A company who has been a walking punchline suddenly strikes gold after managing to color in the lines when adapting one of the most impeccably written games of all time and having the added benefit of their audience’s rampant transmisogyny has promised to stop making bad games, essentially calling anyone who played their previous work a bunch of suckers.
Boy I wish I had that level of misplaced self-confidence.
I just fought Abstract Daddy. They did a very nice job with that part. I also liked the prison area.
Speaking of, I just came across a few more of those Masahiro Ito sketches from years ago and this one is something.
Now that I’ve had some time to think about it since last night, I’m still impressed with this part but at the same time I think it falls short of the original version.
The moving pistons in the walls are among the most striking designs in the original game for me. In the remake, they are just stationary ports (pipe connectors?) and they are overshadowed by all of the other animation going on. That additional animation looks pretty good and the segment has some nice intensity but I think making everything bigger and flashier detracts from the unpleasantness of the scene.
Particularly the final showdown, which is in a roomy, dark, industrial space instead of a confined, well-lit room (with those wall pistons) where you can see Angela sitting there the whole time.
Edit: Relevant Twitter exchange from a few days ago between Masahiro Ito and the director of the remake that someone quoted:
So far it looks like a handful of small improvements made it into cutscenes for the day 1 patch, but also several visual effects got broken that were working in the release candidate.
New patch suddenly makes the game run way, way better on my PC. I could probably tweak a few settings up and ruin my performance, but at least running around the town at the start of the game is a much, much smoother experience.
Not sure if it’s FSR frame generation or optimization or what.
I reached the end of the game, and my overall opinion is definitely positive. Particularly starting with the prison and onward. There are things to criticize but they are mostly minor.
The modern game design elements that they added fortunately aren’t the ones in this thread’s original post. And by sticking to the original script, they avoided the type of writing that I found unappealing in their other games.
Really, if this hadn’t had the baggage of Bloober Team’s name on it (it’s still difficult to bring myself to even type their name) I probably would have found less to criticize because I wouldn’t have gone in expecting to find that they’d ruined things. Now, I wouldn’t complain if they went on to give Silent Hill 4 a similar treatment.
I don’t remember whether this was in the original, but I really like the part near the end where there aren’t any enemies for a while and then you encounter a few that seem ill and disoriented and collapse in front of you. I also noticed that they didn’t have the mini Abstract Daddy enemies in the hotel, which I think was a good change.
Why have there never been any Silent Hill art books, anyway?
Been avoiding this thread for fear of spoilers but I’m at the hotel now and while there’s some stuff in this remake that I don’t love, I’m very consistently shocked by this game’s ability to show saint-like restraint when it matters most.
…
that doesn’t mean there aren’t parts with the exact kind of lack of restraint I’d expect from bloober. but those parts aren’t even that bad and rarely detract much. there are really just a few key moments from the original that I feel like they totally fumbled. the worst among them is:
the part at the end of the hospital sequence where pyramid head chases you and kills maria. I know a lot of people here really missed the pseudo-fixed camera work of the original, and as much as I love that I barely found myself missing it outside of certain sequences, and this is probably the worst offender. the extremely dubious decision to have pyramid head kool-aid man through the wall at the end does NOT help, either. even the cutscene at the end isn’t as good. it’s far from the most memorable scene in the original but it is a pivotal plot moment that you’ll think about as soon as you figure out the twist.
the other thing I thought was disappointing was the first encounter with the under-grate hanging closers in the tunnel connection east and west south vale, and again the perspective is mostly to blame here. but they end up doing more interesting things with closers than the original did, and while I don’t love some of that, it makes it easier to forget their introduction not hitting the same as it did originally. since in that game you never encounter them again, which I also prefer, but I’m okay with them making a mechanically meaningful appearance in the labyrinth and I actually love how they’re used in the hotel so far.
I also hate how they did eddie, he looks like a fucking cartoonish garbage pail kid and his personality is depicted as entirely unsympathetic where the original did a much better job giving his story more humanity and genuine, understated pathos. and I mean… it’s not like they handled him unproblematically but I honestly think the remake is worse here, which is baffling because imo literally every other npc along with james is done as well if not significantly better than the original. angela in particular is so fucking good, but I love maria so much. I love how she constantly gives james shit for his casual psychopath behavior like unapologetically looting shit from cars and storefront windows. I love how the game makes you do petty criminal shit like this. it fits so well with james’s personality, especially the way he just gets all “er, um, ah, sorry” when called out on it. I love the emphasis on breaking and entering. as much as I groaned at the first push-the-wheeled-cart-to-climb-through-a-window puzzle the repeated use of this trope is actually deeply thematically appropriate and does a lot to heighten the feeling that you’re trespassing. that you’re just going deeper and deeper into somewhere you shouldn’t be, someplace where you’re unwelcome, but you may not be able to return once you climb over that wall.
I played the first half of the game on steam deck and to be honest, as awkward and weird as that was, I think it actually benefits the game a lot to run on underpowered hardware. it’s less the small screen – in fact, I splurged on a portal 13.7 inch OLED monitor to hook the steam deck up to have a more moderately “cinematic” experience – and more that all the weird rendering artifacts that FSR 3.0 introduce when aggressively trying to reconstruct the image are deeply flattering to the game’s atmosphere in a way that makes me fondly recall the warbly textures and blocky fog of the PSX original silent hill. it lost something running on my desktop rig with better picture quality and image stability, but also it doesn’t matter that much because the art direction is more than strong enough to work on its own.
(also the 90’s filter is ugly as hell I can’t imagine playing the whole game with that shit turned on)
beyond how much they nailed aesthetically (and putting aside how much they fumbled, for the moment), I’m mostly impressed by how ballsy the game design is here. my biggest fear, after seeing the initial trailers, was that it would play it too safe design-wise and stick to the tried and true RE-make/TLOU template. and the basic skeleton of that is here for sure, but I’m struck by how much of that design ethos it outright rejects in favor of a more minimal, organic approach, that is really devoted to the classic 90’s survival horror experience. every modern touch feels like it was handled carefully and implemented in such a way to not detract from that sensibility. when something detracts it’s a misstep in writing, pacing, or art direction, but rarely is it directly a result of the game design being bad.
most surprising among these considerations is the combat. it’s so so much better than it needs to be, and worlds better than the admittedly low bar set by the original (where that was never the point). like obviously committing fully to the over-the-shoulder mode kind of necessitates giving it at least some attention. but I honestly can’t believe how far they went with it without compromising the atmosphere, mood, or narrative. it’s clear that despite adding significantly more flexibility with aiming and movement, great care was taken to never make you feel like James is anything but an ordinary dude without any real combat training outside of knowing how to fire a gun. you never feel powerful or strong. dodging in never a guarantee especially because the enemies are so hard to read. sometimes when you escape from a grab they will counterattack immediately and sometimes it’s with a delay and there’s barely a useable tell to know how to avoid taking damage consistently.
and honestly the enemy designs really carry the entire experience, similar to the original but there’s so much more going on here and it’s so well done. they have so much personality! I love how they use the mannequin monsters; even when you figure out how they work the game is great at having them hide in plain sight and surprise attack you. they all have their own patterns and ways to deal with them but it never stops feeling organic. I love the weird squeaky noises the mannequins make. I love how very, very rarely, instead of the usual squeaks they emit a high-pitched but clearly human-sounding giggle or whimper. I love how the straightjackets going into worm mode is used… sometimes, to lure you into a dangerous ambush. but sometimes they just be wormin’ around. I love how the roaches are basically just there to drop a false positive radio sound and fuck with you.
(I hate how frequently they throw the non-enemy swarms of roaches all over the place in the prison and the labyrinth though. it’s so overdone! it loses impact!)
as setpiecey as this game gets (and it gets real setpiecey), for the most parts they never draw attention to themselves in the way that setpieces do in RE4, say. and while it’s an insane decision to make an alternate form of the mannequin monster that acts like a half life head crab, it’s so surprisingly well implemented I can’t complain. especially because it clearly is running with the manual artwork that suggested a very different vision for the prison sequence than what we got in the original PS2 game.
the end result is that it’s rarely possible to kill most enemies without consuming either ammo or health, so you have to play carefully or learn how to sneak up on them. because like the original there is a barebones stealth system which the game just never even tells about except for a single handwritten message found early-game that mentions that they can hear you. but are no button prompts or canned animations which guarantee a successful kill. you never know if it’s going to work until you’re already committed to the action, and even then it’s only going to knock the enemy down. if there are other enemies around you still have to manage to stomp em to death before another they catch you, and if you don’t you’ve created a much situation than just trying to fight them one-by-one.
and the enemy AI is like insanely dynamic. dynamic in ways that often feel unintended, possibly as a result of a bug, but almost never in a way that breaks tension or atmosphere. enemies will come through doors and crawl through windows and crawl spaces. sometimes. some doors. some windows. some crawlspaces. some enemies. it always feels specific to the area you’re in and the particular enemy you’re facing, but rarely in a way that feels contrived or even purposeful with regards to a set piece. it’s more like… well, I guess this nurse just doesn’t want to go in this room but this straightjacket has no issues with it. this applies to stealth stuff too… it’s most useful against nurses because they’re so fucking spongey, and some of them you can consistently sneak up on but some of them seem to have eyes on the back of their heads. some of them seem to care if the flashlight is on and if you’re running instead of walking and some don’t. some of them will just wander basically anywhere after being aggro’d, even if they’ve forgotten about you. some will follow you for unreasonable distances before giving up. sometimes enemies just teleport back to their start location if you look away or look at the map. but sometimes they try to bite your face off if you do that. I love it. you can never get comfortable. you never feel like you’ve figured them out or know a 100% safe way to approach.
every enemy seems to be capable of reviving but the frequency varies so wildly that all I know is the pipe-wielding nurses seem to do it the most. but I’ve seen every other basic enemy type and variation revive at least once. I even had a dark world straightjacket follow me into a fucking safe room. I was sitting in the save dialog for a minute looking on my phone and when I canceled out I was in a fucking grab animation from him. I’m pretty sure this was a bug because that motherfucker rapidly backstepped out of the room like he knew he wasn’t supposed to be in there and I didn’t actually take damage but it still scared the shit out of me.
ignoring the baggage of the silent hill name and the pedigree of the original, on its own terms this is a terrific horror game that I basically have no criticisms of. it is arguably ground-breaking in some small ways, but I mostly appreciate how deeply old school its sensibilities are. the puzzles, pathing, resource management, are unapologetically complex and overwhelming (on hard/hard at least, but god if you didn’t play on this mode you really cheated yourself). this is just such a meaty game, meatier than any of the REmakes and unlike any of them it doesn’t blow its was after the first act.
a small thing I really appreciate is that despite the game having all these empty cabinets and drawers for james to rifle through, TLOU-style, the items they contain are 100% fixed. as far as I can tell there isn’t any dynamic difficulty resource adjustment going on behind the scenes, and if there is it’s more in the form of getting slightly more or less bullets from a single pick-up. I don’t know if this is a deliberate fake-out or the result of a last-minute design decision (or maybe it is dynamic on easier difficulties) but it does so much to maintain tension.
as a silent hill game it’s easily the most deeply purely silent hill experience since silent hill 4. like it’s the real deal, the atmosphere, sound design, and art direction are exactly what they should be. it has issues with pacing and some questionable aesthetic choices but none of them are really more egregious than missteps in the original team silent trilogy or silent hill 4. beyond all that though, I honestly haven’t felt this scared playing a horror game in years, and it’s the exact same kind of fear I experienced on my first run of silent hill. the only remotely comparable recent game was RE7 and even that only really maintained it for the first 6 hours or so. partway through the prison I started to take issue with how set-piecey it can be, but it never stopped being terrifying…
as a remake of silent hill 2 there’s so much shit that I wish they did differently but there’s so much that really truly outshines the original and smartly builds upon what it did. I was worried about the extra content just feeling like filler but for the most part it all feels purposeful and meaningful, and even when it isn’t the basic material of it is usually so good that I don’t mind. there are definitely a few sequences I would have rather seen cut because I don’t think they’re necessary at all but even the worst of these just isn’t close to the kind of egregious disaster I expected from bloober team.
Damn Big Toups Post…been a minute.
Great post! I had no idea about the stealth mechanics…
I’ve gotten midway through the hospital now in this remake. It’s been so long since I played Silent Hill 2… The memory card in my old PS2 says I last saved that game in 2008, but I think that was just a brief revisit of the beginning of the game during a college break. Playing this remake, I occasionally have flashes of recognition when I enter certain rooms. The hospital basement with the generator really brought me back. It’s a credit to the remake that, despite enlarging all the dungeons so much, I still feel that intense sense of place that the original was able to impart.
Aside from the (minor) pacing issues, the one thing about this remake that really annoys me is the way it sort of winks at its status as a remake in this silly fourth wall breaking way. Like, when you encounter specific places that were more important in the original than the remake, you get a weird chiming sound and the camera switches to a little snapshot of the spot. And when you’re walking around with Maria, she’ll keep making these little references to things that are different, like, “what, you thought I wouldn’t want to go in this building? I can’t imagine why.” When you see the easter egg where they put her original outfit in a random closet, you’re like, “oh, haha, nice.” And then you keep walking, but then you turn around and Maria’s grabbed the clothes from the closet, holds them up next to her, and says, “Hey, do you think I’d look good in this?” It’s sooooo corny.
But I was nodding along to Toups’ entire post. This remake is excellent, I gotta admit. They actually did it.
yeah I don’t mind the occasional subtle nod to the original to acknowledge something they changed but there’s just so much of it. I kind of assumed that beyond the nostalgia factor all these little tidbits were part of some post-game puzzle or ARG or whatever since basically every game does that these days so they can milk free promotion from the youtube theory/lore mill. though that doesn’t seem to be the case here and I’d honestly be more okay with it if it was. as it is it just kind of seems needlessly apologetic to the kind of purist that may not even exist judging from how well-received this has been across the board.
I can’t fault them for it too much though because if I was in the position of making this game, with an actual budget, with key members of the original dev team contributing, I’d be feeling impossible, unbearable pressure to conform to every diehard’s expectations. especially considering how boldly this game often diverges from what the original was at times.
Angela Dad’s Fight, The Garbage Chute Puzzle…that’s kind of it really.
The praise seems a bit overblown. I’ll also admit the hate probably is too. It’s just that I don’t see much of the changes in this game being bold, but rather a “necessity” given the fidelity and generic framework they’re working in which is much closer to The Last of Us than I think Toups’ post indicates.
I’ve already made enough posts complaining about the game but when talking with friends I’ve just described it as “Silent Hill 2 But The Last Of Us.” The scavenging, the pushing crates to go through high-walled Windows, aggressive violent combat that’s not that fun.
It’s fine. Bloober got a passing grade on the assignment.
Except here. lol
the entire prison segment is different? nearly every dark world segment is completely redone. the dark world apartments didn’t even exist in the original. there’s like twice as much labyrinth including this insane looping combat sequence that throws back to a room that didn’t even exist in the original. the flesh lip fight in the hospital is completely different. he falls down on the floor and turns into this fucked up rusty spider machine. the route you take through silent hill is totally altered. there’s an entirely new chase segment between the apartments and the hospital. there’s an entirely new miniboss fight with a closer/mandarin in the hotel. the final boss fight has two completely new phases where even the setting changes between them.
That this puzzle seems created to transform what was ambiguous horror imagery (James’ body appearing in places in the original) into LORE about a time loop fan theory is so fucking tasteless.
Have any devs ever said if reusing James’ model in the original was even an artistic decision? SH3 also recycles James’ model for Harry’s dead body and somehow it’s more blatant there than any of the instances in SH2.
I don’t think it was ever meant to have symbolism. they reuse angela’s model in the intro sequence to silent hill 3. you only see the top of her head for less than a second in the scene where heather wakes up in the shopping mall.
I think it is purposeful in the remake but I don’t buy the time loop theory. there are easy to reach thematic reasons for james seeing all these murder victims as himself before you need to assume it has deep lore implications or whatever. the polaroids come off like an easter egg for fans with the message acknowledging how long the wait has been.
that said a “time loop” interpretation doesn’t bother me that much because it’s consistent with what the original game implied about what silent hill is and how it works. call that “lore” or not but if the idea is that silent hill is a place where your darkest psychological issues become physically manifest, the idea that james has been repeatedly going through the same basic path with small variations falls in line with that. he is grieving the loss of his relationship with his partner and is denial about the fact that he took her life. grief is a cycle of denial approaching acceptance and then resetting to denial. so like, sure. it makes sense. I don’t understand what’s tasteless about it. but I also don’t think it’s a necessary interpretation, and if it is the case that’s the intended meaning, it’s an unnecessary addition to the original’s story.
and it’s much easier to believe that james sees eddie’s victims as himself because he sees himself as the victim of mary’s loss. or because he holds a subconscious belief that that’s the fate he deserves for his crimes. it’s easy to believe the polaroids and nostalgia moments are easter eggs for longtime fans. that’s how it all comes off for me.
anyway I’m not trying to change anyone’s mind or to convince anyone to like this game as much as I did. there are a lot of things in it that I really don’t like and if any or all of those things ruin it for you I don’t think that’s an unreasonable reaction.
