This next game was one I was waiting for. I anticipated it and dreaded it in equal measure. It had a lot to live up to, of course – to my mind, this was the only big budget game I was really that excited in. All year, I wanted to play it, and otherwise only really had eyes for older games, or smaller games. This was the big one. This was the one to prove whether big horror releases were still for me or not. And hey, guess it turned out okay.

3) Silent Hill 2 Remake | Bloober Team, 2024
“In my restless dreams… I see that town.”

From the moment the game was announced, I had hope. To have a Silent Hill game on a modern console? Could it be okay? Could it even be… good? I dared to dream, and I watched with nerves as the game had a couple of pretty shaky trailers. That combat trailer with grotesque cuts and shaky overlays made the game look awful – and yes, the original Silent Hill 2 (2001) had bad marketing as well, but that was twenty years ago. Konami didn’t really have any excuses now. The pressure mounted. The game looked more and more polished, but also I began to worry about the little things. How would the game’s atmosphere change? What would they take out? Would they add anything? Could anything possibly live up to the life-changing experience of the original game?

The answer to that, for me, is no. The 2024 version of Silent Hill 2 (hereafter referred to as SH2R) does not defeat the original Silent Hill 2 in my mind. But that was always going to be the case. The original Silent Hill 2 game induced enough delusions in me that I wrote a two hour long video on it, plus a couple more. I played through the original three times this year alone, and still haven’t got sick of it. It is such a beautiful survival horror experience, even if it is quite easy. The pacing is unbeatable – just when the game starts to lull, you get a knockout narrative scene that makes you go “oh, what the hell, I have to keep playing”. Every single line of dialogue seems to mean something. Every single character has an interesting perspective. The dreamlike ambience is one of my favourite places to hang out in. It is a mood that I indulge in far more often than I should.

SH2R, on the other hand, is not perfectly paced. The biggest struggle that the remake has is in its emphasis on combat. There are simply too many enemies. The game seems explicitly built around the idea that you’ll be fighting most of the time. You’ll fight down corridors, down streets, and in rooms. Enemies seem to be everywhere, and while the smarter enemies are of course an improvement from the dumb ones in the original, they get old quick. There are no new enemy types added (though the Mandarin enemy is at least reutilized in an interesting way to make them feel new). This lack of enemy variety hurts a game that took me about twelve hours to beat my first time around. Subsequent playthroughs certainly take less time. That’s because I’m less interested in killing all the enemies to be able to look around areas more carefully, but too many enemies is certainly SH2R’s biggest problem. Just removing a quarter (or even more) of the monsters would not only make the ambience more meaningful, but would also make the remaining encounters more frightening. It would also mean that certain areas aren’t lingered in for so long.

Other than that gripe, though, it’s hard to think of other meaningful critiques of the remake. Bloober Team did a fantastic job iterating on the story structure of the original. Putting aside issues of pacing that means you’ll sometimes go for hours on end without any narrative stuff happening, and a long sequence in the Otherworld that makes you feel exhausted, the actors did a fantastic job. Emotions are conveyed wonderfully, and it’s clear that everyone was fully invested in the material – even if I do prefer some line readings from the original. Facial expressions are taken full advantage of, something that SH2R obviously has over the original (and something like Mouthwashing). That’s not to say that SH2R tells a better story than those games, but that it uses that affordance to tell a damn good one. Like the other games on the list this year, psychological trauma is a key factor in why the narrative is interesting. The question of what it means to be human rears its head again here, and of course Silent Hill 2’s narrative is famous for how it handles that question. How it handles it of course is done through a lot of environmental storytelling, one of the most famous of video game affordances.

Some areas are just intoxicating. The level of detail that Bloober were able to squeeze in felt incomparable. I’ve never seen a game with such a level of detail that actually seemed to matter. The Otherworld in the remake is visibly distinct from the fog world, and every location has its own unique character. I was worried that they wouldn’t be able to give the town a suitable atmosphere, but everything ended up feeling just right. From the way floorboards creak as you walk across them to the cacophony of static intermingling with the growling of monsters, the sound design serves to oppress and disturb.

The extended length and added puzzles of SH2R means that you don’t get the same breaks from the Otherworld that you got in the original game. Once again, this serves to sabotage the pacing a bit – but the environments are still a joy to explore, even if they do feel crushingly oppressive for such a long time that oppression becomes monotony. Taking longer breaks than I did from playing would probably help that feeling.

SH2R feels to me like an unexpected triumph, one that modernizes Silent Hill 2 while only making slight missteps. If my biggest complaint about a game is that there’s too much hitting monsters with sticks, it feels like a bit of a minor complaint. That monster-stick-hitting is still fun and engaging, and the story SH2R tells is, well, still Silent Hill 2’s story. A few moments being less emotionally impactful here are counterbalanced by others being more emotionally impactful and more subtle. It is a remake made by people who clearly love the original game, and their respect for the material is bettered by the ways in which they attempted to change things. To live up to the legacy of one of the most famous horror games ever made is a daunting task I would envy nobody. And yet, Bloober Team somehow made a great horror game that I imagine will stand the test of time as a survival horror experience for the ages.