Hands-On: Silent Hill 2 feels like it’s getting the Capcom-style remake treatment it deserves

Modern remakes of classic survival horror games have a gold standard – Capcom‘s remake of Resident Evil 2.

It’ll be of great relief to Silent Hill fans, then, that we were quickly reminded of the current standard bearer as we played the Silent Hill 2 remake for the first time.

Bloober Team‘s take on the game essentially serves two purposes. It’s an apology from Konami for the state it’s left the franchise in for years, and it’s a reintroduction to the series for a new generation of players who have only heard it spoken about in whispers.

“We wanted to evoke this feeling of ‘oh, I remember that’ even though it’s not the same thing,” creative director Mateusz Lenart told us. “It plays differently, it’s structured in a different way. What counts, in our opinion, is the moment that players think they are playing the original, because that’s what stays with you.”

That’s inherently the challenge at the heart of all of these remakes. Do you make something structurally the same, but gussied up to modern aesthetic standards, or do you take the composite parts of what makes a game iconic, and re-apply them to the modern standards of the medium?

For Silent Hill 2, so far the game feels like something that’s faithfully invoking the spirit of the original wrapped in a satisfying and scary modern survival horror.

Our demo consisted of the game’s opening three hours. As we arrived in the hills, made our way down the path to the cemetery and then into the center of the town, the game nails its tone from the jump.

Following James down the steep hillside into the wooded area ahead of the cemetery, we were reminded of Alan  Wake 2’s imposing forests and foreboding atmosphere.

The descent into the fog, this time an atmospheric tool rather than a mechanical crutch, gives players both new and old a sense of what they’re getting into. The game is played in third-person and controls similarly to the recent Resident Evil remakes or the aforementioned Alan Wake 2.

We were soon stalking through the town with nothing but an old piece of wood with nails in it to ward off the shambling creatures that screeched at us as we ran from building to building.

James, the game’s protagonist, is now much more agile than in the original, able to dodge and counter enemy attacks. The timing isn’t impossible, but you’ll still have to keep your guard up. We often found ourselves running around with the red halo of impending death clogging up the screen, following our failed attempts to dodge properly.

While Silent Hill 2 nails the tone of the original, we were somewhat worried beforehand about how some of the original scares would translate into the modern era. In the eyes of some fans, it’s a can’t-win situation. You either change things, subsequently annoying the hardcore base, or you retain everything, cheesiness and all, and potentially turn off new fans.

“That’s the most interesting aspect of remaking a game like this,” Lenart tells us. “In the original, the fixed camera allowed the developers to hide threats. Not only this, the old era of consoles didn’t have the power to show all of the things that exist in the space. A big part of the horror was created in the player’s mind, so recreating that feeling is a challenge.

“We needed to expand on the design of enemies. Mannequin, for example, has more mechanics. She can hide, she can surprise the player.”

Can she ever. It’s an unedifying experience getting caught by a jump scare in the middle of a packed room of other journalists playing the same demo,  but more than once we were caught on the back foot as the mannequin charged out of a dimly lit cupboard at us.

Every room we entered in the highly-detailed complex featured at the end of the demo was filled with misdirects, and places for enemies to hide. Even in rooms in which it felt like we could trust that we were alone, every decrepit wardrobe or jacket hanging on a coat rack had us on edge.

We mentioned at the beginning that Silent Hill 2 is not only a remake for hardcore fans who have been left out in the cold for years, but it’s also an introduction to the series for a new generation. With that in mind, there will probably be more than a few players asking if they need to play the non-existent Silent Hill 1 remake before diving into this.

Lead producer Maciej Glomb laughs as we broach the subject of starting with a sequel. “If you’re asking why start with Silent Hill 2, the decision wasn’t ours to be made. Konami wanted to revitalise the franchise with this one since it’s the most well-known and considered to be the best.

“It worked out for the best, because Silent Hill 2 fits what Bloober Team can do the best. For our employees, this is their absolute dream project. Everybody wins.”

As we played through the game’s opening, we couldn’t help imagining what playing through these exact sequences will be like for the most dedicated fans of the franchise, when the game is released in a few short weeks.

While they’ll know the original game like the back of their hand every deviation, every reimagined cutscene, and crucially every location that’s now in stunning 4K will either be a moment of relief or justification for their doubts.

“We’re often asked if the pressure from the fans got to us, to some extent, it definitely did,” Glomb tells us. “We know every trailer, and every asset we release is so closely watched, every second directed into little parts. It’s hard, we haven’t experienced it before. Our games weren’t as high in people’s regard before. The thing that we always say is that the biggest pressure was coming from ourselves.

“If we weren’t making this game, we would be those people on Reddit checking every frame. It’s enriched the experience. After every trailer we get a lot of feedback – negative or positive, we don’t really care, as long as we can take something out of it to make the game better.

“If we weren’t making this game, we would be those people on Reddit checking every frame. It’s enriched the experience. After every trailer we get a lot of feedback – negative or positive, we don’t really care, as long as we can take something out of it to make the game better.”

“There are things that people have noticed that we didn’t notice before, and it’s impacted some of our decisions. Not all of them – in some cases we’ve already tested something they suggested – but it was a case-by-case scenario.”

We came away from Silent Hill 2 far more confident about the remake than we were before we played it. The gameplay feels great, the game is graphically impressive, and the atmosphere of the original has been replicated perfectly. It’s an inherently different experience in the transition between fixed camera to third-person, but at no point does it feel like the heart of Silent Hill 2 has been lost.

Crucially, for the health of the series, Silent Hill 2 feels like it’ll be exactly the kind of shot in the arm that will bring the series back into vogue. The Resident Evil remake comparisons will likely be inescapable, but is that a bad thing when Capcom’s latest efforts have been just as genre-defining for modern survival horrors as both Resident Evil and Silent Hill were in the genre’s nascent days?