The “Run away” thing is in the original, but it’s a trail of notes where each one tutorializes some aspect of the game before building up to one that just says “Run away” then another that has “Run away” written on it a dozen times
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I really gotta replay the original SH2, it’s been too long.
This is one of the differences with the original that’s most vivid to me, because killing the monsters used to offer no satisfaction, you just kind of grimly, repetitively wail on them as they cry out in pain and then they’re gone. It feels ugly. But in this, combat was designed to get that dopamine hit and there’s the sense of having ‘vanquished’ monsters. When you kill them it is ‘triumphal’ and ‘rewarding’. Consequently the player’s entire relationship to the monsters changes and I feel like it makes them way less evocative of anything outside of being ‘a video game enemy’. It’s action game combat and not horror game combat and that throws off the tone, when ‘tone’ was the entire point of SH2.
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I agree with all of this but also enjoy the wrinkles of not just being able to mash against things composed mostly of legs (and sometimes torsos) while bumping into locked doors on a map
I may feel differently about this at the 5-hour mark, although I do have my suspicions that certain areas are now designed as specific wraparound gauntlets in the way the original was not
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this game runs surprisingly well on steam deck without feeling like it compromises visuals or atmosphere too much
I just completed the first major puzzle at neely’s bar. and it is getting way more right than wrong so far. I’m genuinely surprised. it feels correct. I don’t think any of the additional content detracts. the incidental writing is fine imo. mostly consistent with what is in the original game. some of the documents are a little tutorially in a way that I dislike but along with all the other minor grievances it doesn’t detract from what it does well. combat is suitably stiff and awkward and feels about as brain dead as the original game. you tend trade damage in encounters in the exact same way. even with the dodge button (which is a weird choice and feels unneccessary so far) nothing is making it too easy or too videogamey. with difficulty maxed out you are strongly incentivized to avoid combat as much as you can. it’s arguably better than the original here too bc you can’t just stunlock the straightjacket monsters with the medium pressure plank attack.
the atmosphere is perfect. the audio design is exceptional — up there with resident evil 7. except the soundscapes are way more detailed than they need to be, not just in terms of substance but also in terms of environmental specificity. for example as you near the shuttered tunnel by lake view parking lot at the outset of the game you hear howling wind passing through the tunnel. it’s full of details like this that are completely inconsequential and optional but do a lot to make the experience immersive. if anything it’s on the busy side, but even this feels coherent with the oppressive atmosphere of the original. there are constant shuffling and creaking sounds and the effect is that you never feel alone even when you know there are no enemies or npcs around. I could see this approach wearing thin if it’s sustained for the entire game but for now it’s working and I can’t help but appreciate how well it’s done, especially because most AAA games, even horror games, tend to skimp out on audio detail and quality. I wonder is akira yamaoka directed and created all the sound design as well? it feels like his work.
I would need to check but the intro sequence with james washing his face in the bathroom mirror feels heavily revised from what was first shown. his facial expression is more neutral and his voice delivery is way more understated. it feels truer to the original but it doesn’t copy it note for note. and overall all the voice acting up to this point has been quite good as well. it took a moment to get used to how deep james’s voice is but once you do, it works really well. it feels like they are deliberately characterizing him as a hapless dope in a way that feels very true to the original as well.
ironically my biggest complaint (so far) is with the music, which is mostly very excellent but the music that plays in east vale has this weird crescendo that sounds like it’s a dynamic cue meant to signify an approaching threat. but it’s just a scripted part of the track. the first time it happened it effectively faked me out but it just loops and repeatedly hits the crescendo. it wears thin pretty quickly and just feels awkward and unnecessary and I can’t even blame that on bloober. but it’s also not that big of a deal.
there is something vaguely off with the character models. like they look good but their proportions seem vaguely cartoony and it’s kind of off-putting. but I wonder if there’s something about the lowered rendering settings on steam deck that are causing it to look that way. l’m away from home right now but I think I might restart the whole game when I get back to my PC. it’s doing enough for me so far that I would be happy to replay the start of the game.
it’s not perfect, there are a ton of small things that are annoying or awkward or weird or rough around the edges. but overall I’m very impressed. imo it’s nailing the most important things.
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the women look like bobbleheads
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Have they redone the score a lot? Kinda curious about that side of things with remakes.
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There are a lot of audio cues and ambient tracks directly lifted from the original and I think Yamaoka is still directly involved in selecting and composing new material for this. I’ve only gotten to the end of the apartments so far but I don’t really like the bits of cloying acoustic guitar added to some of the original themes which kind of, along with the combat, makes it reek too much of TLOU for me…this is in line with what most have said here but I keep wanting to just sum it up as “they really padded this out too much and it’s tonally off but, I guess this is someone’s idea of SH2 shoehorned into modern survival horror and not the PS2 game I grew up with”
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The reimagined soundtrack was once announced to be a collaboration between Yamaoka and Bloober’s resident composer Arkadiusz Reikowski. No idea what happened but the final version of the official score is credited exclusively (pointedly so) to Yamaoka, Reikowski’s tracks are excluded, but he is credited as the audio designer/director and keeps mentioning on his social media how he has a story to tell one day. Assuming some unpleasant creative friction occured there, Yamaoka was probably very defensive of his most acclaimed work, and what I know of Reikowski’s body of work is mostly shameless aping of Yamaoka for better (audio design here) and worse (his past compositions)
Re: why can’t they just rerelease the original SH2 alongside it, I do think SH4’s GOG release shows they would if they could, the voice actor royalties/source code issues are seemingly too much of a headache which is probably one of the reasons this was made
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yeah the original bag enemies are one of the best examples I can think of maintaining tension because they never really become explicitly hostile towards you. They spray stuff at you but it’s hard to say if they even mean to, and even in combat with them it’s hard to say if they’re really fighting. You’re left feeling nothing when it ends.
When an enemy turns and targets you and clearly wants to attack that’s for me the clear apex of the moment and when all the tension is gone. SH2 would just maintain that feeling
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Yeah there’s far too many enemies and too much combat. I knocked it down to Easy so I could blow through everything.
The game being twice the length of the original seems a symptom of the longer gameplay loops. I wanted the apartments and the hospital to be done and over with, but I felt that way in the original, and in SH1 and 3.
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Without the dynamic camera angles it is really easy to miss important objects. Feel like the behind the player is a detriment. But whoever complained about the wrap around end cutscene into gameplay, I love that in every game, every time.
I hated in Dead Space that you could stomp meat at any time and I hate it here. James feels like a psycho swinging a nailed 2x4 into windows screaming. I don’t know why I put the puzzles on difficult. Why I thought to trust Bloober team. So far I’ve had to look up two solutions Thanks Modern Internet and been mad both times. I think it was something messing up with the rendering engine that made finding a clue in the safe-apartment puzzle impossible.
It’s just dull.
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I know everyone likes point to the loose combat as the series’ trademark but for me Silent Hill was always all about the camera. Feeling like you were getting the POV of something stalking you when the camera twisted and flipped overhead in that alley at the start of Silent Hill 1 was a monumental moment. Ditching that aspect of the series for a supposedly straight forward update feels like really missing the point.
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Replayed silent hill 1 yesterday and this is absolutely true. The way the camera moves and lurches, it is one of the main characters of the game.
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it’s such a fundamental point about horror cinematography i don’t understand why they ever let players have a quick wide-angle camera
at least in first-person games and like RE4 the FOV is so constrained that they can manipulate your attention from the inside out
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just replayed real silent hill 2 over the last few days and in addition to the fixed angles the swinging L2 camera lurching toward whatever you’re trying frantically to get a look at is certainly god tier
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yeah the l2 camera in the silent hill games (it was also this sickening in sh1!) is amazing
It’s a shame that gamers want ‘quality of life improvements’ because this camera is the best camera for a horror game
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At the heart of both the combat and the camera maybe is that this used to be a genre defined by the limits it placed on player agency. There was a unique shock and sense of tension in a loading screen immediately dumping you into a new area with a fixed camera angle and you having to quickly re-orient how tank controls needed to be manipulated from this perspective in time to respond to whatever threat was suddenly right there. The more facile the mechanics become, the more the player is granted a sense of mastery, of being in control, which is antithetical to horror.
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Being a legacy fan of franchises was the true horror all along
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I don’t respect this remake, so I set up my old PS2 to replay the original with my partner, who’s never played a Silent Hill game before. Unfortunately, it seems my PS2’s laser might be on its way out. It stuttered hard during the first cutscene and eventually froze.
We watched some of the (very long) trailer for this remake on the PS5 store page and I found myself saying “oh! I know this spot! Wow! I remember this layout!” That, combined with my busted PS2 and the surprisingly semi-positive reception in this thread, convinced me to actually just get the dang remake.
I haven’t played much yet, but I agree, the new camera is a serious detriment.
They’ve done well with the visuals – Silent Hill feels like Silent Hill. I thought the reveal of the fissure blocking one of the streets was particularly well done. Environmental design was always one of the few things Bloober Team excelled at so I guess it’s not too surprising.
I hate James voicing all his thoughts… In the original SH games, I always liked the silent subtitles telling you the character’s internal monologue. Felt lonelier.
I really don’t care for the remake’s depiction of the bag enemies in the beginning. They look sort of pinker, and less abstract. Their color, the big HD zipper down their back, and their more clearly high heeled feet combine to really shove the symbolism down your throat. I also find their texture less nasty… The originals had this brownish sheen that gave them sort of a cockroach look that became more pronounced when they started crawling around. I dunno, big miss for me there. I’ll be curious to see how they do the rest of the monsters.
I’ll also be curious to see whether this remake does that thing the original did where some monsters outside of aggro range would just stand completely still until you got closer. I always liked that, found it eerie.
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