Summary
- Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 remake struggles to capture the original's fear and vulnerability with clumsy combat changes.
- The Remake's focus on action and combat erases the original's intentional design of making players feel truly defenseless and vulnerable.
- Adding upgradable weapons and skills may stray further from the creative vision of Silent Hill 2, losing its original impact and meaning.
I’m excited for 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Bloober Team’s 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Silent Hill 2 remake to finally come out so we can stop talking trash about it. Bringing one of the best survival horror games ever made back to life was never going to be easy, and I would have pitied whatever studio was burdened with the task. Being known for something as mediocre as 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Medium didn’t help matters, but that’s the world we live in, so I’ll meet the remake on its own terms when the time comes instead of wast🔯ing my energy.
But that’s proving difficult, b🍷ecause every new trailer and detail for the Silent Hill 2 remake only has it stepping on rakes in the midst of an impene♊trable foggy garden. James Sunderland is never going to find his dead wife when his clown shoes are making so much damn noise anyway.
Konami is in the midst of an awkward renaissance for Silent Hi𓆏ll, with this remake set to act🦹 as the apex of its precarious opening lap. Ascension and The Short Message have already dropped the baton.
Silent Hill 2 remake received its first dose of gameplay footage at the end of January as part of Sony’s State of Play Showcase. Konami billed it as a ‘Combat Reveal’ trailer with a focus on our protagonist swinging blunt objects and firing guns at a variety of awful horrors. It was clumsy, tonally in𝔉consistent, and much too ferocious for a game where the focus has always been on running away from threats instead of confronting them.
Before sexy dead nurses or Pyramid Heads were cemented in the wider canon as just another monster, they were representations of James’ deepest subconscious fears and insecurities. A reflection ꧂of the monster he really was and the demons he refused to acknowledge, which made them all the more te𝓰rrifying. You’d see them slither under cars or emerge in dimly lit corridors and quickly feel a chill run down your spine. James is a deadbeat husband, not a hardened marine.
He is meant to run away, or at best desperately swing a battered piece of wood into the misty darkness. Games like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Resident Evil instilled within us a false sense of security, something that Silent Hill 2 takes advantage of again and aga𝔉in to make us feel truly defenceless. It’s this original intent that has caused fans to view the remake as such sacrilege. The combat reveal has undead nurse🅺s jumping over chest-high walls like it’s Gears of War as James blows them away with a variety of guns from an over-the-shoulder perspective pulled straight out of RE4 Remake. It is framed as an action game, with enemy movements and character action perfectly reflecting that. It doesn’t feel right, and not because Bloober Team decided to improve otherwise barebones combat.
Critics on social media have pointed out the hypocrisy of Silent Hill 2 die-hards saying for so many years that, ‘well aside from the combat, it’s a masterpiece’ and then complaining when Bloober Team actually improves things. To assume it’s broken in the first place is missing the entire point though, and fails to consider the intentional design that ♋underpins the very best of survival♈ horror. It’s diametrically opposed to Resident Evil, which in the majority of its games has you play as trained operatives armed with weapons they know how to use.
They can still be overwhelmed, and frequently are, but with a loaded pistol and three ghouls at their heels, it isn’t unrealistic to ౠsee Jill Valentine emerge victorious. James Sunderland is prone to run away with his tail between his legs, and for the remake to erase that important narrative context already feels like a loss. If I can go up against unknowable horrors onl𒆙y to fill them with lead until they drop dead, why on earth should I be scared of them? Silent Hill asks you to consider that option only to fail miserably and leave well enough alone. James isn’t flinging pieces of wood like a clumsy fool or firing blindly because the controls suck; he doesn’t know how to fight, and thus does whatever damage he can before calling it a day.
Bloober Team is seeking to fix something it assumes was broken in the first place, or to add a layer of combat complexity to an e♕xperience that, at its very core, is worse off for it. If more trailers reveal upgradable weapons and skills I may need to check out entirely, because it all goes against the creative vision of Silent Hill 2 and why, more than two decades later, we still hold it in such high regard. It was a horror game that questioned conventions of the era to make players feel truly vulnerable. Many of its characters are mundane, but it is through🎉 this normalcy that we’re able to feel so grounded and terrified. Like it could easily happen to us if we walked headlong into tragedy without considering our own wellbeing.
Putting a gun in our hands and telling us we know how to use it and defend ourselves from unspeakable horrors removes everything we’re meant to be afraid of, and after that we are left with empty visuals and designs which lose all meaning. Silent H𓄧ill 2, especially a remake that promises to bring it back into the limelight, needs to be more than that.
