Photo: Bloober Team
2001 is rightfully remembered as a benchmark year for video games. Grand Theft Auto III laid the blueprint for the now-ubiquitous open-world genre; Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty served peerless stealth action primed for the post-truth era; Ico delivered a mythic fairy tale to rival those of Studio Ghibli’s. These are disparate games, yet each one saw its respective makers pushing toward a common goal — namely, figuring out how 3-D space (which arrived five years earlier for home consoles) might be harnessed as a tool for expressive, interactive storytelling. The fundamentals had been laid down by the likes of 1996’s Tomb Raider and Quake. These game-makers of the new millennium wanted to use 3-D space as an antagonist and a metaphor — the rig of Metal Gear Solid 2 teetering in the ocean, the castle in Ico languishing high in the clouds.
Silent Hill 2, from Japanese publishing giant Konami, is another all-timer from 2001: a powerfully un-fun horror game that conceives of 3-D level design as a Freudian nightmare. Like the well-reviewed 1999 original, it plays like weirder, creepier, less action-focused horror than Capcom’s Resident Evil series, albeit with a more involved story. You play as the oddly vacant hunk James Sunderland, who is looking for his dead wife in a small town swathed in thick, all-encompassing fog. Things quickly get even weirder: Architecture takes on an incoherent quality; a perverse, esoteric logic emerges in the game’s inscrutable puzzles (of which there are many). With each passing minute, Silent Hill 2 gets murkier, grimier, and more disgusting. Blood, puke, and muck coat every conceivable surface.
The game was warmly received — if not a critical slam dunk — at the time of its release, praised effusively by IGN while GameSpot offered a slightly cooler take. Yet its status as one of the most revered video games has grown in the following 23 years. Not even a string of disappointing sequels, two bad movies, and odd franchise pivots by Konami has sullied its renown.
So it was with mild concern that fans greeted the news that Polish studio Bloober would helm a remake of their beloved psychological torment. The developer’s highs are undeniable (2017’s Observer delivered pitch-perfect cyberpunk shocks starring none other than tears-in-the-rain cyborg Rutger Hauer); its lows are arguably best left in the past (2021’s The Medium fumbled a story of intergenerational trauma). Bloober specializes in brain-mangling horror of the kind that, consciously or not, owes a great debt to the Silent Hill franchise. Thus, the question was whether the Kraków-based studio could be trusted with a game whose influence pulses through many of its own debased creations.
Fans needn’t have worried. With the help of original creature designer Masahiro Ito and original composer Akira Yamaoka, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 smartly updates the original while staying true to its atmospheric core. This remains an unremittingly miserable game, only now you get to experience existential despair via a camera that is slung over James’s shoulder rather than situated at fixed points around him. Combat, a rare low point of the original, returns in a newly scrappy guise: Each swing, dodge, and pull of the trigger is a moment of high-octane drama in itself. If you’re playing on the PlayStation 5, the haptic feedback of the controller is put to unnervingly great use; at one point, I felt the decaying tone of a ghostly piano through the controller as if I were in the actual room with James, experiencing the same vibrations as him.
Purists will crow that the best way to experience Silent Hill 2’s inimitable brand of crusty dank is by booting up the original on a PlayStation 2 through a fat old CRT television set. Maybe they have a point, but it bears emphasizing that the texturework here is wonderfully wince-inducing — and the fog is so thick and voluminous that it feels genuinely suffocating. The woeful, eerily bright 2012 remaster of Silent Hill 2 has never felt like more of a distant memory.
Perhaps the greatest trick this remake pulls off is in regard to the original’s aforementioned level design. Twenty-three years later, the town of Silent Hill is larger and more interactive than before. Bloober encourages you to poke around all of its decrepit nooks and crannies in order to find resources and unearth story tidbits. But such an expansion hasn’t disrupted the flow of the game, which, for all the ways it confounds, follows a clear psychoanalytic logic. The sense of descending into the Freudian subconscious, a place of repressed emotions and desires, is relayed just as keenly here as in the original. The moment this structure clicks together in the final third of the game, with a staircase that plunges hundreds of meters into the bedrock below the town, is as unsettling as ever. The darkness, like the fog prior, is engulfing. I kept turning around to see if I could still see the light at the top of the staircase. There came a point when I couldn’t.
The original Silent Hill 2 was a product of its time, influenced by the movies of David Lynch and David Fincher and limited by the PlayStation 2’s processing power and what could physically be stored on a disc. But in the way it helped push the medium into newly cinematic territory, and the bloody-mindedness with which it explored an unflinching story of trauma and abuse, the game also felt streaks ahead of the curve. As original director Masashi Tsuboyama recently admitted, it was a game whose ambition outstripped the technology from which it emerged.
In quieter moments, when James’s portable radio isn’t buzzing with the static of lurching nearby enemies and the soundtrack isn’t swirling with industrial dread, playing Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 led me to reflect on video-game remakes more broadly. It’s easy to dismiss these efforts as glorified cover versions of beloved hits. Certainly, we’re a long way from the reinvention that can occur in a good movie remake — for example, Luca Guadagnino’s take on Dario Argento’s 1977 horror classic, Suspiria (another of Silent Hill 2’s heady, art-school influences). Maybe the best way to think about Silent Hill 2 is as an act of translation on Bloober’s part — and a thrilling one at that.
Technology evolves, expectations shift, and the old becomes arcane. Bloober has translated the past as one might a literary classic, illuminating and modernizing the grottiest game to ever grace the PlayStation 2. It won’t fundamentally reshape your understanding of the original, but it does offer a newly accessible way of appreciating its bold, depraved vision.
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