The Many Ways Silent Hill 2 Remake Changes the Classic PS2 Horror Game

Video game remakes like Dead Space, The Last of Us Part 1, and Demon’s Souls leverage current-gen technology to deliver modern, definitive versions of all-time classics. But there’s another, more ambitious tier of remakes, like Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth, which stay true to the original game in spirit but make fundamental changes to the gameplay and story, resulting in a fresh, more evolved experience.

Konami and Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 falls into the latter category, daring to rebuild the 2001 horror masterpiece from the ground up for the PlayStation 5 and PC. Gameplay is revamped, visuals have been updated, story has been modified…it’s a true remake that looks and plays differently than its predecessor in almost every way.

Is the remake better than the original? That’s a question of taste. The original game has actually aged quite well, and there is surely a contingent of fans who prefer the look and feel of it. That being said, while the remake brings a lot of new things to the table, Bloober Team made an obvious effort to preserve and even amplify the strengths of the original. With that in mind, let’s delve into what changes the Silent Hill 2 remake makes to its predecessor’s formula and whether or not they help or hinder the game in capturing the greatness of the PS2 classic.

One of the most transformative new features in the Silent Hill 2 remake is the eschewing of the traditional semi-fixed camera setup in favor of a third-person over-the-shoulder view reminiscent of titles like modern Resident Evil and Alan Wake. The concern is whether or not the new camera setup makes the game scarier or not. My feeling is that the remake is just as scary as the original game, if not more so in certain moments. The OTS perspective adds greatly to the immersion, and even encounters with some of the lowliest enemies in the game can be terrifying when they jump you from around a dark corner unexpectedly.

In other words, I prefer the remake’s OTS view over the original’s semi-fixed camera. That being said, there is a unique, found-footage quality to the original camera setup that is still very effective, particularly when exploring the game’s dark interiors. There’s a sense of disorientation that comes with the dynamic camera cuts that really works for this sort of experience despite the fact that they can also have an adverse effect on the player’s ability to fight off enemies.

That said, while it does ultimately makes things scarier in the remake, the camera often gets stuck on walls and corners in those same claustrophobic interiors, at times struggling to frame the action. This is disorienting in a bad way. The game’s oppressive darkness is meant to be intentionally obstructive and panic-inducing, but there were several moments when I was simply trying to attack an enemy I knew was right beside me, but just couldn’t get the camera to cooperate. For a game so steeped in atmosphere, this is an unwelcome distraction that can kind of kill the vibe.

Outside of this, however, the new gameplay features are all wonderful. Combat feels more visceral, and environments are way more fun to explore. Even subtle new features afforded by current-gen hardware add a ton to the experience. While in the original game different sections of levels would be partitioned by loading screens when you opened most doors, the remake lets you explore Brookhaven Hospital, the Lakeview Hotel, and the rest of the interior sections seamlessly, completely devoid of loading (as iconic as the loading screen “footsteps” are, it’s nice to see less of them). This has a huge effect on the experience and lends a groundedness to the maps and environments that isn’t found in the original.

One of the more distinctly current-gen features the remake offers on PS5 is the implementation of the DualSense controller’s speaker, which plays the series’ signature eerie static that grows louder the nearer an enemy is. More often than not, despite the static’s warnings, I had no clue where exactly the enemy was, which added so much tension to these encounters. While you might suspect that the controller gimmick would detract from the game’s sense of suspense, the effect is quite the opposite. Enemies of all types set off the static, so you never know whether its a mere cockroach crawling around that’s setting it off, or Pyramid Head himself primed and ready to lop your head off behind a breakable wall.

Speaking of ol’ Pyramid Head, my favorite gameplay change has to be the overhauled boss fights. They freaking rule. In the original game, the first encounter with Pyramid Head takes place in an empty box of a room. In the remake, the room is littered with metal cages he smashes to smithereens as he tries to split you in two with his giant, rusty Great Knife.

Another shining example of how significantly improved the boss battles are is the meat locker showdown with Eddie later in the game. In the original, you try to take him down while navigating hanging, butchered bovine carcasses. It’s a moody scene, with the series’ signature fog effects used to simulate the freezing cold air inside what is essentially a massive walk-in fridge. But in the remake, the chilly air is so thick you can only see a few feet in front of you, effectively making the fight with Eddie an edge-of-your-seat game of hide and seek. It’s a markedly better boss fight than in the original.

The thing about horror games is, it’s difficult to compartmentalize visuals and gameplay when discussing them. More than any other genre, a horror game’s visual and sound design have a palpable effect on gameplay and vice versa. The Eddie boss fight is better in the remake because the power of current-gen hardware allows the developers to not just make the game “look better” but add visual effects that fundamentally change the way the fight plays out.

In other words, the Silent Hill 2 remake’s updated visuals aren’t simply cosmetic; they’re consequential. The point isn’t that the leggy abominations leaping at you in those dark hallways are “rendered better.” The point is, because the enemies are rendered with higher fidelity, they’re more faithful to the artists’ original designs, which makes the game scarier. The designers and artists at Team Silent were limited by the PS2 hardware, whereas Bloober Team is empowered by the PS5 and PC hardware to illustrate their visions of terror in grisly detail, thereby making the remake more visually compelling in most ways.

I say “most” because one thing I prefer about the look of the original game is its overall grittiness. There’s something about the lo-fi, pixelated PS2 look that lends itself to that game’s demonic, almost found-footage aesthetic. Even today, the original game’s visuals still really work because the graphics look sort of digi-haunted and grimy.

The remake’s visuals lack that sandpapery grit. Despite the repugnance of the imagery onscreen, this is a slick-looking Unreal Engine 5 game with smooth edges, fancy lighting, next-level animation, amongst a load of other current-gen graphical trappings. But this isn’t a bad thing—it’s just different. All of that UE5 wizardry enables the artists to create a version of Silent Hill that is intoxicatingly vivid and atmospheric.

Silent Hill 2’s power lies in its atmosphere, and the devs have leveraged their tech to make the game’s atmosphere as rich as possible. Something that springs to mind is the volumetric fog on Toluca Lake as James rows toward the beckoning, ghostly lighthouse. It’s one of the most poignant moments of respite in the game, and the presentation here is as evocative and serene as it should be considering the hell the player is put through beforehand, in the nightmarish bowels of Toluca Prison, and after, in the descent into madness that is the Lakeview Hotel.

The game’s environments are positively terrifying, from the crumbling halls of Wood Side Apartments to the borderline pitch-black cell blocks of the aforementioned prison. Bloober Team’s use of lighting is excellent, with enemies genuinely obscured from view when drenched in shadow (not the case in most games that aim to achieve this effect). What few light sources there are in the game behave realistically, save for James’ pocket flashlight, which has to be one the dimmest flashlights to ever appear in a video game (this is done by design to instill fear, of course, and it does the trick).

As scary as the game’s visuals are, the sound is where all of the horror magic happens. The score, by longtime series composer Akira Yamaoka, is unnerving and tortured in the most beautiful way, but when the music drops out and the only sounds you hear are the moans and gargles of the demonic creatures lurking in the shadows, it’s almost unbearably tense. And because so much of combat is predicated on not knowing where your attacker is coming from, the directional audio is absolutely crucial. Thankfully, the game gives you a terrific sense of spatial awareness via its sound design at all times, making the experience feel thoroughly enveloping.

The remake’s sound design and visuals are leaps ahead of the original game technically, and I would say artistically as well, though the brilliance of the core designs from the original are still the rock-solid foundation all of the modern tech is built upon. Bloober Team only ever implement current-gen techniques when they help bolster the game’s sense of terror, which results in an experience that looks spectacular but doesn’t compromise any of the original game’s artistic value.

Bloober Team’s artistic touch is on full display in the game’s completely reimagined cutscenes, which feature re-written dialogue, performance capture, and a more nuanced approach to the sensitive themes tackled by the original material. The game’s narrative elements have all been reworked for the better, to the point where they frankly blow the cutscenes from the original game out of the water. Hell, these new cutscenes are so terrific, they blow scenes other modern games out of the water.

First of all, there are the redesigned character models and animations—they look phenomenal. Most video game storytelling featuring human characters struggles to be cinematic in a humanistic and intimate way because the character models aren’t emotive enough to convey the complex emotions the scenes demand. Video game characters’ body language and facial expressions can often feel theatrical and unnatural to compensate for the lack of nuance in the models’ animation and articulation. But what we find in the Silent Hill 2 remake are characters who look and move convincingly like real people, with little furrows in the brow and twitches of the mouth that allow us to sense what’s going on inside a character’s head without them literally telling us.

Let’s go back to the encounter with Eddie in the meat locker. In the original game, after James [spoiler] kills Eddie, he collapses beside him and screams, “Eddie!” before muttering to himself, “I…I killed a…a human being…A human being…” Even by 2001 standards, this is some B movie-level, melodramatic dialogue. The original game is an all-time classic, but objectively, the dialogue and voice acting is schlocky. As in the original, James kills Eddie in the remake, but he doesn’t fall to his knees. He stands over Eddie’s body, slowly lifts his hands and stares at them in disbelief. Then, we see him in close-up, looking at once terrified and heartbroken, his eyes falling for a moment before looking up again. The scene gets across the same message that the original’s did, just in a way that feels more sincere.

All of the game’s story moments are more potent and poetic in the remake, like how we discover what’s been tormenting Angela, or when Laura gives James an envelope from Mary with his name on it. Most notably, the dark, sexual undercurrents propelling the conversations between James and Maria are far more engrossing this time around thanks to the actors’ brilliant performances and the reworked dialogue which, again, is more subtle and leaves room for interpretation. While the characters in the original game felt stilted and, you know, video game-y, the characters in the remake look and sound like real people. This makes all the difference in the world.

To be clear, I don’t mean to knock the original game or unfairly hold it to modern standards. The point is, some remakes don’t mess with the original story at all, and I feel compelled to commend Bloober Team for daring to improve upon material that was already revered by fans. They could’ve whiffed, but they knocked it out of the park.

Virtually every change Silent Hill 2 makes to its predecessor’s formula is a welcome one that makes a great game even greater. It’s less an homage than a bold assertion that even masterpieces can be improved upon if done the right way.

Silent Hill 2 is out now for PlayStation 5 and PC.