the main thing i remember from The Medium is it has a little tactile segment where you hold and drag a razor through a skin door to “open” it, and the first time i saw it i was like oh its nice they had a whole system for such a weird oneoff thing. and then you do it like four more times through the game with the exact same item. so i’m glad their commitment to the bit continues. auteur theory!!
otherwise idk. there was a video a while back of a silent hill 3 mod with “modern camera” which meant over the right shoulder continuous camera and i didnt even want to make fun of it bc as soon as i saw it i was like, “this is bait… some smartass punk teenager made this to enrage 40yos. nobody actually thinks that this is good.” so the reception of this one has been something to ponder for sure.
honestly when we put it this way its probably better that they just remade silent hill 2 instead of doing more stupid fucking shit inspired by it but dramatically more offensive
More accurately it is that being sexually abused passes the abuser’s demon on to the abused, and the abused will then sexually assault others, unless they take the heroic step of kys.
I think the “modern camera” mods could be good as an alternative way to play games I love. I’d frequently fight the camera in 2-4 just to see one more little detail that is barely visible. I could see it particularly working with 3 because that’s about larger tunnels mostly. Not for a first time through but as an alternative way through.
Wow can you imagine the hate this would have gotten if they made you play through the whole thing once with the fixed view camera in order to unlock the behind the shoulder camera.
I caught a cold on the plane home from the meetup (kid right behind me was coughing incessantly the entire flight, so I guess everyone in the area was doomed with or without masks), so I took yesterday off and went to a locally-owned video game store in the afternoon to buy the Silent Hill 2 remake. I can’t remember the last time I bought a new video game at a physical store. I wanted a physical copy so I could lend it to friends and possibly sell it.
Positives so far:
Atmosphere is good.
The detailed environments are nice to look at with trash and decay all over the place and a muted palette. I was happy to see that they use gross colors for liquids on the ground and not just red, something I’ve always appreciated in Silent Hill 4 as well.
I thought it would bother me that James looks so different, but I got used to it pretty quickly and the voices are decent so far. And since they pretty much stick to the original script I assume this isn’t going to have some of the trying-too-hard-to-be-edgy writing seen in some of their other games.
You can set the subtitle size to “huge,” which is the way it should be for a Silent Hill game.
Not so sure about:
No set camera angles, as everyone has mentioned, though I think I can get used to that and take it on its own terms as OSB said.
I can’t seem to get the gamma setting right no matter what I do. Maybe it’s because I don’t have a 4K TV? While it’s maybe fitting that everything is a little hard to look at when indoors (with or without the flashlight), it’s a little exhausting. The “90s” video setting made that even worse, which is a shame because I think I might prefer it.
The music seems a little less focused and more ambient, with some songs familiar but with pieces missing. And the main loop in town is odd, as Rudie mentioned.
First glimpse of Red Pyramid Thing is much less menacing. Too close and too distinct, maybe.
Where’s the intro movie when you wait on the title screen? I miss that waterfall of mannequin legs and one of the best songs in the game.
This is totally opposite my usual attitude about such things, but I’ve always preferred the U.S. remake of The Ring to both the original book and the original movie.
I think I finally found the right gamma setting so I can leave the “90s” video filter on all the time. I reached the otherworld apartments last night, and that area looks great.
Seems like you can’t avoid fights in this game as often as you could in the original. Or maybe that was only ever in big, open spaces anyway. I don’t remember. There’s probably a trick to the timing of the dodge, but that’s one of those video game things I’m bad at so I’ll just have to hope they keep being generous with the healing items.
I killed one of those leggy creatures that spawned in the room after I picked up an item in the hospital, and right where its corpse fell was a note I just hadn’t seen. I read it and it said stuff like, “I need help. I need help. Why won’t they take care of me?” And I know that this letter was probably always there, even before the monster appeared. But it was seriously funny to think I looted this specific letter off its corpse and this monster was just sad and in need of help. Wouldn’t put it past Blooper Team to be honest.
But yes. This is a very serviceable “entertainment product” with, honestly, nothing unique to offer and it doesn’t even manage to do anything cooler or more interesting than the original. I don’t hate it. But the way it’s so easy to play is something I observe and feel like should be more alienating to me than it actually is. Why are games these days so easy to consume? Hmm.
The added length is mostly only because they made each area longer. It really allows one to acclimate to the horror and become over familiar with the monsters, the types of scares the devs rely on, so nothing is really novel or surprising after an hour in any of the dungeons. The hospital is especially stupid because the thing that keeps you running around its four floors for three hours is this contrived plot about a doctor and his three patients you read in hint documents. The text is entirely irrelevenat except for the parts that say shit like “she was combative until we put her in ROOM 302” or “they feed me with WIRES that make me gag” so they’re totally glossable. Seriously, this crap feels like such a waste of my time, almost like they created the puzzle with the three coins from the first apartment complex, the Man, the Woman, and Death, and decided to write a story about them as if they were characters. And it’s about as fun as someone telling you a story about three puzzle coins with personalities which you’ll have no reason to think about once you leave this place.
I’ve been watching a friend stream it and yeah from the bits I saw it seems like you’re always fighting. I feel like that could get kind of samey. They also came away from the game saying it felt kind of long, which I took to mean you might be doing the same thing over and over too much
Fully developed combat systems are fine but I never minded the old combat just being light friction to add texture to the locations. It puts a lot of weight on the game if you’re doing this whole developed system over and over. I think people are way too harsh on the old combat
The RE2 remake did a good job of pacing things more like: combat, take a break to do puzzles and explore, combat is now fresh and scary again. This game seemed more like sprinkle a leg mannequin enemy in every room to keep the spooky action going. Which I think is kind of inevitable because SH2 doesn’t have a lot of systems to manage like Resident Evil does, it’s a pretty mechanically simple game, so when you create an in depth combat system you’re stuck doing that again and again because there’s not that much else to insert into these levels
