The Silent Hill 2 remake is at its best when it feels like the original

Before you play for three hours, Silent Hill 2 remake at a recent press event hosted by Konami in London, we were shown a new trailer. Like the previous trailers, it left me skeptical. While I am not against the remake project Silent Hill 2I’m wary of any modernization drive that replaces the old, the strange, and even the terrifying with the same glazed-over generic trappings of the AAA game from the 2020s.

After getting my hands on it, I think some of that skepticism is justified. I also think the original Silent Hill 2 is a very, very good video game.

In its opening sequence, James jogging through the streets could be any multimillion-dollar game you can buy on the PS5. Sure, it’s foggy, but otherwise it’s boring. The switch to an over-the-shoulder camera, the breaking of windows to dig through drawers for health items, and the blank canvas marking areas that are interactable all feel unspecific.

The latter two mechanics also point to the game being bigger, possibly significantly so. We’re told the game is 12+ hours long, while the original clocked in at around eight. For example, Neely’s Bar – once a small, tasteful spot with a clue on a map – becomes a quest location that involves visiting another new part of town to pick up an item before running back to solve a puzzle. We’re told that these new puzzles add to the lore of the franchise, a promise that will excite some – but I know I’m not the only one exhausted by them.

I don’t think this would be good for the pacing. Konami PR has recommended multiple times that we only spend an hour in the opening of the game before using a preset save point to jump through to the apartment section. I’ve done that, so I can’t tell you what lore might be buried in the Neely’s Bar puzzle. I also can’t tell you what it’s like to have to spend a long time in the modern version of that city before you get anywhere else, but the suggestion to not do it is self-explanatory, to a certain extent.

On the other hand, by jumping forward to the apartments, the generic feeling disappeared. They are claustrophobic, labyrinthine and tense. Their design emphasizes a number of things that Silent Hill 2 great in the first place, but not common in modern AAA games. Gradually exploring with James’ scribbled map, for example, feels incomparably better than any game with a minimap or a tagged compass.

This section also highlights the improvements in the remake. When I watched a YouTube video of the original apartment segment after playing, I was struck by the difference in the sound design. The original James thumps with every footstep, but he hits enemies with a kind of quiet disdain. In the remake, he sounds scared and shocked as he swings into a mannequin creature. The combat changes aren’t exactly mind-blowing, but actor Luke Roberts deserves credit for selling them.

Roberts and the other voice actors were also apparently crucial in finalizing the script for the remake, says Maciej Głomb, lead producer at Bloober Team. “These were all professionals,” he says. “So they often had ideas about how to sell a scene or a specific line of dialogue. As long as they were in line with the tone that we wanted, we usually trusted their experience and their ability.”

The script has also been reworked slightly to make it “more understandable,” Głomb says, and edited to reflect how newer technology like facial motion capture has allowed the team to “show and not tell” certain aspects like emotional beats. But while many of the mechanics have been updated for the remake, it’s the story that Bloober Team is trying to keep “as close as possible” to the original, says creative director Mateusz Lenart: “The characters from the original game, their specific arcs and endings, and what those characters are.”

There will be additional endings, however. “I think that was one of the first requests from Konami, right at the beginning,” Głomb says. The original endings will all be there — “even the funny ones,” albeit “with our own twist to expand a bit.” But in new game plus runs, there will be the possibility of getting alternate outcomes. While Bloober Team wouldn’t give anything away directly, Głomb did say that the devs would “add something from the different worlds; from the different game,” presumably hinting at overlap with other Silent Hills.

In my last question to Głomb and Lenart I ask whether they took outside inspiration into the remake. Silent Hill 2 is famous for drawing on film — Jacob’s ladder and the work of David Lynch — and paintings by artists like Francis Bacon. I can hardly think of another game with 2024 Silent Hill 2‘s budget that reflects that kind of influence, and I specifically want to know if there’s been anything in the art world over the last 20 years that’s contributed to the way the game’s been updated.

The answer is usually no. Lenart cites the work of Italian painter Nicola Samori and French artist and performer Olivier de Sagazan as having a lasting influence on his work, beginning as early as Layers of fear. But this project is mostly about returning to the original game’s inspirations. “For the whole team, the first thing we wanted to do was go back to those movies,” Lenart says. But “there wasn’t a need to look much further,” he says. “We didn’t feel the need to look for modern references because the game is kind of stuck in that era.”

I was skeptical about it again. Like I said, the remake Silent Hill 2 is a product of its time in the way it has been modernized. It often looks and plays like any other AAA game; it didn’t need to. But then I saw Pyramid Head for the first time.

As in the original game, you first encounter Pyramid Head, illuminated in ominous red behind a dimly lit hallway in the Wood Side apartments. Unlike the original game, you already know who Pyramid Head is.

I can’t overstate the fear I felt when I first saw Pyramid Head. Despite never having played the game before, cultural osmosis had, unbeknownst to me until this moment, ingrained deep in my bones the fear of being chased and killed by this creature. I stood there, looking at Pyramid Head through the bars, being looked at through the bars. And then the person next to me coughed, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. At best, Silent Hill 2 (2024)’s biggest inspiration is Silent Hill 2 (2001). And again, Silent Hill 2 (2001) is a very, very good video game. It is, in the most crystallized sense of the word, iconic. If the remake can make that iconicism work, and tap into what made it so, it will be very, very good. It won’t always be that way, but it might be long enough.

Silent Hill 2 will be released on October 8 for PlayStation 5 and Windows PC.

Disclosure: This article is based on a preview event held by publisher Konami in London, England on August 12th. Konami provided Polygon with travel and accommodations for the event. You can additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.