In an interview with GamesRadar+, a team lead for Bloober Team discussed the Silent Hill 2 remakes and the conditions surrounding it. Little was given in the way of details, with the speaker focusing mostly on the current horror environment and talking generally about the enormity of taking on a project like Silent Hill 2. The gist of it more or less seemed like Bloober Team feels they’re up for the job and they’re eager to prove it.

Honestly, I’m hoping they’re up for the challenge too, but I can’t help but have doubts. For one thing, this interview sounded very…self-serving. They boast about how certain they are that their upcoming projects will cement them as the premier horror game developer in the coming years. They talk about their games as though they’ve somehow ceated a new subgenre, which they apparently call “hidden horror.” It’s apparently because their games focus on “story, atmosphere and sound” as though no one else does this. I dunno, it’s all a bit too much considering this company’s track record thus far.

For my part, I’ve played one Bloober Team game and watched through another. That is, I’ve played Observer and watched Blair Witch. Both games certainly try to be scary, Observer doing so with dystopic ideas and horrors of technology, and Blair Witch just trying to be overall spooky as a callback to the movie. There was certainly potential in both games, but neither really managed any scares. Observer’s vision of a technologic future gone wrong doesn’t haunt the player like it should, and it has a hard time pulling you in.

Blair Witch on the otherhand does get some of that dread one would feel while wandering the woods out in the middle of nowhere, but it doesn’t take long for that feeling to shift into boredom as the game overplays its hand. It’s as if Bloober Team is just setting up these potentially scary places only to fail to do any more than present them to you: “here it is! Scary, isn’t it??” The substance just isn’t there, and that’s a big problem since they’re working on Silent Hill 2: a game that’s all about substance.

Thankfully, Bloober Team more or less has a blueprint to follow when it comes to the writing, music and overal design of Silent Hill 2; they’ll be able to lean very heavily on what came before, and that’s perfectly fine. What’s going to challenge them though is making the place feel alive in the same way Team Silent all those years ago, something they haven’t yet managed in their own games. Silent Hill 2 Remake is not going to succeed if it winds up feeling like yet another Bloober Team horror-themed amusement park ride.

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Of course, I could be completely off about this, so I wanna know what you think. Are Bloober Team the masters of horror that they think they are? Can they pull-off Silent Hill 2 Remake in a way fans will be happy with?

Image from Niche Gamer