SILENT HILL 2 (2024) – Silent Heaven?

Silent Hill 2
Developer: Bloober Team
Publisher: Konami
Platforms: PlayStation 5, PC (Reviewed on PC)
Release Date: October 8, 2024

This article contains minor Silent Hill 2 remake spoilers and out-of-context endgame screenshots.

Originally released in 2001 on the PlayStation 2 during one of the greatest periods in the history of gaming in terms of classic and influential releases, Konami’s Silent Hill 2 is widely considered one of the greatest horror games ever made, if not the greatest. While its blend of survival horror (or horror adventure, as Silent Hill was actually called by Konami) gameplay and psychological themes and storytelling hardly seems revelatory today with so many games coming out and exploring different themes and storytelling methods, there was nothing like Silent Hill 2 at the time of its release.

Silent Hill 2 puts the player in the boots of James Sunderland, a thoroughly average lug of a man whose wife Mary died three years ago of an unspecified disease. The game begins in a lookout area outside the resort town of Silent Hill, as James monologues about a letter he recently received from Mary. According to this letter, Mary is waiting for him in Silent Hill. As you might know and James very astutely points out, a dead person can’t write a letter, so clearly this is completely ridiculous. Yet, here he is in Silent Hill, in that special place they visited before Mary got sick… and who knows, maybe Mary is actually there waiting for him.

After a bit of a walk (because some git blocked off the main road) and an awkward conversation with a young woman in the graveyard, James makes his way to the town proper and finds it completely deserted, with everything draped in thick fog and most roads either blocked or destroyed. This clearly isn’t how things were on that vacation some years prior, but James doesn’t seem to mind that nor the blood trails on the road. So, like any sensible individual, James chooses to follow the blood trails and a vaguely human-shaped figure he sees twitching and staggering through the fog. Without spoiling too much of the story, let’s just say things go downhill from there.

When Silent Hill 2 came out, it received mostly positive reviews but nothing suggesting an all-time classic. Its clunky and basic combat, while hardly the point of the game, was heavily criticized. The approach to horror was of course worlds away from the jump scares and B-movie stylings of the Resident Evil games and even the ultra-hostile nightmare world of series creator Keiichiro Toyama‘s (who did not return for Silent Hill 2) original Silent Hill, leading some to bemoan the lack of scares while others praised the oppressive atmosphere and the absolutely phenomenal soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka. Seriously, this is one of the best video game soundtracks of all time.

In the years since its release, Silent Hill 2 has taken on a mythical reputation among fans. Despite this and the many developers influenced by SH2, Konami has been very reluctant to let us actually play it. The game was ported to the original Xbox and PC with mixed results in 2002 and received a PS2 Greatest Hits version containing the extra content from those ports around the same time. It then resurfaced as part of the Silent Hill HD Collection for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in 2012, but that version was and is a complete disaster.

In their infinite wisdom, Konami didn’t bother to spend any money or time on the HD project and gave it to an inexperienced developer by the name of Hijinx Studios, who had only worked on shovelware titles and were completely out of their depth. Not only that, but Konami didn’t even give them the final source code because they had lost it years prior! Nor did they have any of the original developers (commonly called Team Silent by fans and media, but that name was invented for the SH2 prerelease trailers and never used internally at Konami or in any of the games) helping them as Kojima Productions assisted Bluepoint with the earlier, far superior Metal Gear Solid HD Collection.

The HD Collection was also going to ship with new voice acting with no option to change back to the original voices, as there was a contractual dispute with members of the original cast, primarily James’ original actor Guy Cihi. This was eventually sorted out and you could play SH2 HD with the original voices (but not SH3, as nobody was able to find Heather Morris despite considerable effort) instead of listening to Troy Baker as the world’s saddest man, but you might as well not have bothered because the game was riddled with bugs and crashes and, higher resolution aside, looked completely inferior to the original PS2 release and even the compromised Xbox and PC ports. Friends don’t let friends play the HD Collection.

The kicker here is the fact the HD Collection is the only official way you can currently play Silent Hill 2 and 3, as it’s available on the Xbox Store and playable on modern Xboxes (the PS3 version was also available via streaming last I checked, which admittedly was a while ago). Did I mention the Xbox 360 version never received a patch? I actually bought that version back in the day. It came with a hideous yellow “Welcome to Toluca Lake” shirt, which was the best part of the whole thing. Konami actually offered Xbox players other games from their catalogue as compensation for the perpetually busted HD Collection, but I never took them up on the offer because none of those other games interested me very much. I think the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection might’ve been on there, but I already had that.

While Konami doesn’t seem to care about giving us a proper version of the original SH2, the fans have stepped up to do exactly that. The Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition community mod is an extensive overhaul of the PC version that fixes every issue from that port and improves just about everything you can think of. For the longest time, the PS2 Greatest Hits version was the most complete release with all the visuals and audio that were cut or downgraded in the ports, but the Enhanced Edition is now clearly the definitive way to play Silent Hill 2. It does require the original PC version, which is expensive these days if you want the original discs… but, well, who says you need the original discs? This is the internet, I’m sure you’ll figure something out.

Now, if I was a bigwig producer at Konami, I’d get in touch with the Enhanced Edition team about creating a new official HD release of Silent Hill 2 based on the Enhanced Edition – or just selling the thing outright as an official HD release, unless there are rights issues with the original PC porting team. I know big companies don’t think like normal people and Konami is even more averse to anything resembling common sense than most, but I feel like an official release of the Enhanced Edition on Steam, GOG, etc. would easily recoup whatever it would cost to get it done.

But, despite the wall of text you just read, we’re not actually here to talk about the original Silent Hill 2. We are here to talk about the new Silent Hill 2.

Bloober Team is a Polish developer with a number of horror game releases under their belt, with Layers of Fear probably being the best-known one. While Bloober’s games have always looked the part thanks to the extremely talented art team, their writing has traditionally left a lot to be desired and tends to stumble quite horribly when tackling heavy themes such as abuse and mental trauma. With that in mind, you can imagine the sense of dread many of us felt when we heard they were working on a remake of Silent Hill 2, one of the few games – certainly from its era – that actually handles those themes with care, especially when it comes to the character Angela and her sad and horrifying story.

You can certainly argue Bloober doesn’t deserve any benefit of the doubt after the grotesquely tactless way trauma was handled in The Medium, which was almost impressive in how badly it bungled everything. While the remake thankfully avoids going full Medium and mostly handles Angela’s story carefully, there are still some things here that could’ve been done better. For example, while I don’t think it was the intention, Eddie’s portrayal here can look more “lol he’s fat and gross” than before, certainly at first glance. The man eats melted ice cream with his hands in one scene, which seems like an odd choice but does make some sense considering the fact Eddie seems to be in a freezing cold version of Silent Hill at all times and the ice cream probably appears completely normal to him.

The scene also works in the context of James – and perhaps a first-time player – dismissively treating Eddie as a useless fat slob even though that’s not the case at all and Eddie is actually far more intelligent and capable than he lets on. In any event, I maybe would’ve just let him eat pizza like in the original, mainly because I love the “This town is full of monsters! How can you sit there and eat pizza?” line.

Most of the story remains intact and there are no plot twists here if you’re familiar with the original, but new scenes have been added in an attempt to flesh out the characters (and make the game longer). Some people hate these added scenes because they ruin the subtlety of the storytelling or whatnot, but I didn’t mind them. I actually quite liked seeing the new interactions with James and Maria, the strange Mary doppelgänger he encounters on his travels, but your mileage may vary.

Around launch, Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 received mostly very positive reviews from critics and was also generally well received by players. Personally, I had some fairly serious concerns about the way many of these reviews and reactions highlighted Bloober Team’s changes to the gameplay – namely, they would say something to the effect of “The original combat was garbage and the game was too short, but these problems from that crappy old game have been fixed in this modern remake, which is way better!” Whether or not you agree with that assessment, there is no disputing the fact this is very much a modern remake.

If you’ve played any of Capcom’s recent Resident Evil remakes, you have a pretty good idea how this works. There are differences for sure, but Silent Hill 2 is very much a Modern Horror Game Remake(tm) with an over-the-shoulder camera, button-mashing quick time events to escape enemy grabs, and a protagonist far more capable in combat than you’d see in the PS2 days before Resident Evil 4 came and ruined everything (I like Resident Evil 4, but it marked the death knell of classic horror games – certainly in the mainstream space – for quite some time as everyone wanted to make the next RE4). Konami and Bloober have taken the safest path they possibly could, which means polishing most of the rougher edges with industrial-grade sanding equipment.

As I said earlier, the original SH2 combat is certainly awkward and clunky – arguably even compared to the original Silent Hill on the PlayStation. Is that or the general gameplay with its tank controls and fixed camera angles (or a camera you can kind of guide in the right direction) a problem for those of us familiar with the original game or old-school horror games? No, not really, but I know from experience that playing one of these games can be difficult as a newcomer. I didn’t quite grasp tank controls until a few years ago and while Silent Hill 2 does have a “2D” control option, it’s still not the smoothest experience in the world. Which, again, is fine for a game like this, but Konami and Bloober clearly considered this a critical problem that had to be solved to appeal to a wider audience.

The original camera angles were often very striking and added to the horror atmosphere, giving the game an almost voyeuristic feel, but now the camera is firmly planted behind James at all times as he goes about his business. Is it modern and convenient? Yes. Does it take away some of the game’s character? Also yes, although some people find the new perspective to actually enhance the horror atmosphere. So, again, your mileage may vary.

The combat in Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 mainly takes cues from the Resident Evil remakes, Dead Space, and The Last of Us. The monsters are far more of a threat than their original 2001 variants, so you have to pay attention to your attacks and dodges even on the easiest difficulty setting (which is what I played on because I didn’t come here for a combat challenge and figured it was the closest thing to the original SH2‘s normal difficulty). Despite being a mediocre office worker, James is quite good at aiming precision shots to the head or legs with different guns and also extremely adept at dodging, to the extent some fans have taken to calling him I-Frames Sunderland. Seriously, this guy puts action game characters to shame. EVE from Stellar Blade, which I’ve also been playing recently, is nowhere near this good at dodging. Her hair isn’t as soft and shiny as James’ either, as our boy has presumably borrowed Leon S. Kennedy’s hair products.

On paper, the combat is reasonably similar to Double Helix Games’ dismal Silent Hill Homecoming, but the actual fights look and feel considerably less ridiculous than Alex Shepherd’s endless combat rolls and spinning slash combos. Melee attacks hit monsters with just the right amount of heft while gunshots also look and feel impactful. As is traditionally the case in Silent Hill, James can stomp enemies to finish them off, and this time you can really go to town on the fallen monsters and repeatedly put the boot to them Isaac Clarke style.

If you can keep enemies at a distance and take them out carefully without attracting the attention of multiple creatures at once, things should go pretty smoothly for the most part. Hitting enemy weak points helps save ammo, as you can knock down most creatures with a well-placed shot to the leg to knock them down for a melee finish, and headshots will also do plenty of damage (if the creature in question happens to have a head, of course). But if you miss a critical shot or fail to notice something lurking behind a corner, these monsters will quickly overwhelm you and that’s when the panicked, desperate flailing starts, often with wildly blasting at everything that moves and stomping it flat when it stops moving.

If you manage to avoid said flailing and explore all the areas thoroughly for loot, you should make your way through the game with a decent amount of ammo and healing items, at least on the Light and Normal combat difficulties. I played extremely methodically on Light and had so much healing and ammo by the end of the game that James could’ve started his own illegal pharmacy and black market arms shop, but that’s also how the original SH2 works so I didn’t find this abundance of resources to ruin the experience.

The game doesn’t really tell you this, but each of the weapons James finds has an optimal use. The plank, later replaced by the steel pipe, works well against Lying Figures (the first monsters you encounter) and can be used for instant takedowns from behind if you manage to sneak up on a monster. The pistol takes down Mannequins in a couple of hits and is perfect for knee shots to set up melee finishers. The shotgun is devastating at close range and knocks down Bubble Head Nurses in one hit, letting you stomp them dead while they’re incapacitated. The powerful but slow hunting rifle doesn’t really counter any specific monster and is best used against slow-moving bosses. Naturally, any weapon can work against any monster, but each definitely have specific use cases where they work best.

Overall, the combat works well, but I can’t shake the feeling they’ve missed the point here, especially with the sheer amount of combat this game forces on you. Sneaking past enemies is not really feasible here and neither is running away, because these monsters will follow you to the ends of the earth. In the many, many, many retrospective reviews of the original Silent Hill 2 I have watched and read over the years, very rarely is combat even mentioned in any great detail because it’s not the point of the game and never has been.

The combat could be removed altogether and Silent Hill 2 would still be a classic horror adventure game. In the original, you can actually set the combat difficulty to Beginner and barely have any combat at all, and it’s still Silent Hill 2. Turn up the puzzle difficulty and you have something akin to an old school adventure game with the occasional monster encounter. If you removed most of the combat from the remake… I don’t think that would work at all. This is an action horror game, and removing the action would lead to a lot of empty space between the puzzles.

Speaking of empty space, let’s talk about the pacing of the remake. As a modern game, Silent Hill 2 has to be at least 15-20 hours long to satisfy the seemingly ever-growing HOURS TO BEAT = VALUE crowd. Frankly, the older I get, the more I miss the days when a 20-hour game – let alone 30 or 40 hours – was considered long. Silent Hill 2 also doesn’t have enough story or gameplay for a 15 to 20-hour game because it was never actually meant to be that long, so the remake extends every part of the game, sometimes past the breaking point.

In the original game, it takes maybe half an hour to get from the start of the game to the first “dungeon”, the Wood Side Apartments, if you explore everything you can and pick up all the items around town. Now, your first run to the apartments can take up to two hours, as there are new puzzles forcing you to explore the town, which now lets you enter many more buildings. You can, of course, cut down that time considerably if you know where to go.

I’m not really against exploring the town, but I do think the puzzle with the Neely’s bar jukebox is a bit silly especially when you pick up the items for it before ever entering the bar. It gets sillier when James finally fixes the jukebox and hears “Magdalene”, reminding him of the wonderful times they had at Rosewater Park… which, of course, you can only get to through the apartments, as was the case in the original SH2. At the start of that game, James remembers the park and wonders to himself if it is where he’s supposed to go, so he makes his way through the apartment complex because the roads are blocked. The added content in the remake just feels like adventure game busywork to make James remember he spent a lovely day at the park with Mary.

I find every area in the Silent Hill 2 remake to be at least 33% too long, which seems to be a running theme with these remakes of classic games lately. Looking at you, Rebirth. The “dungeons” (the apartments, Brookhaven Hospital, Toluca Prison, the Labyrinth, Lakeview Hotel) are each based around a central puzzle requiring three doodads from different sections of the map. Usually, you can get them in any order whereas occasionally the progression is linear, but you always have to find three things to progress. Then, you shift to the otherworld and have to find three different items for a new central puzzle.

Changing things up from time to time or just removing certain parts would’ve been appreciated, because I certainly got quite tired of slogging through these areas despite the actual level design being surprisingly solid and having a good flow to it. Each area is interconnected with various routes and shortcuts you can open to make backtracking less of a hassle.

As good as all the environments look and as effective as the overall atmosphere is, especially with the returning Akira Yamaoka bringing his finest nightmare soundscapes to the party, the repetitive structure of the game’s levels and sheer number of enemy encounters can make the whole thing start to feel rote and not very scary after a point. And before you go “well, turn up the difficulty to make it more exciting”, making the constant enemy encounters take longer wouldn’t exactly make them less tedious, would it? It’s not like the enemies get any more interesting, they just have more health and hit harder.

Because the game is so long and our time on this earth is limited, I find very little incentive to return to it to unlock the alternate endings. Apparently, the main endings are quite easy to get by just doing a few things differently near the end of the game and since puzzle solutions seem to be the same on every playthrough, you can skip large portions of each area, but even then I just can’t be bothered. Of course, all six endings from the Greatest Hits version of SH2 are here, with two new ones created just for the remake. As before, only the three main endings can be obtained on your first playthrough.

Silent Hill 2 runs on Unreal Engine 5 and while it makes some lovely use of UE’s features such as Lumen (software on console, hardware on PC if your rig is up to it, and you can also edit files to enable stuff like Ray Reconstruction and virtual shadow maps on beefy PCs), it also exhibits some of the worst traversal stuttering I’ve ever seen. I don’t think the situation is quite as bad as it was at launch, but this game does not run perfectly smoothly on any machine no matter what your specs might be.

The frequent traversal stutter and the bizarre juddery animation caused by a broken DeltaTime may or may not bother you personally, but these are serious under-the-hood issues that should be fixed and shrugging them off by saying “but it runs fine on MY PC” doesn’t help anyone. Nobody bringing up these problems is saying the game is literally unplayable (well, maybe some are), these are just unfortunate blemishes on an otherwise great presentation.

I’ve only played the game on PC but from what I’ve seen, the PS5 version works a bit better but is hardly perfect. The PlayStation Five Professional update was initially a bit of a disaster because all it did was add image noise and completely ruin the reflections due to PSSR upscaling issues, but the current version seems to be working better while also running smoother than the base console. So that’s nice, I suppose. I do get the feeling some of these early PS5 Pro updates were rushed out before anyone had a chance to test them, because SH2 is far from the only one with similar issues.

The audio is an important part of Silent Hill, and the remake mostly nails it. All the original music has been remade and there are dozens of new tracks, and all this music adds up to six CDs in total (three for the base soundtrack, another three for the Extra Edition). Some of the new versions of old songs don’t really work for me, especially the new “Laura Plays the Piano”, but many others are excellent. I especially love the fact “Theme of Laura II”, as it’s called here, has the guitar solo from the original Silent Hill 2 trailers that, for whatever reason, was cut from the in-game and OST version of “Theme of Laura”. Naturally, the soundtrack also includes plenty of those wonderful clanging and banging noises Silent Hill is known for, a genre I like to call “Akira Yamaoka falling down the stairs”. Good stuff all around, really.

Okay, there is one issue I do have to complain about, and that is the use of the PS5 DualSense controller speaker on the PC version. When playing on a DualSense, the radio noise warning you of monsters is emitted from the speaker. This is actually a very cool feature in both versions, but the PC version specifically does not let you turn it off or even adjust the volume for some inexplicable reason. So, even when you play the game with headphones, you have to deal with your controller screaming loud static at you. Not particularly ideal if you live with other people, especially when you’re playing late at night. You can completely disable DualSense audio via Windows sound settings (but just changing the volume there does nothing in-game) or use a different controller, but then you also lose the excellent haptic feedback the DualSense offers.

The voice acting has received a somewhat mixed reception, but I feel the performances here are perfectly good. They’re different from the original, of course, but that doesn’t mean they’re bad. Just different. I don’t really have strong feelings one way or the other. I think Angela is excellent whereas Mary/Maria isn’t as brilliant as Monica Taylor Horgan‘s performance in the original, but nothing was ever going to top that (especially her reading of the letter in the endings) so I don’t hold it against Salóme Gunnarsdóttir.

“It’s different but not necessarily bad” could be the subtitle of the Silent Hill 2 remake. Do I think this version of the game is as memorable as the original? Absolutely not. Do I think it succeeds in what it clearly set out to do, i.e. creating a new take on Silent Hill 2 in the framework of a modern over-the-shoulder action horror game without doing anything interesting? For the most part, yes. As I said, the pacing here is not particularly good as the areas are too long and there is too much mandatory combat, to the point the game largely stops being scary and becomes tedious. This is, obviously, not ideal, but I feel the remake works well enough overall to be considered a success at what it’s trying to do. I also don’t feel it has anywhere near the kind of staying power the original still does to this day. Will we look back as fondly on the Silent Hill 2 remake in 20 years as we do the original now? Predictions have never been my strong suit, but in this case I would guess probably not.

What I most definitely don’t want is for this remake to replace the original Silent Hill 2 wholesale. Konami could make a decent version of the original Silent Hill 2 available to the public, but they seem uninterested in doing so and would probably prefer it if we just bought the remake instead and forgot about that busted old PS2 relic. Ironically, the remake itself seems to already have largely been forgotten by the gaming community despite winning some awards (probably shouldn’t have won any “Best Horror Game” awards in a year that also brought us Mouthwashing, if I’m honest) and being nominated for others, which perhaps doesn’t bode well for its longevity. Or maybe I’m just talking nonsense again.

The remake did sell quite well, so maybe more remakes of older Silent Hill games are on the way. Personally, I’m more interested in Silent Hill f, if that ever comes out. Part of me still mourns the loss of Silent Hills because we were so close to having a Silent Hill game made by Hideo Kojima, Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito, but… well, that was simply too beautiful for this world, I suppose.

Let me just conclude my overlong ramblings by stating that the Silent Hill 2 remake is a perfectly good video game by 2024 video game standards. I don’t use numerical scores in my reviews because you can generally tell what I think of the game without a big old number at the end, but if I did, this would be a solid 7/10 (Good) or maybe even 8/10 (Good+) if I’m feeling generous. Unlike 7s and 8s from professional review outlets, these are genuinely good scores on my scale.

Unfortunately, as we have seen over the years, Silent Hill 2 probably should be more than just “a perfectly good video game”, and that is a bar the remake doesn’t really clear. Silent Hill 2 is such a special and beloved game among its fans that I don’t think any remake could live up to it. This is a much better game than I ever expected from Bloober Team and I’d say it’s well worth experiencing, but I can also tell you right now that the next time I think “hey, I should play Silent Hill 2“, I will not be playing the remake.