The early hours of the Silent Hill 2 remake are promising, if not exactly transformative. The opening segment of the game follows, as it did in 2001, James Sunderland as he wanders the town's fog-choked streets and discovers strange things. This quiet start allows Bloober Team's talent for set dressing and prop design to sing; I lost count of the number of single-use spaces that were completely bespoke. Was I terrified by the long descent into the town proper, menaced by vague, inhuman noises from offscreen, like I was when I played the original? Well, no. But I was impressed by the quality of light streaming through fog, with creatures stumbling out of the gloom, and Akira Yamaoka and Arkadiusz Reikowski's suffocating soundscape.
The subsequent Wood Side apartments section leads to the Blue Creek otherworld dungeon, which is massive compared to the original. Expansion is Bloober's main interpretive strategy; more is better. Escape-room-tier puzzles, mandatory mob battles, and expanded "lore" clog every corner of the meticulously rendered environments. The workmanlike memos from the original game have been overwritten with clumsy, obvious rib-nudging.
It'd be easy to list off a bunch of things from SH2make that are worse or that I think missed the point. And from there, it's tempting to get philosophical about the form of the remake (as opposed to the remaster), but I believe that to draw a red line at the very idea of remaking Silent Hill 2 is to engage in the exceptionalism that has prevented critical writing on the game from progressing in the first place. It was plucked from the rest of the series and made unprecedented long before this remake. To some extent, that was inevitable: Silent Hill 2 is a standalone story, unlike the first and third entries, and the "psychological thriller" angle makes for enduring crossover appeal.
But some of this received wisdom we can ascribe to the decline of mainstream videogame critical culture, which presently requires little more of writers than the ability to remix preexisting consensus in clickable ways. Anything smart or genuinely considered is pumped out, undifferentiated, amid a slurry of shit. Reviewers at the few websites that still pay for reviews choke down forty-hour games for minimum wage, likely cutting straight through the "content" on offer to get to the ending; it doesn't mean anything if you don't finish.
Ten years ago, on the downslope of videogame blogging as a thriving scene, Lana Polansky wrote "Against Flow"+, saying, "For all our sound and fury about games being an art form, we’re much more likely to consider them as machines with necessary functions." I wonder how we got from a sentiment like this, expressed humbly by one voice within an intellectual community, to believing in our withered hearts that a videogame needs to meet quarterly sales metrics in order to qualify as a success. That this artform, predicated on technological platforms, happens to be uniquely teleological in perfect lockstep with the iterations of those technological platforms. Everybody wants smaller games with worse graphics until the stakeholders aren't kidding!
Like most AAA games, SH2make demands a term even more lubricated than "flow:" it recalls Netflix's "second screen" ideal, "content" that can be played in the room without demanding a subscriber's full attention. SH2make can be played, quite effectively, for a general audience on stream because the inter-cutscene gameplay torpor offers room to riff, and all extant story beats have been triplicated for the cheap seats. It is, in a word, modernized; and if that word doesn't inspire dread in you, I'm afraid you have no idea how lost you already are.
To be clear: there's no inherent reason that making a videogame that runs at 1080p is any less thought-provoking than one that runs at 480p. There isn't more art saturating those aliased edges. Reading any interviews with Team Silent from the mid-00s shows they saw technical facility as a means to, and inextricable from, affective storytelling. In fact, there's no reason to believe Silent Hill 2 made for the first time in 2024 wouldn't look and feel close to the way this remake does.
Well. Maybe there's some reason. In 1999, Silent Hill director Keiichiro Toyama said there's a "danger that the realistic elements will simply end up being a burden on the player … The more one includes realistic elements in their game, the more the remaining game elements stand out in sharp relief." Team Silent had aspirations beyond pure image quality; they wanted to create the feeling of a dream, an interactive abstraction. The street names in the first Silent Hill are named, with youthful guilelessness, after writers and books that inspired the team. Any number of artists and filmmakers influenced the overall art direction and creature design: I won't waste our time listing them all out; you can go read what the designers say.
SH2make has one main point of reference: the original game. It does not illuminate new meaning in that material, and every decision made to deviate from or expand on the original is purely detrimental except to highlight why the original exists in the form that it does. You can go play Silent Hill 2 right now. It's okay. It still exists. Given that I don't think any story could survive the disfigurement of time and pacing that Bloober Team has inflicted on it, you really should. The buzzing film grain, the then-cutting-edge lighting engine, the fact that Eddie continues to puke violently while talking to James; these were all decisions made during development to negotiate technical capacity, player experience, narrative goals, and artistic ambition. Akira Yamaoka said in 1999 that he "tried to think about how people would interact with Silent Hill as a PlayStation game. To that end, my sound design is like a blade sunk into Silent Hill, carving out a space to make it unique from all others."
In SH2make, there is very little negative space. Details pile up, with no meter or rhythm, until the game becomes pure, unstructured noise. Silent Hill 3 is a masterclass of noise: some of the areas are nearly unintelligible to the eye. But there, the volume recedes into clarity before ramping up again.
Ed points out that remake-James acts in a way "that suggests that Silent Hill and its terrors have invaded his reality," whereas 2001 James undergoes the harrowing and ambiguous catharsis of "emerging from a nightmare." To bring the storytelling of SH2make in line with its general photorealism, tiny shifts in tone and framing have drained its interpretive depths. Suddenly, there's a confusing gap between gameplay-James furiously beating monsters to death like Joel in The Last of Us and cutscene-James being, all things considered, kinda normal. James's latent rage is never woven into the larger story; by the end, it's almost played like a tragic inevitability that he killed Mary. That conniving bitch Maria turns out to be the real villain.
As Reid writes, all of the remake's fidelity-chasing is ultimately counterproductive: you have to "squint harder" to see its purpose. Now, I'm not convinced it has a purpose, except to perpetuate an endlessly resellable version of videogame history in which anything older than the last console cycle is an unplayable relic fit only to be aestheticized in video essays called The PS2's Most Liminal Hidden Gems.
To that point, SH2make does make one significant change to the original: it turns the story into a time loop. This takes, as you can tell from that thread, a little bit of piecing together, but every player will come across at least some of those pieces while playing through the game.
It's well-observed that in Silent Hill 2, you come across corpses all over the town that are dressed similarly to James but always have their faces obliterated or obscured in some way. This suggests all kinds of things without saying any one thing in particular. The Polaroids you collect in SH2make literally spell out the declaration "You've been here for two decades." It's been two decades since Silent Hill 2 came out. We've all been here for twenty years, saying the same things, confirming the same theories, playing the same game. I was on the Silent Hill Heaven forums in the early 2000s, all of us bemoaning the decline of Team Silent upon the release of Silent Hill 4: a game I have not played to this day. I am here, in 2024, swearing I have something new to say about Silent Hill 2. I think of the conclusion of Final Fantasy VII Remake, where the weight of intervening time, audience expectation, and artistic legacy actually, physically materializes as villainous specters to force the game's plot back onto the track it took in 1997. Like the SH2make time loop, this is a metafictional sleight-of-hand hoping to pass muster as something new, sating the audience with the mushy, rotting fruit of branching timelines and fan theories. But deep down, there is no new direction. The choice has been made. There is nowhere to go, and nothing has changed. You get what you already got. We've been here for two decades.
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+ Like much of the writing from that era, inaccessible outside Archive.org.
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Astrid Anne Rose is a former full-time game critic and long-time contributor to Bullet Points. Currently she writes and edits horror fiction & co-hosts the podcast Live at the Death Factory. She co-wrote the videogame Roman Sands RE: Build. Follow her on Bluesky.