Hiya!

Silent Hill 2 Remake was released a while back and it’s actually good! So far, Bloober Team‘s remake of Konami‘s survival horror classic has been garnering rave reviews from both critics and fans alike. With the game being as popular as it is right now, myriads of gamer influencers (is that the right term?) are now streaming their own playthroughs of Silent Hill 2. A lot of them are neophytes so this is their first time travelling to the nightmare town that is Silent Hill because of all this good word of mouth.

I do wonder, however, how many of these newbies know how much original fans had no faith in Bloober team in the development of Silent Hill 2 Remake. Yes, in retrospect, it seems pretty surprising how much fans were dreading this update to a classic game. I bet they’re all eating a whole lot of crow but I can’t check on that because I’m too busy handling my own serving. After all, I myself were one of those people who doubted Bloober Team and Konami! So, yeah, I do feel I owe them a huge apology as I was one of those people who gave them a lot of crap.

In my defense, I do stand by my observations when Konami did the whole reveal on how Bloober Team’s progress was going. Looking back at the first gameplay trailer, the game didn’t look like it had the necessary polish to be the next big thing. James Sunderland’s walking animation looked really stiff and the way he wields the melee weapons just didn’t look natural. There were also animation errors, like when James would perform the motion to push the door open while he was in the middle of already opening the door. It just looked… not ready.

In retrospect, this was a whole four months ago. A lot can happen in four months as Bloober Team could have used that time to really polish all of the little things. Looking back, things were already looking solid but some things, like James Sunderland’s walking cycle and synching up the lips with their speech, just needed some cleaning up. Well, there is still some jank with the main character’s walking animation but it’s not that evident, especially when you are admiring the creepy scenery of a Silent Hill game.

One thing they didn’t touch up on were the character models and, in this case, I do think my original opinion still stands. Angela Orosco still looks dumpy and, I dunno, there’s just something wrong with her proportions. Her head looks too big for her body! Weirdly enough, she only really looks bad during your first meeting with her! When you do encounter Angela Orosco later on, she does look so much better! Maybe it’s because the lighting hits the character model differently but I still stand by what I said when I first saw her: Angela Orosco doesn’t look good.

In fact, I believe I can still say that for the majority of the human characters. From the main character, James Sunderland and all the way down to Laura, the little girl, everyone just look like they fell head first into the deepest part of the uncanny valley. The models from the original game did have a plastic-y sheen on them. In the Remake, however, I do think Bloober Team tried their best to make them look like real people. To be fair, like with Angela, some of them do look good due to the light, or the lack of light in some cases, hitting their faces at the right angles. Basically, if you don’t get a good view of them, they look fine. Take the time to really examine their faces and you might be asking them to cover up with a giant metal pyramid on their heads!

Going back to my apology on how much I was wrong about the Remake, the biggest thing I was concerned about was if Bloober Team was going to nail Silent Hill’s tone. I was afraid, in a sense, they were going to try to make Silent Hill 2 scarier by adding more jumpscares and more enemy encounters. That would’ve been a mistake because what made Silent Hill 2 horrific wasn’t through the adrenaline rush of getting into an iconic boss battle with Pyramid Head or Abstract Daddy. Okay, maybe that was a part of it.

However, what made Pyramid Head and the other monsters of Silent Hill horrific were based on what they represented. These monsters were based on the psyches of the people who visited Silent Hill as they became their tormentors. This is why Laura never saw any monsters because she was the only innocent person in the town. Everyone else were haunted by their own tragic pasts and, once you figure that out, is truly scary.

I will say they did kind of scale back on the symbolism a bit and make it a little bit more obvious, which I don’t really like but I understand. I know some gamers may not figure out how Abstract Daddy is connected to Angela in the original game because it just looked like some kind of amorphous blob stuck to a door in the original Silent Hill 2. In Remake, Angela does spell out her abuse a little bit more vividly after this boss fight, making it clear why she both fears and detests Abstract Daddy. With Pyramid Head, the scene with the two mannequins comes off more subdued as you don’t really see what he was doing to them, unlike in the original where you get a rather gratuitous view of the deed.

In the grand scheme of things, these changes were rather off-putting but here’s the thing. Bloober Team still did a phenomenal job recapturing the depressing fear of Silent Hill 2. I do think that’s much more important than just complaining it’s not exactly the same as the original. They added their own spin while keeping in mind why this was a huge franchise for Konami in the first place.

So, yeah. Bloober Team, I do apologize for giving you so much crap before. You did good here and I’ll go back to eating my heaping bowl of crow here.

Byee!

What did you think of Silent Hill 2 Remake? Let me know in the comments section below!