know what's coming and to surprise new players. They may have a stupid studio name, but Bloober knows, loves, and most importantly understands this game and treats it with the admiration and respect it deserves.

One of the things I liked least about The Medium, aside from the clumsy story, was how prescriptive the puzzles were. Even if you figured something out, you wouldn't be able to move forward until the solution was spoon-fed to you. Silent Hill 2 is much more relaxed. At one point I typed 0451 – the immersive sim code – into a safe and ten minutes later its contents opened for me before finding a note with a math puzzle I no longer needed to solve. I don't know why Bloober used the Imsim code, but it's cool that puzzles are more than a series of steps you have to follow in the right order – there are some really inventive, multi-step puzzles later on.

I was also worried about the new over-the-shoulder camera. This wasn't as much of an issue with Resident Evil 2 Remake, as it's a series that thrives on fixed and dynamic cameras. However, much of Silent Hill 2's atmosphere comes from its deliberate camera placements, pulling back to capture isolation and close approaches to simulate claustrophobia. Although the camera sometimes shakes and wobbles when you're near a wall, Bloober has managed to convey these feelings brilliantly through the combination of smart level design and great art.

When you're stuck in one of the longer “dungeons” – the hospital, the apartments, and the prison – the deeper you delve, the more trapped you feel. When you finally step back out into the foggy streets of Silent Hill, a feeling of relief comes over you – or at least it does when the fog doesn't affect the frame rate.

Occasionally, Bloober will take the camera away for dramatic effect – usually either for cutscenes or gaps. You see, James is not a healthy man. When he sees a hole, he jumps in. He sticks his arm into holes. Loves a hole. The camera pulls back each time to stare into the abyss as James grabs and delves into the dark recesses of his Swiss cheese brain.

James is completely confused. His face is an emotionless mask and his delivery is distant and distant throughout. When emotions come through, it's almost a jump scare in itself. The rest of the cast have similar staccato, lynching performances that modernize the source material but still understand that it was delivered in a certain way to evoke a certain feeling of discomfort. It's good stuff.

From the performances to the music to the sound design – industrial machinery, sirens, radio static and drag chains – everything comes together to create an impressively depressing atmosphere. For this reason alone it is worth playing the remake of Silent Hill 2.

The only place where it falls apart a little is the “survival” aspect of “survival horror.”

Survival horror at its finest will leave you on a knife edge, always looking for a few bullets and limping to your next health pack. This remake doesn't balance the economy to create these conditions and doesn't use a dynamic system to check how much you're carrying. By the end of my first playthrough (on Normal difficulty), I had 20 unused syringes (which fully heal me) and hadn't died once. In addition to this generous health recovery economy, you also have a dodge button that you can press at any time to avoid damage. Once you get used to the timing of enemy attacks, you basically can't be hit unless you're attacked from behind.

Because of this, even the game's best-designed enemies don't feel like legitimate threats. I like what Bloober did with the mannequins, which thanks to the new camera can hide behind, under and over things before jumping at you – and do so dynamically throughout the environment. You stare right at them, wondering if it's a bundle of clothes or the turn of a tied-back curtain, before they notice you're watching and pounce on your face. If you were worried that they might actually kill you, this would be a brilliant piece of horror game design, but they lack impact because you're always so well equipped.

Otherwise, the Silent Hill 2 remake is a welcome surprise that respects the source material while still feeling fresh for modern gamers. You may not be convinced in the first few hours, but stick it out until Brookhaven Hospital and then you're in for a whirlwind ride straight to hell.

Platform tested: PS5