[Music] I'm kind of [Music] lost lost yeah I'm looking for Silent Hill after a string of Resident Evil remakes the resurrection of dead space and even genre granddaddy alone in the dark stepping back into the spotlight earlier this year it feels long overdue that seminal survival horror classic Silent Hill 2 should emerge from the fog and be given a modern makeover hey wait enter blubber team the psychological horror Specialists best known for layers of fear and observer who've been given the task of taking the morbid Masterpiece from the PlayStation 2 era and making the feted
Flesh of its many demonic ghouls seem fresh as a big fan of the original I'm happy to report that this resulting Silent Hill 2 remake is an exceptionally grim and grimy horroscope that's consistently compelling to explore packed with new puzzles and beefed up boss encounters and enhanced with modernized combat that made my return to the small town of Silent Hill a regular violent thrill given that it was released more than two decades ago there's every chance you don't have the foggiest idea what made the original Silent Hill 2 so impactful aside from its Sinister small
town setting that felt like stepping straight into the pages of a stepen King novel Silent Hill 2 stood apart from other survival horror stories of its era by putting just as much focus on the battle with personal demons as it did Regular scraps with the snarling physical kind protagonist James Sunderland who lured to a remote mining town by the promise of making contact with his deceased wife Mary is not a battle Harden member of a zombie killing special unit he's an ordinary man forced to confront some truly extraordinary things what is this the struggles with
his own guilt and Trauma both humanize him and add believable heft to the horrors that unfold around him while the roles of James and the handful of other lost souls he meets along the way have been recast with voice actors of a noticeably higher standard in this remake the campy dialogue they deliver remains mostly unchanged yeah I remember this does preserve the off-kilter David lynchian feel of the original character interactions but comes across as a little bit jarring at times given the vastly improved standards of Storytelling we've seen in more recent horror landmarks what a
big dumb dumb like you doing here anyway hey that's not very nice I was no less entertained by Silent Hill 2's quirky characters this time around even if I never became emotionally invested in their plights to the same extent I did with the supporting casts in The Last of Us or even Alan Wake 2 regardless I found the mystery surrounding the fate of Mary was still more than intriguing enough to drag me through the darkest depths of Silent Hill 2's story story [Music] Mary the difference in look and feel between this Silent Hill 2 remake
and the 2001 original is night and day well perhaps that should be Nightmare and daydream given The Surreal nature of its small Town's continually altering State the streets are blanketed by believably heavy fog and Rich with detail right down to the missing person's posters taped to telephone poles that flutter in the breeze dimly lit dwellings are overrun with discernable signs of Decay and drywall and cinder blocks Splinter off in shards from startling shock waves felt in hurried hallway chase scenes hordes of cockroaches startle and Scatter in the beam of your flashlight as you make your
way down each putrid path that winds you through an increasingly hellish Otherworld Silent Hill 2's festering environment is at once both off-putting and alluring like a scab you can't stop picking the enemies to have been dressed up in Far More disturbing and disgusting designs the most common type the lying figure which appears to have its arms wrapped up in a straight jacket made of its own skin seems slick with a decidedly icky Sheen and more smoothly shifts from two-legged stagger to ring prone along the ground in preparation for a surprise attack there's also the Twitchy
Bubblehead nurses introduced during the Brook Haven Hospital section who now come in both pipe and and knife toting forms and of course Pyramid Head whose sharply pointed skull once again brings a more literal meaning to the tomb apex predator this lumbering death dealer remains one of the most terrifying presences in the horror genre only now he seems somehow even more Sinister thanks to extra details like the realistic rust on his Jagged head and the ghastly Inky goop that coats his powerful frame of course that's when you can actually see the enhanced enemies and environments around
you since Silent Hill 2 is also oppressively dark for significantly long periods at a time James's chest mounted flashlight has a shorter throw than Mr Burns get a snootful of this gas bomb meaning it's regularly the case that you can only see a few feet in front of his nose testing your television's black levels tightening the unrelenting sense of claustrophobia and leaving you vulnerable to ambushes from the creepy mannequin enemies that stand eerily still in the corners of rooms like their floor lamps purchased from hell's home Home Depot it's during these moments when your peripheral
vision shrinks down to a pinhole that Silent Hill 2's incredibly unsettling audio design really comes to the for the signature radio static hisses that intensify around imminent dangers the shrieks in the distance and Whispers that are uncomfortably close and the accompanying discordant drones maintain an ongoing and ominous sense of dread stalking through Silent Hill 2 left my nerves more shredded than a guitar solo played by a shirtless hu Jackman thankfully when things get loud in Silent Hill 2 this time we're much better equipped to fight back gone is the stiff autot targeted shooting and cumbersome
pause menu based weapon swapping of the original Silent Hill 2's combat feels much more like what you'd expect from a survival horror Adventure post Resident Evil 4 enemies can be manually targeted from an over theholder Viewpoint weapons can be quickly shuffled between at the tap of a d-pad button and James is also able to perform quick Dodges to nimbly Sid step around lurching enemies or the streams of acidic B they spew additionally melee attacks can be used to smash through glass in order to gather Health drinks and ammunition from cabinets or locked [Music] cars and
even to crash through weakened sections of walls to gain access to secret Areas hidden amongst its expanded environments that said although Silent Hill 2 gives you far more control over each shot fired it remains staunchly true to the original in terms of its noticeably limited arsenal of weapons James is an underpowered every man by Design After all there are two two types of melee weapons plus a handgun shotgun and rifle and that's your lot there are no weapon upgrades or mods to expand the capabilities of Your Arsenal further and ultimately I didn't particularly favor one
weapon over the other I pretty much just switched to whichever gun I had the most ammo for at any one time actually that's not entirely true according to the story completion stats page I did prefer one weapon more than most the lead pipe partly since ammo was so scarce but mainly because it just feels amazingly satisfying to relieve Silent Hill 2's near constant tension by clubbing a hellborn beast to the ground and continuing to pound their slimy skulls in until they've long since expired stop stop he's already dead yet while Silent Hill 2 lags behind
the likes of Resident Evil 4 or dead space as far as the flexibility of its Firepower goes the de Vel opers have thrown a few new enemy types into the mix to keep the combat consistently engaging despite its relative mechanical Simplicity when I first entered the TCA prison section in the story second half only to find a freaky new breed of mannequin that could scramble up and down walls and along the ceiling like a spider made of discarded doll Parts I couldn't hit the new 180° turn button fast enough nm- n however once I'd composed
myself I set about trying to pick them off from afar with my rifle as they shuffled in and Out of the Shadows above which gave silen Hill to's combat a challenging New Edge where the overhauled combat really shines however is in the boss battles some fights like the first encounter with the iconic Pyramid Head play out largely the same way they did before they just feel more muscular and menacing thanks to the immediacy of the over thee shoulder Viewpoint and the vastly more detailed visuals however other action sequences have been enhanced to far more comprehensive
degrees without spoiling too much there's one particular late game fight in the original Silent Hill 2 that amounted to little more than an attritional head-to-head standoff but here it's been reworked into an intense game of cat and mouse amidst the frigid air and dangling carcasses inside a meat locker effectively transforming one of the story's weakest boss fights into one of its very best similarly many of the original game's puzzles have been preserved here whether it's the eccentric pointand click adventure kind like using a specific specific tool in order to retrieve an item from an apartment
sweet garbage shoot or the more ingenious form like swiveling an ornate box on its axis in order to manipulate the Towering MC eer Inspired Room of impossible staircases inside a late game Labyrinth meanwhile other brain teasers like this coin puzzle early on had been given additional steps to complete which prevented their solutions from ever becoming too predictable as someone who played the original all those years AG go with the exception of some obligatory valve turning here and there puzzle types are largely unique and consistently stimulating and there are plenty of them to solve however some
of the simpler puzzles have been expanded Upon A Touch Too Much take one early obstacle in the original that effectively required you to solve a fairly straightforward riddle in order to wind a grandfather clock to a specific time in this remake I had to undergo a sequence of multi-part treasure hunts to gather up each of the three hands for the clock face fending off enemy hordes and completing additional puzzles along the way which ultimately meant that close to an hour of my playthrough was spent simply attempting to make the clock chime and unlock the way
forward this is just one example of a number of instances where the new Silent Hill 2 bogs down slightly in terms of story progression and I have to admit that as I jump through yet another elaborate series of Hoops just trying to get my hands on the key to a lock door in the Woodside Apartments I did catch myself wishing the owner had simply left a spare under their welcome match it's because of the expanded puzzles and combat sections that the new Silent Hill 2 is considerably longer than the original despite the fact it seems
to stick to all the same story beats the main campaign of the 2001 Silent Hill 2 can be completed in around 8 hours but my playthrough of this 2024 remake hit the credits at just over 15 while it's almost twice as long I don't really feel it's doubly as good this remake is genuinely excellent for large stretches at a time particularly during the escalating Stakes of its climactic final third but there are definite moments throughout the early parts of the journey that aligned with more padding than the walls of the Brook Haven Hospital psychiatric ward
even so although it might not completely Trump the original in the same way that the Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes did Silent Hill 2 is still an incredibly highquality reimagining that improves on its source material in more ways than not I really like the way it uses distinct Hues of light and distant audio Cube to subtly steer you along the right path allowing the HUD to stay free of any immersion breaking objective markers it's great how James automatically marks his map with any puzzles or lock doors you find vastly reducing the amount of
aimless backtracking that occasionally played the original game developer blueba team has also really emptied its full bag of tricks as far as taking tense situations and bringing them to near nervous breakdowns the timer based light switches in the TCA prison for example are an extremely effective device for creating Panic the intensifying countdown beeps echoing my own escalating heart rate as I hurry to complete my search of each cell before the whole block was plunged Back Into Darkness it's fantastically fear inducing stuff Silent Hill 2 is a welcome modernization of a survival horror Masterpiece it smoothly
polishes down the rough edges of the original game's combat while taking a piece of heavy grit sandpaper to scuff up every rust and mold covered surface of its nightmarish environments successfully making them appear far more abrasive and menacing to explore previously primitive boss battles have been transformed into substantially more intense encounters and its intimidating audio design kept me acutely aware that every fog cloak Street I walk down could quickly hurry me towards my own dead end it does feel a little paded out in parts and I do wish that blueba team had streamlined some of
the more convoluted puzzle sections to prevent the story's momentum from sagging on occasion still intermittent pacing problems aside Silent Hill 2 is a great way to visit or revisit one of the most dread inducing destinations in the history of survival [Music] horror for more reviews of survival horror remakes check out our verdicts on Resident Evil 4 and dead space and for everything else stick with IGN
