The original game was both combat-light and a little short, and Bloober has addressed both these issues head-on. For the latter, the remake has opened up a slew of new landmarks for us to explore, so I devoted a lot of time picking through the streets of Silent Hill, revelling in the new-found freedom of being able to visit shops and buildings that had hitherto been out of bounds for us. This, coupled with longer levels and more places to visit, more than doubles the original eight-ish hour run-time.
This doesn’t sound like an improvement to me. And the reviewer couches this praise between paragraphs that are saying the combat is monotonous and the puzzles are the same. Not really compelled by this glowing review.
Plus, I have to admit, my theory has always been that there’s something about the genre that causes horror fans to have on average some of the least discerning taste imaginable despite also being some of the most fervent celebrators.
Silent Hill 2 is an all time great and the idea that its faults are “combat-light and little short” is absolutely ridiculous. Pearls before fucking swine. Never expose gamers to anything good, they’ll only ever want to make it ugly.
feels odd to see silent hill 2 of all things get this typical gaming fanboy treatment where people have already decided bloober has nailed it based solely on the metascore and are now forcing “cynics” to “eat crow” before the wider public even had a chance to check out the game. SH fanbase has always had this reputation of being perpetually unhappy, arguably unhappy for a good reason even if it was probably smarter to let go, and I guess in the last few years the old guard did let go and it’s mostly happier younger people who love to post the screenshots of minmo ads or shitpost videos where james does skateboard tricks or whatever. and despite thinking I managed to let go as well, having played through sh2make I did feel depressed at how middlebrow it comes off now that it isn’t janky ps2 software flailing to say and do ambitious important things but an “updated” element of a wider, respectable brand strategy with incredible resources (and less taste/vision) behind it. I know some people feared what what silent hills would have been but a flawed idiosyncratic vision of a weirdo is way more than I expect of konami after connecting the dots between ascension, short message, this, and stuff I’ve heard behind the scenes. there was a hole here and I miss what it was before it became a cheeky easter egg.
It’s considered an unabashed classic now, but it might shock you to learn that the initial reviews for the sequel to Silent Hill weren’t so favourable in 2001. “The reviewers were talking about how it’s not really Silent Hill and, as I understand it, it’s with that timing that the company (Konami) had to figure out what games they’re going to make for next year,” Blaustein said. “And so it was decided that they would continue the series, but they split the team into two groups to work simultaneously.” As a result of this decision, Silent Hill 3 landed in 2003, with Silent Hill 4: The Room arriving in 2004, just a year later.
“I think it was very rushed, you know, making two Silent Hill games at the same time, having split the team,” Blaustein said. “These guys who, up until this point, have been completely collaborative, throwing ideas at each other and coming up with the best ones — now they’re just trying to slap together some stuff. Silent Hill 3 was still very much, you know, in Japan, with a great deal of collaboration between us all,” he added. “I think Donna Burke did a really great job with Claudia (Wolf). Right away, I was like, just do Galadriel, man…”
Whatever its comparative merits are when take on its own, they are totally negligible in the face of its nonexistent artistic ambitions. It exists only to make money. That was the only impetus behind a remake of SH2. What started out as expression was reduced by others to “content”, a “product”, a “toy”. I’m not sure there’s anything else that needs to be said.
