I'm going to approach this review as a lifelong fan of Silent Hill 2, and as someone who is a purist and originalist. I'm assuming that those reading this review will be people who want to know how the remake holds up against the original, and I will assume that those people have already played the original. But if you haven't, or you don't want the remake to be spoiled, then consider yourself warned: this review will be very spoiler-heavy, and will become increasingly spoiler-y as it goes on! So be warned. If you sense that I'm starting to talk about something spoiler-y, then STOP READING!

I was a vocal critic of Bloober's ability to adequately adapt this game. I would have preferred to see a company like Frictional handle this (or Bluepoint, or The Chinese Room, or even FromSoft). I was especially critical of the trailer that showed the opening cutscene of the remake, which I thought had already spoiled the game.

In defense of myself, and everyone who was critical of the early trailers for this remake, Konami and Bloober did delay this game by a whole year, while Bloober apparently changed parts of the game based on feedback to those trailers. So it isn't necessarily the case that we were all wrong about Bloober and this remake, since our commentary and criticisms were apparently incorporated into the final release of the game. (Including tweaking the opening cutscene). In any case, Bloober did not completely fuck this up! This remake is competently put together, and is a fine game on its own right. It's also reasonably faithful to the original -- or at least, as reasonably faithful as I would expect for a modern remake.

Increased graphical fidelity allows more evidence of economic collapse and urban decay.

Unlike with other remakes or remasters (such as Dead Space or The Last of Us), Silent Hill 2 is old enough that it can benefit from an increase in graphical fidelity. One of my favorite changes in the new game is the increase in graffiti, litter, and other signs of urban decay. This gives the impression that Silent Hill is abandoned for perfectly normal [non-supernatural] economic reasons. Documents found within the game (some of which are even new in the remake), reinforce this. This is a small, tourist town that has a history of serial murders, mysterious deaths and disappearances, and weird occultism. That kind of stuff can really hurt the tourism trade, and send such a town spiraling into recession and abandonment.

I also really like some of the upgraded lighting and weather effects. The fog looks great, and there's even an intense wind storm that happens occasionally to try to pressure the player to find shelter in the next area that you're supposed to explore. This is the kind of stuff that I would put into a new Silent Hill game if I were in charge of designing a new game. I have some issues with Bloober's execution of this wind storm, but the idea is still good.

Bloober also makes good use of the Dual Sense controller. Radio sounds come from the controller's speaker. The lightbar along the touchpad changes color to serve as a health indicator. The impact of a melee strike can really be felt. And I even feel the gentle pitter patter of rain on the controller when exploring outside. I think there might also be directional rumbles to indicate when an enemy might be sneaking up on you from off-camera.

Technically speaking, the game looks great and mostly feels good to play. They do a mostly serviceable job, and I actually do like some of the new cutscenes, dialogue, and backstory that is presented. Visits to Rosewater Park and the Abstract Daddy boss fight stand out to me as highlights in this regard.

Bloober repeatedly toys with veteran players' expectations.

However, there are a number of fundamental design decisions that I strongly disagree with, as well as technical concessions which have dramatic effects on the atmosphere, tone, and lore of the game. Much of these weaknesses are things that critics (including myself) feared would be in the game.

The tighter camera angle removes the sense of detachment between the player and James, as well as the detachment from James and what is going on around him. Specifically, the camera (along with sound design) in the original game's forest hike into town elicited a paranoid feeling of being watched or stalked that instantly makes the player uncomfortable. That feeling is almost completely gone from the remake.

For the most part, Bloober's designs lack a lot of the subtlety and restraint of the original, and the increased focus on action and combat dissipates the atmosphere of dread that so thoroughly permeated the original. This could just be me being desensitized by over 20 years of playing and replaying the original Silent Hill 2, but I just didn't think Silent Hill 2 Remake was scary at all, and its harsher environmental design and more intense action meant I also didn't feel the sense of loneliness, isolation, or quiet, surreal introspection that the original did so well. This game is also full of bloat and excess, as if the developers were so excited that they were able to pull of several technical or mechanical feats, that they decided to copy-paste those mechanic everywhere! To the point that parts of this game start to get tedious. And that's basically been one of the core complaints with all of Bloober's games.

This game has a nasty case of "look what I can do!", and it drags out the game, and drags down the final product.

For Halloween this year, and in anticipation of Konami announcing new Silent Hill titles, I have adapted an old blog post about the Lakeview Hotel of Silent Hill 2 into a YouTube video essay. The video essay includes some revisions, including clarifications of certain points, further explanation of some of the assumptions and head canon that go into my interpretations, and so forth.

This video was available exclusively to Patrons for 2 weeks prior to its public release. If you would like to support my content creation, and get perks such as early access to content, please check out my Patreon page and consider becoming a contributor. And be sure to take the Patron entry survey to tell me which content you like the most, so that I can try to produce more of that type of content.

Editing of the video and its release to Patrons was completed a couple days before Konami announced its upcoming livestream in which it would announce new games, so I sadly did not know about the new slate of Silent Hill games (including the official announcement and trailer of the Silent Hill 2 remake). At the time of releasing this video, all of that was still rumor -- and not entirely convincing rumor, considering the bevy of Silent Hill rumors that have been floating around since the cancellation of Hideo Kojima's Silent Hills all the way back in 2015.

The first season of Stranger Things was a mysterious and intriguing piece of television that successfully channeled an eclectic collection of 80's and 90's nostalgia (from E.T. to Stephen King to The X-Files to Dungeons and Dragons). Instead of being a cynical piece of derivative nostalgia bait (or an outright cash-in on established intellectual property), Stranger Things somehow felt wholly fresh and original.

Unfortunately, season 2 lacks a lot of that mystery and originality that made it's predecessor work so well. Season 2 just feels too familiar. We already know about the Upside Down, and the Demogorgon, and Eleven's psychic powers, and the secret government research lab conducting shady experiments. None of that can really carry the show anymore. But that's about all that season 2 has. There's nothing very new. There's no surprises.

The introduction of a new girl creates tension within the group.

Compounding this problem is that plot points and set pieces feel recycled from last season. Most are inverted in some way, as if they are Upside Down reflections of the previous season's events. But that isn't nearly as clever as the wordplay might make it sound. For example, there's a sub plot of tension among the boys because a new girl has entered their group. This time, it's Max instead of Eleven, and it's Mike who's unhappy with the new dynamic of the group instead of Dustin and Lucas. Midway through the season, there's a set piece in which Will draws a bunch of pictures and hangs them up all over the house. It feels like a repeat of Joyce hanging up the Christmas lights, except that it's Will trying to communicate with the Upside Down instead of Joyce trying to communicate with her son. And the group even takes in another stray and tries to hide it; except this time, it's a baby demogorgon instead of Eleven.

There's a sort-of new monster in the form of the "Shadow Monster" that haunts Will. This shadow monster, however, doesn't really do anything, and we're left with only the army of dog-like demogorgons. It takes an approach similar to James Cameron's Aliens , in that it multiplies the number of monsters, gives them a "nest", and adds some big "queen" that seems to be controlling everything. This comparison is driven home by the shadow monster's resemblance to a ghostly xenomorph, and the inclusion of a scene that was basically pulled straight from Aliens (right down to the beeping motion detectors). But unlike Aliens , I never felt threatened by the surplus of demogorgons, and the Upside Down never seemed as mysterious as the xenomorph hive or their horrifying queen.

The "Shadow Monster" is a threat that never really pays off -- at least not this season.

While the first season didn't revel in sudden character deaths for the sake of shock value like Game of Thrones , the sudden death of Barb midway through the season did manage to raise the stakes for everyone else. Season 2 has nothing like that. There's no sudden or unexpected deaths of any characters who aren't obviously disposable from the moment they arrive on scene. And even among the cannon fodder characters, the death count is still ridiculously low...

After P.T. took the PlayStation Network by storm two years ago (geez, has it already been that long?), I set up my Google news feed with a subcategory specifically for Silent Hill news. I wanted to keep up with the progress of the game, since it looked like the most promising project the series had seen in a decade. After the traumatic cancellation of Silent Hills, that news feed has been mostly populated with articles mourning the loss, or with conspiracy theories about the game's return. Lately, however, a new story has been repeatedly populating that news feed: reviews and interpretations of the Netflix original series "Stranger Things".

With the internet's insistence that Stranger Things is "the show that Silent Hill fans have been waiting for", and some recommendations from co-workers and friends, I decided to give Netflix's new horror thriller a chance. So while House of Cards and Daredevil still sit unwatched in my Netflix queue, my girlfriend and I powered through all eight episodes of Stranger Things within a week.

Stranger Things reminded me a lot less of Silent Hill, and a lot more of Twin Peaks and E.T., but I loved the series nonetheless. I found myself amazed by just how much the show looks and feels like something from the late eighties or early nineties, and by how well it manages to capture a sense of nostalgia for its sources of inspiration without having to license them outright. Hollywood could learn a thing or two from this show. The insistence on reviving franchises like Star Trek, Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, The X-Files, etc., is starting to wear very thin. At best, these films feel like high-budget fan fiction. At worst, they feel like cynical attempts to play off of nostalgia for a quick cash-grab. Very rarely do they feel like genuinely inspired works of creative art. This reliance on adaptation instead of inspiration has created a dearth of creativity that in many cases has tarnished once-venerable intellectual properties.

The internet claims that Stranger Things is "the Silent Hill show that fans have been waiting for".

Stranger Things doesn't stoop so low. It wears its influences proudly on its sleeves, but it also remains, thankfully, it's own entity. It never feels derivative; it never feels stale; and it never feels creatively bankrupt. It's not exactly original (as it blatantly incorporates elements of its inspirations into its plots and characters), but it also manages to occasionally surprise with its clever subversions of genre tropes. It never feels like the shallow fan service that I've gotten so used to seeing from Hollywood blockbusters, and (most importantly) I could enjoy it without the baggage of expectations from a recognized namesake.

Much of this is due to the characters and performances, all of which are great...

Years ago, I wrote a post regarding the nature of Silent Hill's Otherworld and how it is most likely not a parallel dimension. In it, I may have made a significant mistake. Uh oh. Everybody makes mistakes, and I'm definitely not an exception. But no, I haven't changed my mind and conceded to parallel dimensions :P

Specifically, I failed to consider an important piece of evidence, and therefore may have mischaracterized the Lakeview Hotel Otherworld. In that post, I stated that the burnt-out version of the hotel was the Otherworldly-version that had been transformed as a kind of intermix between James' and Angela's Otherworlds. This is not necessarily true.

In fact, the burnt-out, waterlogged version of the hotel may not be the Otherworld at all. It could be the hotel in its natural state. The "normal"-looking version of the hotel may very well be the Otherworld one.

Is the Lakeview Hotel basement an Otherworld? Or is it the real hotel, as it currently exists?

In this post (as in others that I've written), I'm going to use the term "Otherworld" to refer colloquially to the areas of the game that have undergone supernatural transformations that modify the area substantially from its natural state. I still do not believe that the Otherworld is an actual "other world" that exists separately from reality. I still believe that the entirety of the Silent Hill universe (as created by the original developers) exists in our singular, real world, but is transformed via a supernatural force or entity that is native to the region.

Now, let's talk about the Otherworld in Silent Hill 2!

The Otherworld of Silent Hill 2 is a confusing and complicated issue in the series. Unlike the other games, SH2's Otherworld is much more subtle and restrained. This is due to two reasons. First, having a bloody, industrial Otherworld does not fit the story, since SH2 is a melencholy personal tale about James' mental state in the wake of his wife's death. It's not a game about a cult summoning a corrupt god to reshape the world into a hellish paradise.

Secondly, Silent Hill 2 deals - in part - with the state of the town after the events of Silent Hill [1]. Since Silent Hill shows signs of massive renovation and reconstruction efforts, it is reasonable to assume that Silent Hill 2 takes place shortly after the events of the first game (probably within a year or two; maybe even days or weeks), and that the town is still rebuilding from the devastation that it sustained from the first game. The cult has suffered losses in its leadership, a crisis of faith, and is also in a state of rebuilding and recruiting. As such, the cult does not play an active role in Silent Hill 2. With no God or psychic girl around this time to project her nightmares onto reality, the paranormal activity experienced by the characters of SH2 are likely a lingering effect of the spiritual and psychic interference of the first game. Because of this, the manifestations experienced are much more personal and subdued, as the influences must be pulled from the twisted minds of the few characters in the game.

In fact, the general consensus among Silent Hill fans is that SH2 only has between two and four full Otherworld levels...