Silent Hill 2 created sympathy for the protagonist we would be playing by painting him as a desperate anti-intellectual that responded to a single piece of mail stating that his dead wife was still alive. He drove hundreds of miles to try find her based on that and his reward for caring about his marriage was that hundreds of body horror monsters tried to kill him. The malevolent forces of Silent Hill 2 made our guy come to them! This is like placing an order for one Swatting through DoorDash.
The remake team — Bloober Team S.A. — did a great job with Silent Hill 2, you can’t fault them for anything. They knew the assignment, they did their job and they did it well. It’s the original design decisions that cement Silent Hill 2 as a game from a different era. 20 years ago, we expected a game to take up all of our free time. These days my game playing happens between toddler naps and the 40 minutes procrastinating work on my own work-in-progress game before I go to bed. This is the central conflict between myself and this game.
The first couple of hours of the Silent Hill 2 remake deliver what I was looking for: a spooky experience that slowly introduced me to game mechanics. We get an iconic weapon – a 2×4 with nails in it. We talked to another gal in a cemetery who I think is also going through what our protagonist, James, is – though she doesn’t really come out and say it. The character models look GOOD. The town of Silent Hill itself looks incredible. This is the unglamorous part of game development in a port. I played the PS2 version of Silent Hill 2 on an emulator for a little bit, and the developers for the remake had to recreate a lot of stuff they didn’t get to make decisions on. I love towns that look like there is a never-ending dispute with sanitation. This is one of the nicest-looking games I’ve ever played.
Ok, so we get further into downtown Silent Hill. After the two types of monsters get introduced we eventually find ourselves in a run-down hotel that looks spectacular. It has construction and shoddy building damage that forces a very singular path through it. This is where the game lost me. Look, it’s still a good game, but I have to keep a map of the hotel in my head. I probably could have done that when I was 30. It’s on the player to recall the exits for rooms in this hotel that don’t look like exits. We are given very little ammo and very little opportunity to replenish health. We can save whenever I want by going to the lobby – I genuinely appreciate that – but the sameness and singular nature of what I have to do to proceed made me feel like I had seen what the game could throw at me.
6.8 hours in and I see that I am in area “2 of 8” according to a walkthrough. I appreciate that they gave out a lot of content for the $70 (!!) they asked for this, but I can’t keep going with it. There isn’t enough to make me proceed and see what I am assuming is more or less the same thing for another 30 hours. If the combat was more fun, maybe. But it’s very pattern based. If we simply had more monsters, then maybe I could keep playing this game for fun. Silent Hill 2 is a very lonely game, too: we see one other character in the hotel and it’s just a frightened obese man who won’t leave or say anything fun or interesting. James doesn’t really react on why there is literally one other human in downtown Silent Hill at this point.
So we have something that looks as good as any PC game out there, that makes itself fairly easy to enjoy but is clearly meant for an age where there wasn’t a million other distractions and responsibilities. I had a PS2 when it was fairly new. I wish I had something like SH2 for it! Instead the first few games I bought were Maximo, Spy Hunter and Ico. Ico is one of the 100 greatest games ever made, but during the time of my life where I could have obsessed about Silent Hill 2, I missed it.
And look, seven hours of fun is almost as much as the Star Wars franchise has managed to give us in the last 35 years. If I had to go with positive, negative or neutral, I’m going positive for this. I am happy with my purchase. Players interested in exploration and who CAN keep a path through an abandoned hotel and other mazes in their head will love this. Part of this project has me asking myself why I abandon games – I can’t do repetition in video games, and I can’t continue if I think there will be repetition. Silent Hill 2 is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. It’s an overall quality experience. I just wish there were more going on.
- Silent Hill 2 Remake was played on an Intel computer, thankfully with a chip that was of a generation before Intel stopped caring if they, ya know, actually fucking worked or not. I am on Windows 10 with a nVidia 4090. I used an 8BitDo gamepad.