You come to the first save point in Silent Hill 2's remake, the ominous, redolent red square lying symbolically at the bottom of the well—an invitation to stare deep into the ground, look at the abyss, like a dry run for the rest of the game—and James Sunderland remarks out loud that it feels as if someone is “groping around inside my skull.” It’s a line from the original game, but in the original game, James doesn’t speak it—it appears at the bottom of the screen in written rather than verbalised English, and the player has to interpret the line as a product of James’ internal dialogue.
When you find a significant location in Silent Hill 2's remake, for example a locked door that you will return to later once you have the key, or a puzzle that you will come back to solve once you have collected the relevant puzzle pieces, James will take out his map from the inside of his jacket, and you will watch him circle that location using a red pen. James also marks locations in this way in the original Silent Hill 2, but we don’t see him physically writing on the map. If we discover something relevant, the map screen will open and a red circle or a notation of some other kind will fade onto the paper. Other times, after exploring, for example, the first floor of the Woodside Apartments, we will open the map to find it covered in red marks denoting locked doors, blocked corridors, and so on. We haven’t seen him do it, but James has been making notes for himself.
Restoring health in Silent Hill 2's remake means drinking health drinks or injecting non-descript ‘syringes,’ which videogame tradition would suggest are filled with anaesthetic or adrenaline. When we want to use either of these items, we may tap the heal button for a health drink or hold it for a syringe, after which we see James either drink something or stick himself with a needle. In the original Silent Hill 2, we also have health drinks. Rather than syringes, however, if we need to replenish a larger amount of health, we use an ampoule. Both of these items are accessible via the in-game menu. We press a button, scroll to them, press another, and our health is restored. We do not see James drink something or inject himself—the mechanics of healing are implied rather than shown.
And when we want to move or fight in Silent Hill 2's remake, James will turn in whatever direction we nudge the analogue stick. He will retrieve different weapons from his magician’s hat of a jacket, his shotgun vanishing behind his lapel to be replaced by his handgun, rifle, length of metal pipe. He can turn in increments of single degrees. He can dodge enemies when we press the B button. We don’t need to press a button to open a door—we just walk up to it, and James pushes it with either his hand or his shoulder. He can break windows to access otherwise closed areas, like cabinets and parked cars that contain items. He can vault over low railings and windowsills.
In Silent Hill 2, changing weapons means going back into the menu, and we don’t see James either holster or unholster his guns. True to the ‘tank controls’ that were traditional of survival horror circa 2001, he turns to a limited number of preset directions, generally north, east, south, and west, and when we reach a door, we have to press a button to open it—and then wait through a loading screen until we reappear on the other side. We can’t break windows. We can’t climb over things that look like they can be climbed over. James’ movement is an abstraction of human movement. Grace Benfell wrote about this more.
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One of the worst conceits in the history of videogames—or, more accurately, the conceit whose invention has perpetuated the idea that videogames cannot, should not, effectuate stories that are not in some way shaped by the player; that letting the player have sway over the narrative is somehow truer to the formal nature of the videogame—is the silent protagonist. The silent protagonist represents objectivity. They represent the surrender of delineable artistic decision to the false virtue of infinite interpretation. A game with a silent protagonist is a game without a character. A game without a character is a game without meaning. In some cases, the player might shape through their actions the implied personality of the silent protagonist, and in that way cooperate with the game in creating something resembling a character.
But based on the predominant existing examples—Half-Life, BioShock, Dishonored—I’m unconvinced that the silence of the protagonist aids the congruency and the strength of the narrative, and that the silent protagonist, as a device, is designed for this purpose. I’m more convinced that the silent protagonist is a concession to a petulant type of videogame player that videogame makers feel sworn to serve, who wants to do whatever they want to do and to have ‘agency,’ and that the silent protagonist is also a convenience, an aid, when trying to maximise the massness of a game’s commercial appeal. If the protagonist is silent and has no character, they cannot offend, contradict, or otherwise be ‘confrontational’ to anybody. On the contrary, they can be whatever you want them to be, and, like a magical food that tastes like whatever you imagine while you’re chewing it, the game can inherit only the meanings that you decide.
The prevailing sentiment, among game players, game-makers, and game culture, is that, as a general rule, the more a game allows you to occupy, define, and become the character, the truer that game is to the unique formal properties of games, and therefore the better it is than a videogame that, for example, limits the extent to which you can identify or blend with the character. And so, the sinister genius of the silent protagonist: they ostensibly embody the spirit of videogames as a form, which, apparently, are supposed to present numerate optional meanings (or not) and allow the player to freely choose from among them (or not). At the same time as embodying these supposedly uniquely videogamic virtues, the silent protagonist, by their nature, allows for videogames to be apolitical and abstinent.
James Sunderland is not a silent protagonist, either in the Silent Hill 2 remake or in the original game. But in the remake, he is more you, more us, more the players. He responds more to our inputs. He reacts more correlatively to our own movements, and to our ideas of what he ought to be able to do, as a person with a body. He becomes a silent protagonist not in the verbal but in the mechanical sense. Because we can operate him in a way that feels intuitive, there is no friction between us and him. He doesn’t do things, like healing, annotating his map, or changing his weapons off-screen—he does them on-screen, so that we may see and experience and apprehend them, also. When he walks through a door or enters a new area, there is no ellipsis. We go with him. We explore and see and react to the events of Silent Hill 2's remake+ alongside James in real time.
The separation between James and player, as compared to the original Silent Hill 2, is thus reduced. In the original game, the systems and the control scheme mean that James moves in a way that feels contrary, or at least partially dissonant, to our inputs. And he does things, like alter the map or drink an ampoule, that we either don’t tell him to do, or we don’t see him doing. And so Silent Hill 2 creates the impression of James having a consciousness, having an agency, an existence that is separate to us. When he says out loud that it feels like someone is groping around inside his skull, although diegetically he is talking to himself, it feels also like it is being said for our benefit as players. When the same line is written in subtitles, it’s implied that it is silent, that it is an inner feeling—it implies that James may have thoughts or feelings not broadcast to the player.
Why does it matter? Silent Hill 2, both within the internal logic of its own story and at the thematic level, deals in subjectivity. The various horrors manifest in the town of Silent Hill are based on James’—or Angela’s, or Eddie’s—innermost personal demons. The characters’ experiences of Silent Hill are subjective. Correspondingly, everything we see, we are seeing not through our eyes as players, but vicariously through the eyes of James. Pyramid is his. Maria is his. And speaking more broadly, the game is not a BioShock, Stanley Parable, or Spec Ops: The Line-style invitation to self analysis, or analysis of the role of the player, or analysis of our actions as players. It’s not, for example, Fallout, which ends with a report on how your decisions have played out and will play out on the game’s fictional world. Silent Hill 2 is an invitation not necessarily to judge, but to consider and reflect upon James Sunderland. We may find correlations between him and ourselves, but that introspection begins with the character, and what he’s done, and what’s seen. The game is about James, not about us, or us as James.
But, in the remake, where the frictionlessness of the gameplay and presentation reduce the distinction between the players’ inputs and James’ responses, James and the player become conflated at the spiritual or identificational level. The remake becomes less of a subjective character drama, which by empathising with we may also gain some greater understanding of ourselves or of others, and a game that is—comparatively—more about us; about our experience rather than about James’. By that measure, Silent Hill 2 Remake feels the more myopic, or the less humanistically interested, of the two versions of this story. The original game creates a portrait of another person and then challenges us to feel for him. The remake smoothes and softens this process by making that person, James, feel more like us, and so our sympathy or our empathy or our compassion come easier, and as such are less sincere, and not directed outward—like a lot of games that prioritise agency and allow players to seamlessly occupy the main characters, Silent Hill 2 Remake becomes, compared to the original, more of an exercise in self-interest.
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Reid explains how ‘photorealism’ in Silent Hill 2 Remake, its visual design which is inspired by fidelity to reality, undermines the dark magic and oneiricism of the game’s story. In cutscenes, James furrows his brow. His eyes dart around, or occasionally well up with tears. He has stubble and sweat. He emotes with every part of his body and face. The same is true of the other characters. It’s not that they look real—but they look real enough that you appreciate them as real people, in the sense that you are a real person, and you can tell that that is how the game wants you to see them. The effect is to make the cast of Silent Hill 2 Remake, especially James, more visually human, or humanised. Typically, in such a human story, this would be an advantage. If videogames have historically not been taken seriously as a form that can effectively convey human drama, partly that’s because, by nature of being composed of computer-generated imagery, which occupies a difficult middle ground between abstraction and accuracy (it looks real enough to give the impression that this is ‘reality,’ or a rendition of reality, but also unreal enough to keep you at a distance, and to, paradoxically, make you hypersensitive to the shortcomings, not the strengths, of the fidelity of the recreation) the simulacrum they create is very patently a simulacrum. And so the closer videogames get in terms of detail, accuracy, ‘photorealism,’ and so on—like Silent Hill 2 Remake as compared to the original Silent Hill 2—the more possible it should be for videogames to convincingly effectuate humanness, i.e. as characters appear more convincingly human, their tribulations will be easier to take seriously as relatable to our own.
Which is to say, the fact that James Sunderland looks more like a real man ought to have the potential to make Silent Hill 2 Remake more affecting, more impelling, more keenly felt. However, the opposite is true. The fact that James looks more realistic vicariously adds to the idea that the world he inhabits in the course of the story of Silent Hill 2 Remake is also realistic—that what is happening to him, and the things that he is seeing, and the events that are befalling him are realistic. On the various occasions that James has to reach his arm into a hole in a wall to retrieve some kind of key item, we can see James recoil. When he has to jump into an abyss, we hear him breathe heavily and steel himself before he leaps. These absurdities and abstractions on behalf of Silent Hill’s geometry—the inexplicable nature of the town’s sentient physical structure—now start to feel less unusual. James is a realistic-looking person. His responses to these anomalies are also realistic—we see him grimace and panic. And now he seems that he is in a world of waking thought, of cognition, plausibility, and rationality. He’s behaving like this is the real world, or at least he's inhabiting a world premised on the conventions of the real world. And we get a keen view of him acting in that way.
The original Silent Hill, from 1999, begins after Harry Mason has been knocked unconscious in a car accident. He goes looking for his daughter, Cheryl, and gets attacked by monsters in an alleyway. He blacks out again, and wakes up with a start inside a diner.
At the start of Silent Hill 3, Heather Mason has fallen asleep in the booth of a fast food restaurant.
Silent Hill 4 opens with a nightmare—the first time we see Henry Townsend, he is sitting on the edge of his bed.
The games don’t take place purely within dreams. It’s not clear where they take place. But it seems to be somewhere outside of our everyday, waking reality. Even within the games themselves, we shift between different versions of real. There is the fog-covered, desolate version of Silent Hill, the rusted, bloody Otherworld, and each character also sees the town in their own personalised way. Moreover, the places that James has to navigate and the puzzles that he has to solve are not ‘real’ places or puzzles; that is, they seem to function and be premised upon a logic separate to the premises and logic of what we know as reality. In the hospital in the original Silent Hill 2, James has to find a key, then a code for a rotating numerical lock and then a code for a digital keypad in order to open a box found in one of the patients’ rooms. Inside this box is a single strand of human hair. James combines the hair with a bent needle, and uses this makeshift device to fish from a shower drain a key used to operate the hospital’s elevator. There is a similar puzzle in Silent Hill 2 Remake—in this game, James opens the box and it doesn’t contain anything. There is a short cutscene, showing his face, disappointed, confused, temporarily defeated, before a door swings open behind him. In the original game, there is no such cutscene. James opens the box, remarks (via the written, ‘inner monologue’ subtitles) that there is nothing inside, then notices the hair, and then takes the hair.
In the remake, when James has to reach into one of the holes in the wall, the game prompts us to press A repeatedly, a metaphor for James forcing himself to do something frightening, unusual, or unpleasant. We get the same sequence when confronted with one of the game’s many abyssal plunges—press A to look down, then a second time to take a preparatory step back, and then a third and final time to leap. In the original game, James just puts his hand in the hole without us having to press a button repeatedly. He just jumps.
The story of Silent Hill 2, and what makes Silent Hill 2 scary, and meaningful, is not that James has become trapped somewhere that is ‘real’ or ‘actual’ or even presents a legitimate physical danger. What’s frightening and what’s so resonant is this idea that he is trapped in something spiritual, something within himself, something that has the behaviour and function of a nightmare—not just in its horrific imagery and bizarro un-logic—but in its ability or potential to cleanse, to illuminate. It’s not uncommon to awaken from a nightmare feeling as if some deep-rooted and deleterious personal anguish, be that guilt, regret, or something else, has been ventilated and worked through. This is the world of Silent Hill 2. It’s not just the fear of being inside a nightmare, but also the emotional, spiritual process of going through and then emerging from a nightmare. James, in the remake, acts, and is shown to act, more in a way that suggests that Silent Hill and its terrors have invaded his reality. James, in the original, because he doesn’t have a fastidiously detailed, ‘photorealistic’ visage, or physical behaviours that are designed to compel a sense of realism, seems more ambivalent, more natural in his hideous surroundings—perhaps because they are him, they are inside him, and at some level he has to negotiate them, because at some level he wants dearly to emerge on their other side.
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James’ (original Silent Hill 2 James) acceptance of the town’s monstrousness is reflected in the behaviour of the monsters themselves. They are slow to attack. They often run or crawl away from James. The Lying Figure is partially encased in a mucoid sack and unable to use its arms—it struggles to walk on its brittle legs and platform-heeled feet, and can only harm James by butting him with its head or trying to hit him with inaccurate vomiting. The Mannequins have no heads, no faces. Rather than attack outright, they stand still, try to blend into the background, and hit James only when he gets close enough to them. James, canonically, isn’t killed by any of the monsters. Neither is Eddie, or Angela, or Laura. In the first game, Kaufman is killed by Lisa Garland, who kills herself in the process. Dahlia is killed by the player. If you get the bad ending where Cybil dies, Cybil is also killed by the player. None of them are killed by a monster. In Silent Hill 3, Vincent Smith is killed by Claudia. Claudia is killed by the player, as Heather. If you get the bad ending, a possessed Heather kills Douglas. Harry is killed off-screen by members of Claudia’s cult. None of these characters are killed by a monster, either. In Silent Hill 4, Cynthia, Jasper, Andrew, and—in various bad endings—Eileen and Frank are all killed by Walter Sullivan. Again, they aren’t killed by monsters.
In Silent Hill, after the air-raid siren sounds and the town mutates into the nighttime Otherworld, Harry takes out his matches and says, “Better than nothing, I guess.” He finds a disfigured, emaciated body strapped to a chain link fence and says, “What is this? What’s going on here?” He seems more puzzled than scared.
In Silent Hill 3, Heather is attacked by the gigantic, club-limbed Closer in one of the mall’s clothing stores. She tells it to stay back, then shoots it dead with a gun she has found on the floor. “What the hell is this thing?” she says. “It’s definitely not human. I’ve never heard of such an animal. And no way is it a costume. It sounds crazy when you say it, but ‘monster’ is the only word. But I’m not crazy.”
When Henry, in Silent Hill 4, sees the two Sniffer Dogs eating the flesh of a third, he says nothing. He just watches them.
And when James encounters the first Lying Figure in Silent Hill 2, he doesn’t scream or try to run away—he gasps a little, and then picks up a nearby 2x4, and beats the creature to death, and then pokes it with the plank and says “it’s not human.”
None of the major characters are killed by monsters. None of them are hysterical or especially outwardly terrified when they encounter the monsters for the first time. When the characters in various Silent Hill games meet one another, they talk as if the monsters aren’t monsters at all—rather than discussing plans for survival or escape, they speak calmly, strangely.
“My name’s James, James Sunderland,” he tells Eddie when meeting him for the first time in Silent Hill 2. “Who’s that dead guy in the kitchen?...You’re not friends with that red pyramid thing, are you?” It’s only when James asks about the “red pyramid thing” that Eddie thinks to mention, “I did see some weird lookin’ monsters.” Eddie admits that the monsters “scared the hell” out of him, but even then, he’s more concerned about convincing James that he has nothing to do with the dead body. James describes Pyramid Head in banal terms. His voice is calm. Why isn’t everybody freaking out?
“They look like monsters to you?” Vincent asks Heather in Silent Hill 3.
Again, this is a subjective rather than objective reality—Silent Hill manifests from within the soul of a person. And it’s not only the monsters that are manifest. It’s the rules, the conventions, the physical laws, the modalities, the logic. In the world that springs into being from within these people, if there are monsters, the monsters make sense. They’re meant to be there in some way. They’re not exactly normal, but they are less impossible than they are in the reality outside of Silent Hill. And given how characters react to their existence, and also the fact that they never actually kill anybody, the purpose of the monsters seems to be something other than to pose a direct physical threat. The characters don’t talk about and react to the monsters as if these things might kill them—because they don’t kill them.
The exception is Pyramid Head, who kills Maria three times, in Brookhaven Hospital, in the labyrinth, and then finally in the depths of the Lakeview Hotel. But every time she is killed, she comes back to life. Despite his appearance and the fact he represents, from a mechanical and ludic basis, one of Silent Hill 2’s biggest challenges, Pyramid Head also becomes the ultimate expression of how the monsters in this game, in this world, have a function that has nothing to do with actually mortally harming anybody—even when they kill, they don’t actually kill. The Lying Figures, the Mannequins, the Nurses. These are all mirrors, created by James for James to look into, and to look back into him. When they attack him, it’s not to kill him, but to torment, punish, and agitate—he has suppressed his feelings and his memories, and the monsters exist to arouse those from him. When he beats them to death, it’s an expression of his anger towards Mary, towards himself and the complexity of his feelings. It is also a crude, blunt-force metaphor for the processes of grief and self reconciliation. It’s the way that a man, in the way that James is a man, might analogise dealing with his problems.
In Silent Hill 2 Remake, the monsters are more aggressive, more animated, and more numerous: the results screen at the end of Silent Hill 2 Remake said I’d killed 322 enemies; the results screen at the end of the original Silent Hill 2 said I had killed 102. The Lying Figures are more prepared to come towards you—during the sections where James is exploring the streets of Silent Hill, if you see a Lying Figure and try to avoid it by going into a building, it will follow you inside. There is one variation of the Lying Figure that when you kill it, it explodes and releases acid all over you if you stand too close. The Mannequins appear in packs. They climb up the walls and onto the ceiling. Like the rest of the monsters, the Nurses now come in two variants, the more dangerous of which is covered in ooze and oil, and attacks you with more speed since she’s holding a knife. In the prison section, when you leave and then re-enter the main cell block, some of the enemies will respawn. The Mandarins, which cling to the underside of the chain link floors in some of the Otherworld sections, and in the original game don’t do anything unless you remain in the same area for a long time, will now chase you and lash you with their long, snaking tendrils.
Combined with the third-person, Resident Evil 4-style over-the-shoulder perspective; a new heads-up display that provides an on-screen ammunition count when you change weapons or reload; and a warning when your health is low (the screen gets increasingly red the more you get hurt; eventually, when you’re on the brink of death, a first-aid cross starts flashing), the monsters, and your fights with the monsters, becomes more survivalistic—more literal. There are more monsters. They are more agile, and more capable of hurting you. James, in turn, has more ammunition, is more able to accurately aim and use a gun, and can (and must) dodge incoming attacks. It feels now as if the monsters actually are trying to kill you. And when James kills them, it feels like he is doing so largely, almost entirely, to protect himself from death—the dynamic, or transaction, between him and the monsters is more straightforward.
Visual fidelity and mechanical intuitiveness have a correlative influence on—if not objectivity per se—a reduction in subjectivity. The controls and combat system in Silent Hill 2 Remake are ‘better’ than they are in Silent Hill 2, but because what ‘better’ means in contemporary games is ‘easier to use,’ ‘less obtuse,’ ‘more fluid,’ and ‘more functional’—because we contextualise ‘better’ the same way as might the designers of consumer electronics, i.e. a microwave that has fifteen temperature settings is better than a microwave that has ten, because it gives the user more control over their cooking experience—’better’ also means ‘more universal.’ It means games that have a visual and ludic language that grease the players’ playing. Since Resident Evil 4, and then through Dead Space, the Dead Space sequels, Alan Wake, The Last of Us, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, the remakes of Resident Evils 2, 3, and 4, Control, The Callisto Protocol, and Alan Wake 2, the makers of mainstream games have developed, cultivated, and perpetuated a mechanical and presentational lingua franca for horror. Familiar, generalised, and functional in the way that players already expect are ‘better’ because they allow those players, accustomed to this videogame language, to slip into a game more readily. These mechanical and presentational standards also come with pedigree—just owing to the fact that it plays like the acclaimed Resident Evil 4, the acclaimed The Last of Us, the acclaimed Dead Space, gives Silent Hill 2 Remake both artistic and commercial credibility.
But generalising, or universalising, the combat and the monsters in Silent Hill 2 Remake deprives them of their subjective meaning. The power of the monsters in the original game is rooted in their symbolism, their allegory. The purpose of the combat has less to do with creating the tension of survival, and is distinctive instead because of its metaphorical implications. These effects still partly exist in the remake, but because the monsters are more animated and their behaviours are more complex—because they act more like you would expect enemies to act, having played other third-person horror games—they don’t feel as much like they come from within James, like they’re artificial in some way, like they’re his inventions. Instead, they feel like actual, hostile animals. And because the aiming, shooting, and fighting feel like they do in other games, those actions also feel less subjective to James. Combat in the original Silent Hill 2 has mechanical commonalities with survival horror games of the period, like Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, and Parasite Eve. But it also has esotericisms, like the fact that you can move while you shoot, that you have an infinite rather than limited inventory, that you can continue shooting and hitting monsters even after they are dead on the floor, that your health is represented by a flickering, CRT-style static image of James. In combination with the game’s camera, combat in the original Silent Hill 2 possesses, suitably, an individual mechanical ‘personality.’ A game that is so much about a single person, and the experiences and feelings of that person, strengthens that idiosyncrasy by effectuating it through every aspect of the design. Silent Hill 2 Remake does not do this. On the contrary, the design benefits a more objective and generalisable experience.
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During the opening of the original Silent Hill 2, as James walks down the long, narrow hillside towards South Vale, the camera rises high above him, following from a distance that makes him appear small among the fog and the trees. Later, in the labyrinth section, the camera stays closer to him—moves with him—so we cannot see the corridors ahead of us. When James walks into the room in Woodside Apartments that contains the mannequin wearing Mary’s old clothes, for the briefest of moments, as James rounds the corner, the mannequin is partially obscured in the immediate foreground. Like our character, we may be fooled, even if it’s for less than a second, that this is Mary—like our character, we also quickly realise this is something else, something awful. James stands at the off-left background. The mannequin has its back to the camera, as if staring right at him.
The camera in the original Silent Hill 2 is not used exclusively for the practical benefit of the player. It is not always used in order to provide a ludically or navigationally advantageous perspective. The camera in Silent Hill 2 is used to create compositions. These compositions have metaphorical relevance to James as a character. It’s no coincidence that the first image in the game is James looking at himself in a mirror. In Silent Hill 2, we’re looking at James, as James, through James.
In Silent Hill 2 Remake, the camera remains attached behind James’ right shoulder. It doesn’t cut to any angle. It isn’t used by the creators of the game to make a composition. In certain areas, a player might position the camera in such a way that they can capture a particular pose from James, a symbolic part of the background, something that may be interpreted as symbolically relevant. But another player might not do that, or might do something entirely different. The camera becomes a device designed to benefit the players’ ease of navigation. It’s positioned in such a way that it always provides the most auspicious, constructive perspective. It becomes, like other components of Silent Hill 2 Remake’s design, objective, practical—more lubricant for playability.
The camera in the original Silent Hill 2 might not always provide the most suitable or helpful angle for navigating the game’s physical space, but that doesn’t mean that the camera is somehow an obstacle between the player and their understanding of the game. On the contrary, the game’s compositions and photography illuminate it—make it more apparent and coherent. The difference is that the camera in the remake captures and exposes the literal path that the player must take, while the camera in the original game captures and exposes the narrative and thematic journey of the game. And so the irony of the camera in Silent Hill 2 Remake is that, by being more practical, accessible, usable, and functional, it beclouds the players’ understanding of the game, or at least does not contribute to that understanding compared to the less straightforwardly functional, less agentic, subjective camera of the original.
This is similarly true of the remake’s level and environmental design. Hanging pieces of white cloth show the player where to go. When they encounter a puzzle, the objects that they need to collect and use on the puzzle are silhouetted beforehand—if you need to screw in a lightbulb, before you go to try and find the lightbulb, you are shown the outline of a lightbulb, so you know precisely where to bring that item once it’s in your inventory. Levels provide closed little loops. When entering the reception area of the remake’s version of Brookhaven Hospital you might find a locked door, but eventually, after exploring the hospital further, you will arrive at the other side of that door, unlock it, and return into the reception area. The architecture feels coherent. Things lead to things. There are no loading screens.
There are no white cloths or silhouettes in the original game. The levels don’t loop in the same way. They don’t have pseudo hub areas like the remake’s variations of Woodside Apartments, Brookhaven Hospital, and the prison. When you walk through a door or enter a new area, the game goes black for a second, and then fades back up. It creates a sense of a more fractured, non-Euclidean world. It is a harder game to find your way around, and your exploration of it is, literally, thanks to the loading screens, fragmented. Again, the environments in the remake are ‘better’ in the sense of being more cohesive, negotiable, and detailed, and frictionless—they facilitate the players’ experience in a literal way, that of being more ‘playable.’ But in a story of this nature–-inspired by nightmares, an Orpheic search for the self, set inside the broken and unruly soul of a man at war with his memory—these environments, like the remake’s camera, serve in fact to disguise and euphemise the game’s meanings.
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Silent Hill 2 Remake is an example—perhaps the best example in videogame history—of how increased playability and the achievement of mechanical and ludic efficiency do not correlate to increased thematic resonance. On the contrary, its standardised game design serves to decrease the game’s legibility—if a game is in some way subjective, that is, from the subjective viewpoint of its character, or possessing a subjective meaning of more or less any kind, it cannot communicate that subjectivity in any appreciable way if it looks, plays, and is experienced so similarly to other games.
Moreover, mechanics and a style of design that are intended to principally benefit frictionless, sheer playability are contrary to subjective themes. Subjectivity, by its nature, demands on behalf of the player some kind of effort to understand, some kind of active participation from them in the awakening of their empathy. If the game succours to the player—if its mechanics and its design are always reaching out to the player; if the game is designed in such a way that the player does not have to consider or augment their behaviour, their thoughts, their feelings, and their inputs while they are playing—no empathic bridge can be built. Silent Hill 2, as a story in its original form, is a challenge to the player to understand its protagonist. Just as James is searching the hellish town for answers about himself, we have to work, and sometimes struggle against, the game’s idiosyncrasies. We empathise with James because the game has a visual and ludic language that explains, at both the conscious and subconscious levels, his character. We may not forgive him, or like him, but we do understand him. And we are more prepared to try to understand him, because the game’s design has challenged us to understand it—empathising with James may be uncomfortable, but by the time we reach the revelations about this character, we have already been guided outside of our comfort zone, and subtly ingratiated into his world.
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In Silent Hill 2, Maria is a more attractive, more flirtatious and more sexualised version of James’ wife Mary. In this sense, with regards to the basest parts of James’ humanity, she is ‘better.’ But she is also hollow, a tulpa James has created to punish himself for his violent desires. She is what he always wanted, and he is tormented by her existence.
Silent Hill 2 Remake is a more playable, polished and refined version of the original game with a greater level of visual detail and more accessible mechanics. It represents a level of visual fidelity and technological sophistication that game-makers, game players and game culture at large has pursued for decades. It’s what we always wanted.
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+ Or, for simplicity's sake, Silent Hill 2 Remake.
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Ed Smith is one of the co-founders of Bullet Points Monthly. His Twitter handle is @esmithwriter.