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 so effectively fostered. This game is also full of bloat and excess, as if the developers were so excited that they were able to pull off 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.
The subtlety of being hit with a steel pipe
Bloober wanting to expand the lore and backstory of characters is fine, so long as it stays in the spirit of the original game, and remains consistent with the other 3 original games. But padding out the gameplay is more tenuous. James is a singularly-focused protagonist. He is in Silent Hill to do exactly 1 thing, and that 1 thing is the only thing that he is concerned with doing. He is not the kind of protagonist who is going to explore and do side quests just for the sake of exploring and doing more side quests (unlike Henry from Silent Hill 4, Travis from Origins, or Murphy from Downpour, who are all more curious characters without a specific single-minded goal). If it isn't something that moves him towards finding Mary, James will not be caught dead doing it. I mean, this is, after all, the same James who has a popular reputation as being a horn-dog, but he completely blows-off Maria when he first meets her, because she isn't Mary, and she doesn't know where to find Mary.
Bloober repeats the wall and window-smashing tricks ad nauseum.
When Bloober was saying that the game is 50% longer, I was afraid that the extra content would be optional side quests and fan-servicey collectible hunts. Thankfully, Bloober seems to recognize James' single-mindedness. All of the new content basically just serves as progress gates, blocking access to the parts of the game that are from the original. But Bloober really does push these to the extreme breaking point. While the original game might leave rooms or entire wings of a building inaccessible, the Remake insists on forcing the player to have to go through almost every single room of every single level (with the sole exception of there being an off-limits wing of the Lakeview Hotel). If a door can't be opened, that just means there's a window you can smash, a wall you can tear down, or a duct you can crawl through -- which might be literally right next to the locked door. Something that might have originally required 2 or 3 steps to accomplish now requires 5 to 10 steps. At one point, the game literally makes the player repeat a level 3 times.
It isn't always obvious (to me or to James) how a given puzzle or quest is contributing to the main story until after the puzzle is solved or the quest resolved. So I spend the entire quest wondering if this is actual story content or just fluff side content, only to find that the quest does, in fact, conclude with me finding a key that will be necessary for going someplace actually important. But boy, oh boy, does the game meander around a lot before getting there.
The whole game is just full of these kinds of excesses that really push the design philosophies and atmosphere of the original game to their breaking point -- but without ever actually breaking.
There's a lot of extra padding, but thankfully no purely optional side quests to distract James.
All the extra padding, and the hoops that I have to jump through in order to progress is likely to deter repeat playthroughs to try to achieve other endings. The original game was tightly paced, and could be completed in a few hours if you know exactly where to go and what to do. And you didn't even have to skip all the cutscenes in order to make the original beatable within a few hours. So you could power through the game and also still enjoy the story, over a Saturday afternoon. In the remake, there's a trophy for completing the game in less than 10 hours, which seems to be the target for "powering through" the game. I'm sure a speed-runner could shave that down quite a bit more. But the point is that this remake is a much larger investment of time and effort from the player, and it's not something that I can just boot up and play through in a weekend just because I want to.
Ironically, despite the extra gameplay padding, and extended cutscenes that add dialogue saying things that didn't need to be said, this remake insists on rushing through certain scenes and moments. Perhaps the best example is the scene in the elevator at the end of the hospital. The original allowed the camera to linger on James, slouched over on the floor of the elevator. It then followed that up with a cutscene in which James shares his inner monologue in which he starts to doubt why he's even here to begin with, and whether Mary is trying to punish him. In the remake, James just slumps down to his knees, and gets up almost as soon as the elevator doors open. And there is no text describing his inner monologue, nor any dialogue of him vocalizing those doubts out loud.
Remakes lacks the inner monologue of the original.
More broadly speaking, I miss having an "examine" button that gives the character's inner thoughts about what they are seeing in the environment. This was most notable in the remake when I found Maria's room in the Otherworld Hospital. In the original game, the player can examine empty vials of prescription pills on the end table, and James will wonder (in text captions) if Maria is taking these pills, and if she is also sick like Mary. There is no such interaction in the remake. I found the room, and there were pill vials on the table, but I couldn't examine them, nor did James automatically make any comment about them.
Scenes like this, along with the tighter camera and complete lack of any textual descriptions of James' inner thoughts, really come together to make James feel less like an independent character, and more like a player avatar. His character doesn't provide any personal insight into the game world or the items he finds. He and the player see the same things, and understand and interpret them the same way.
This isn't really a Bloober thing, or a Silent Hill 2 Remake thing; this is just a modern game design thing, and I hate it.
But then there's other instances in which the dialogue has been changed to be more blunt, stating the character's intent or meaning outright, instead of leaving it unsaid, or letting it be communicated through facial expressions or dialogue. Maria is especially bad about this in the remake.
Smash and grab
This remake also has a few new tricks that it over-uses to the point of tedium. Ambushes from mannequins in particular occur so often that they just become annoying instead of scary. Enemies, in general, are also much more aggressive, faster, and have long-range lunging attacks that are difficult to dodge. Enemies also seem to be have Invincibility Frames or "hyper armor" (in Dark Souls parlance), and their attack animations cannot be interrupted once they begin, which leads to even more cheap hits.
I fear that all this will combine to deter players from potentially triggering the "In Water" ending in a first playthrough. There were very few cheap shots in the original game, and most damage from enemies actually came from the player getting over-confident and reckless in the tight confines of a room or hallway. You'd take an errant hit here or there, but rarely felt in imminent peril, so promptly healing didn't feel that necessary. After all, this is a game about resource-management, right? So why waste bullets when you can fight weak monsters in melee? And why heal minor damage when you can wait to take critical damage and use a more powerful and efficient healing item?
Mannequin ambushes stop being scary and become annoying very quickly.
Now, with each enemy being much more threatening, any individual encounter can take a careless player from full health to dead. It's much riskier to not top off health between encounters, because you may not get an opportunity in the faster-paced, higher-damage fights in the remake.
This game also over-utilizes the new glass-breaking and wall-smashing mechanics. Maria even comments on how James keeps destroying windows. I generally like the scrappy feeling that the game creates by allowing James to smash a car window to retrieve a health drink or ammunition from inside, but I think Bloober could have been a bit more restrained with just how many items they put behind breakable glass. I mean, how many people leave boxes of shotgun shells sitting on the passenger seat of their car?
The original game also had exactly 1 instance of breaking down a wall. Now it feels like I'm doing it 10 times in every level. I get that the original game didn't really give the player any indication that a melee weapon could be used to break a wall, so players could get stuck in the one place where they need to smash a wall. But now, that one part (that used to be a terrifying, panic-inducing moment) is completely trivialized.
People really like to leave ammunition
on the passenger seats of their cars.
In both the case of the mannequin ambushes, and breaking down walls, I think a much better approach would have been to do both of those things once or twice early in the game, just to show the player that it is possible. Then reserve it for important moments later on. Smashing walls could have been reserved more for secret or optional areas, so that it might still be surprising when you finally have to use it. Further, the threat of an ambush is enough to keep the player on their toes, and sheepishly peeking around corners. You don't have to actually ambush them around every corner in order to keep the suspense. In fact, it's counter-productive, because the player becomes desensitized to it and starts to expect it.
Invaded by the Otherworld
I've celebrated the more subdued Otherworld of Silent Hill 2 in the past, and the fact that it's not actually entirely certain which areas are Otherworld, and which areas are the "normal world". It's not entirely clear if there even are any other Otherworlds in the original game. All levels of the original Silent Hill 2 are surreal for sure, but Blue Creek and Brookhaven could arguably just be real, condemned buildings.
But now, Blue Creek and Brookhaven are explicit Otherworlds that look like the Otherworlds of the first and 3rd games. Entering the Blue Creek Apartments awards a PSN trophy for having entered the Otherworld. There is no mistaking the Blue Creek apartments as simply being a condemned apartment in the remake, as was the case in the original. This completely nullifies any interpretation of the first run-through of these areas actually being an Otherworld in which Silent Hill is manifesting a version of Silent Hill that looks more like James' remembers it. In fact, the remake seems to make it explicitly clear that James and Mary lived in Silent Hill, which makes it strange that they have such fond memories of a vacation there.
The Otherworld aesthetic is diametrically opposed to the original game's aesthetics.
The absolute nadir of the game, for me, was everything between entering the Brookhaven Hospital Otherworld and finding the key to the Historical Society. Brookhaven's Otherworld is all metal grates and toilets literally overflowing with shit. It's the complete antithesis to the condemned and waterlogged look or the original. Like, Bloober took the fact that James fishes an [optional] item out of a clogged toilet once in the original, and turns clogged or overflowing toilets into a constant motif for an entire level. This aesthetic might have worked if Bloober were remaking Silent Hill 3, with its horror being more derived from bodily functions, but for Silent Hill 2, it just couldn't miss the point more.
And speaking of missing the point, there are also multiple scenes in this game in which Laura is visible in the same frame with monsters. Stuff like this changes lore. In the original, it was unclear whether the monsters were present, but Laura can't see them, or if they simply do not manifest when Laura is around. The remake, unfortunately, answers that question.
Laura is in the same frame with visible monsters.
And it's so weird to me that Bloober would make mistakes like this, considering how many details they get correct. Or they're just deliberately injecting their preferred fan interpretations, at the expense of fans' ability to debate their interpretations. This one frame basically canonizes the explanation that the monsters are invisible to Laura, and by extension, that individuals definitely see different things at the same time; rather than the interpretation that all characters share the same physically-manifested reality, but that monsters simply don't manifest in Laura's presence.
You can say that I'm just bitter because Bloober doesn't agree with my particular head canon. But that's only in this case. In another case, they explicitly de-sexualized the scenes of Pyramid Head in the apartments, which actually does support one of my pet theories. So I won some, and I lost some, but I'm still annoyed that Bloober took sides on these issues and actively cut off further discussion and debate.
Sticking the landing
Thankfully, Silent Hill 2 remake comes out of that mid-game nadir on an absolute tear. The second half of the game is where it really shines!
Abstract Daddy was probably the least subtle thing in the entirety of the original Silent Hill 2 -- although the monster still went by the name "Doorman" for years because people couldn't actually tell what the heck it was supposed to look like (that's how subtle the original game was!). Well, in addition to getting a much better look at the monster itself, in much greater detail and resolution, the fight has been expanded in very interesting ways in the remake. I generally didn't care for the mulit-phase boss fights, but the one case of Abstract Daddy absolutely nails it! The arena symbolically changes and expands to represent Angela's trauma. It's very on-the-nose, in keeping with Bloober's overall lack of subtlety, but it works very well, and hits hard. In fact, the expansion of the Abstract Daddy might be Bloober's best contribution to the public understanding of Silent Hill 2, and it is the highlight of the entire game.
Abstract Daddy gave me new insights into the original Labyrinth level.
In fact, Bloober's take on this fight actually gave me insight into what the hell the Labyrinth in the original game might actually represent. I'll be honest, I always thought that the Labyrinth was the worst level in the original Silent Hill 2, and I was never quite sure what meaning or symbolism it was supposed to have. But now I do, and it makes me wonder if James and Angela might have more in common than I've always thought...
For fans of the original Silent Hill 2, the Abstract Daddy fight, alone, makes the remake worth playing, in my opinion!
Eddie is the other standout highlight of the game. His voice actor, Scott Haining, completely nails the role and gives an absolutely sinister performance. I actually had to check IMDB to make sure that Bloober didn't just hire the same actor as the original. The motion capture actor also does a good job with Eddie's body language and facial expressions. Eddie steals the scene whenever he's on-screen, and his boss fight is honestly the most frightening and intimidating encounter in the entire game. Sorry, Pyramid Head, but you're a pushover in this game, compared to Eddie. Eddie was always one of the toughest fights in the original game, but the remake makes him absolutely lethal if you let your guard down for a moment.
The Lakeview hotel is also good. It has quite a bit of back-tracking between a few different rooms, but it doesn't seem to have as much of the puzzle and progress gate bloat as the other levels. The hotel just flows so much smoother and quicker than all the other levels in the game, and James' exploration of the hotel feels so much more purposeful and organic.
It isn't perfect though. I dislike how Bloober made the Lakeview Hotel start falling apart before James watches the video tape, and removed the sequence in which James teleports between different wings of the hotel after leaving room 312. I think this is probably a technical concession due to the seamless nature of the game's maps. It's harder to swap out the level geometry in real-time. But Bloober has done stuff like this before. In fact, non-Euclidean liminal spaces is one of the things that Bloober's games are most well-known for. So it's weird that Bloober didn't exercise their trademark Non-Euclidian liminal space level design here. I was expecting the climax of Lakeview Hotel to be even more trippy than the original; not just a bland trek back through a linear series of already-collapsed rooms.
Bloober also removed all of the Abstract Daddy enemies from Lakeview. This is probably the right decision, but it does eliminate any possible speculation about whether Angela has some relationship to the hotel. For example, I had speculated that the hotel might have been the site of one of her first sexual abuse incidents, and that she might have been the one who started the fire that burned down the hotel (which also explains the fire stairway in her final scene). The removal of all the Abstract Daddies in this level kind of nullifies that theory as well.
Lakeview begins rotting before James watches the video tape,
and the remake completely ignores the original non-Euclidean hallways after the video tape.
The right vision for the wrong game?
This is a difficult review. Bloober does so much of this remake so well, but their few misfires just feel like such abysmally bad design choices, that they come close to ruining the entire game for me. I just can't look past these bad decisions the way that so many other reviewers seem to be doing.
Overall, Silent Hill 2's remake is mostly an excellent adaptation on most technical levels. It looks great on a graphical level, it plays like an adequately-polished modern-day over-the-shoulder shooter (except for the confounding decision to put the heal button where the original map button used to be), and it adapts the original story serviceably. It even goes above and beyond by adding to that story in a few meaningful ways! But this remake also alters lore and story in questionable ways, and it does not successfully adapt much of the nuance and restraint that made the original Silent Hill 2 such an enduring horror masterpiece. From the camera, to some dialogue changes, to the radically different aesthetic approach to the Otherworld, to the unnecessary padding of the plot, Bloober's design choices often go in the opposite direction of what I would have wanted to see in a Silent Hill 2 remake.
Ironically, many of these creative choices would have worked much better in a remake of the first Silent Hill! For Silent Hill 2, however, they just aren't good decisions. What we're left with is yet another lesser version of Silent Hill 2 (to go along with the HD Collection), and no way to play the near-perfect original on modern systems. If only Bluepoint had been given this job...