The Silent Hill 2 remake is at its best when it feels like the original

Before sitting down to play three hours of the Silent Hill 2 remake at a recent Konami-led press event in London, we were shown a new trailer. Like the previous trailers, it left me skeptical. Although I’m not opposed to the project of remaking Silent Hill 2, I’m wary of any modernizing instinct that replaces the aged, the weird, and even the off-putting with the same glazed genericism of the 2020s AAA game.

After getting my hands on it, I think some of that skepticism is warranted. I also think that the original Silent Hill 2 is a very, very good video game.

In the opening section, James jogging around the streets could be any game with a multimillion-dollar budget that you can pick up on the PS5. Yes, it’s foggy, but other than that it is bland. The switch to an over-the-shoulder camera, the breaking windows to search through drawers for health items, and the white cloth marking places that are interactable all feel unspecific.

The latter two mechanics also point to the game being bigger, potentially significantly so. We were told the game is 12+ hours, while the original clocks in around eight. As an example, Neely’s Bar — once a small, flavorful spot with a clue marked on a map — becomes a quest location that involves visiting another new part of the town to pick up an item before running back to solve a puzzle. We were told that these new puzzles add to the lore of the franchise, a promise that will excite some — but I know I am not alone in being exhausted by them.

I don’t think this will do good things for the pacing. Konami PR recommended several times that we spend only an hour in the opening of the game before using a pre-set save point to jump ahead to the apartments section. I did that, so I can’t tell you what lore might have been buried in the Neely’s Bar puzzle. I also can’t tell you how it feels to have to spend a long stretch in the modern version of that town before getting to anything else, but the suggestion that we not do it speaks for itself, to some extent.

On the other hand, skipping ahead to the apartments wiped away the generic feeling. They’re claustrophobic, labyrinthine, and tense. Their design highlights some of what made Silent Hill 2 great in the first place but which isn’t common practice in modern AAA games. Gradually exploring with James’ scribbled-on map, for example, feels incomparably better than any game with a minimap or a tagged overhead compass.

This section also brings the remake’s improvements to the forefront. Watching a YouTube video of the original apartments segment after playing, I was taken aback by the difference in the sound design. The original James clunks with every footstep, but he hits enemies with a kind of silent disregard. In the remake, he sounded frightened and horrified when he swung into a mannequin creature. The combat changes aren’t anything stunning, but actor Luke Roberts deserves the credit for selling them.

Roberts and the other voice actors were apparently also key in finalizing the script for the remake, says Maciej Głomb, lead producer at Bloober Team. “These were all professionals,” he says. “So they often had ideas on how to sell a scene or a specific dialogue line. As long as they were in line with the tone we wanted, we usually [trusted] their experience and their proficiency.”

The script has also been reworked slightly to be more “understandable,” says Głomb, and edited with regard to how newer technology such as face motion capture has allowed the team to “show and not tell” certain aspects like emotional beats. But, while many of the mechanics have been updated for the remake, it’s the narrative that Bloober Team is trying to keep “as close as possible” to the original, says creative director Mateusz Lenart: “The characters of the original game, their specific arcs and endings, and what those characters are.”

There will, however, be additional endings. “I think that was one of the first requests from Konami, at the very beginning,” says Głomb. The original endings will all be present — “even the funny ones,” although “with our own twist for a little bit of an expansion.” But in new game plus runs, there will be the possibility to get other outcomes. Although Bloober Team wasn’t about to spoil anything directly, Głomb did say that the devs would be “adding something from the different worlds; from the different game,” presumably hinting at overlap with other Silent Hills.

In my last question for Głomb and Lenart, I ask whether they brought any outside inspirations to the remake. Silent Hill 2 is famous for drawing on film — Jacob’s Ladder and the work of David Lynch — and paintings by artists like Francis Bacon. I’m hard-pressed to think of another game with 2024 Silent Hill 2’s budget that reflects that kind of influence, and in particular I want to know if there’s anything in the last 20 years of art that’s contributed to the way the game has been updated.

The answer is mostly no. Lenart mentions the work of Italian painter Nicola Samori and French artist and performer Olivier de Sagazan as having ongoing impacts on his work, beginning as far back as Layers of Fear. But this project has mostly involved returning to the original game’s inspirations. “For the whole team, going back to those movies was the first thing that we wanted to do,” says Lenart. But “there was no need to look for much more,” he says. “We didn’t feel the need to look for modern references because the game is kind of stuck into that era.”

At the time, I was again skeptical of this. As I’ve said, the remade Silent Hill 2 is very much a product of its time in how it’s been modernized. It often looks and mostly plays like any other AAA game; it did not have to. But then I saw Pyramid Head for the first time.

Like in the original game, you first run into Pyramid Head lit up in ominous red behind a flimsily barred-off corridor in Wood Side apartments. Unlike in the original game, you already know who Pyramid Head is.

I cannot overstate the dread that I felt at seeing Pyramid Head for the first time. Despite not having played the game before, cultural osmosis had, unbeknownst to me until this exact moment, put a fear of being chased and killed by this creature deep in my bones. I stood there, looking at Pyramid Head through the bars, being looked at through the bars. And then the person next to me coughed, and I almost jumped out of my skin.At its best, Silent Hill 2 (2024)’s biggest inspiration is Silent Hill 2 (2001). And, again, Silent Hill 2 (2001) is a very, very good video game. It is, in the most crystalised sense of the word, iconic. Where the remake can make that iconism work, and draw on what made it that way, it will also be very, very good. That won’t be all the time, but it might be for enough of it.

Silent Hill 2 will be released Oct. 8 on PlayStation 5 and Windows PC.

Disclosure: This article is based on a preview event held by publisher Konami in London, England on Aug. 12. Konami provided Polygon’s travel and accommodations for the event. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.