In myriad ways, Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 seems like an extraordinarily rare type of remake. Not only does it preserve nearly every piece of iconic and paramount lore or storytelling but it also adds onto the original’s story in interesting ways while extrapolating majorly on each gameplay sequence and dungeon. Having more than double the runtime of the original, it was always obvious that not everything would be one-to-one in the Silent Hill 2 remake. Still, the changes made are all in service of Bloober’s over-the-shoulder reimagining and it’s in this drastic perspective shift that even its most trivial adaptations are placed under a microscope.
Players can know with absolute certainty that they’ll be out of harm’s way whenever they are in the same room as a red square in the original Silent Hill. This is mainly due to the fact that each door or passageway is a loading screen that enemies can’t follow players through, and yet save rooms, stairwells, or hallways are particularly calming despite Silent Hill’s red save point squares always possessing an odd, ominous atmosphere. This is wholly upended in the remake, though, and how players interact with red squares or even decide to progress through a hallway full of enemies is a novel challenge.
Silent Hill 2’s Remake Save Points aren’t All Safe
In the remake, being near a red save file square no longer guarantees that players are out of enemies’ jurisdiction. In fact, many enemies are capable of following James Sunderland fairly aggressively—lying figures can pour over windowsills and ledges that players would be able to hop over, for instance, and nurses can maneuver into narrow squeeze-through passages.
There are areas with red squares that enemies don’t enter, meaning they’re technically save rooms for all intents and purposes, but it’s also true that enemies may also access hallways and stairwells here and there where a red square happens to be.
Players will notice this in Silent Hill 2’s Brookhaven Hospital, for example, where they’ll likely be battling nurses feet away from a red square. This presents players with a unique obstacle in traversing areas packed with enemies since they can no longer duck into any random room to catch their breath, which consequently results in not every red square implying players are safe.
Silent Hill 2’s Combat is Met with Great Adaptations in the Remake
Therefore, the uncertainty of whether an area is safe or not is made highly suspenseful and encourages players to slay all enemies that may be idly waiting so that they’ve assured they are safe for the moment. Indeed, combat can sometimes be avoided in the Silent Hill 2 remake—not unlike nearly every other Silent Hill game—if players shut their flashlight off and walk cautiously, and yet encounters aren’t as easy to circumvent as they are in the original.
Mannequins are commonly hiding in contorted positions and prepared to ambush James as he approaches, so seeking them out to down them with stomps and strikes is one of the only ways players can be confident that they’re safe.
Of course, enemies do ‘respawn’ in the sense that they’ll eventually get back up and that may be a much more likely occurrence depending on how efficiently players can find items or solve riddles. Either way, it’s exciting to see how Bloober and Konami molded Silent Hill 2 for a third-person perspective. The remake’s gameplay embraces modern survival horror in its mechanics, which is a natural adaptation for the remake to have pursued and offers unprecedented frights instead of being one-to-one in how it decides to tackle the original game’s tension and combat.
Silent Hill 2
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 87 /100 Critics Rec: 94%
- Released
- October 8, 2024
- ESRB
- M For Mature 17+ // Blood and Gore, Language, Sexual Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Bloober Team
- Publisher(s)
- Konami
WHERE TO PLAY
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Franchise
- Silent Hill
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, PC
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
