This year’s Spooktober has already come and gone, but I’m not ready to leave the spooky season behind just yet. See, the horror genre got a very important entry this month with the release of Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake. The original Silent Hill 2 is the quintes- sential horror game, so a new crop of fans getting to play it for the first time is a big deal.

I myself am one of those fans, having only ever experienced the Silent Hill games through memes and video clips. I know the remake isn’t one-for-one, but it’s still surprising how well the basic game holds up. Still, after being the inspiration of so many games that came after it, perhaps it just isn’t going to have the same impact as it once did.

From what I can tell and from what friends who are huge fans of the original Silent Hill 2 have told me, Bloober Team’s remake is actually a really faithful reimagining of the original. The fog, the tone, the characters and the events are all more or less as they should be. Changes have been made, but there’s always a nod towards how the original went, and it seems they’ve mostly been aimed at making the game’s story easier to follow.

As a newcomer, I’ve been really enjoying it as a horror experience. The silence of the town, the unsettling feeling of the Otherworld and the relentless claustrophobia all do a great job of drawing you into the world and the terrors unfolding within it. Combat feels good. The radio crackle always makes me nervous, the puzzles have been enjoyable to solve, and the story and characters have done a good job of keeping me invested.

This is a solid experience that I can handily recommend to anyone who enjoys a good psychological horror game. All that said though, Silent Hill 2 isn’t quite what I was expecting. The original enjoys an almost legendary status within the horror game fandom, so I was expecting something much more…transcendental, I suppose. Great as it is, I’m not wowed by it or getting thrown for psychological loops. My fault for buying into the hype, I suppose, but, after years and years of build up, I don’t think that’s 100% on me.

Also, well, Silent Hill 2 is kinda simple in its construction, which causes it to start feeling a bit drawn out as you progress. I mean, I know the Otherworld is kind of a staple in Silent Hill and especially in Silent Hill 2, but do 1 really have to go all the way through every real world location and then the way through an Otherworld version of those same locations every single time?

There comes a point where you’re like “I get it! Can we move on already?” My favorite location in the whole game wound up being the historical society/prison since I only had to visit one version of each. Same with the labyrinth. It was cool because it was fresh throughout and not just another retread of a real world location. I get that there is story significance to everything we see in Silent Hill 2. Truly, I do. It’s just that, as a player, the pattern gets tedious, especially once you know that you’re going to have to spend another 2 to 3 hours re-treading through a place.

This issue might simply be that of a long-time gamer who’s already played many gamesthat were inspired by Silent Hill 2 and actually did some things better, at least in terms of gameplay. My go to example would probably be Signalis, which uses backtracking and such in a more engaging way, in my opinion. In the end, though, this is still Silent Hill 2. Admittedly minor gripes aside, it’s still a great horror game, one that every horror fan will enjoy. It’s just that you might not enjoy this one as much as you would have the original back in 2004.

What do you think of Silent Hill 2 remake? Does it hit you just as hard as the original did? Or have you (like me) been spoiled by all of its successor games?

Image captured from the Silent Hill 2 story trailer