I’ve not been silent about my distaste for Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2. The Polish studio has produced half-decent horror games with Layers of Fear and Blair Witch, but these successes pale in comparison to how badly games like The Medium mishandle actively damaging subject matter, and how it tackled its own internal definition of trauma. It all fell apart with a prevailing message that told players that if you’re mentally ill then it’s better to kill yourself because the world isn’t willing to help fix you.
Yikes all around, and this lack of a deft touch has Silent Hill fans worried abouthow this remake will potentially diverge from the original masterpiece. In a recent interview with Engadget, Bloober Team co-founder Piotr Babieno explained it will be distancing itself from psychological horror as it instead chooses to focus on more “mass-market” approaches to the genre. More specifically, he claims that previous games from the studio focused more on storytelling, visuals, and atmosphere than enjoyable gameplay, which it hopes to change.
This has predictably confused Silent Hill 2 fans, given the game’s approach to world building, character writing, and monster designs is very psychological. James Sunderland’s turmoil is pulled from his mind and turned into twisted monsters and haunted locales that are terrifying to this day, with even the other humans you meet all expressing a bleak uneasiness in their demeanour. It’s almost like everything is an elaborate stage play made for our protagonist to surrender to his own all-consuming guilt. Take that away, and you’re not left with much at all.
Babieno continues: “[In our past games, we] focused on the story, we focused on the mood, we focused on the quality of graphics and music, but we didn’t put a lot of attention on the gameplay mechanics,” he said. “It wasn’t our target. But we decided that there was a ceiling that we couldn’t break if we did not deliver something fresh, something new.”
But who says effective survival horror and gameplay that doesn’t suck are mutually exclusive? We’ve seen countless survival horror games, before the dawn of Bloober, which have mixed both of these tenets together with fantastic results. Even in recent months we’ve seen Resident Evil 4 Remake and Amnesia: The Bunker present two very different takes on the genre with stellar results. One is a high-octane shooter with horror influences, while the other is a morbidly tense adventure drenched in darkened paranoia. It is more than possible for a game to play very well and scare us just as much.
Bloober seems to be making this excuse because most of its games have drawn from genre classics without nearly as much imagination. Layers of Fear is a clear riff on P.T. while The Medium uses the fixed camera angles and tank controls of classic Silent Hill with none of the imagination. You aren’t abandoning psychological horror for stronger gameplay when you’ve never done either of them well in the first place. Hold yourself to a higher standard and don’t drag horror down for no good reason. Do something cool, unique, and innovative with a gem like Silent Hill 2. That being said, what improvements could Bloober even be talking about?
When it comes to combat and exploration, and also in how it controls, I wouldn’t label Silent Hill 2 as an untouchable classic. It’s gone down in history thanks to its narrative, characters, and atmosphere, so perhaps Bloober Team is aware of the legacy it is toying with and hopes to improve it in ways that are otherwise superficial. Better melee combat and larger locations to explore could go down well so long as they don’t depict James Sunderland as a ludicrous badass when he’s little more than a loser who may or may not have killed his wife. Spoilers.
Silent Hill 2’s upcoming remake could boast better gameplay and more engaging mechanics, but these are all for nothing if Bloober Team is willing to abandon its underpinnings. No psychological horror means that everything this game does so well will fade away, resulting in a revival that misunderstands what made the original so special while bludgeoning it into this new form that fans won’t be pleased with in the slightest. With any luck, Babieno’s words aren’t representative of the game or simply misrepresent what it hopes to achieve, because this remake has a chance to bring one of the greatest games ever made in the modern era, and it will be heartbreaking to see it fail.