I get the impression Bloober Team knows what you think of it. Ever since the studio was announced as the driving force behind Konami’s remake of the impossibly beloved Silent Hill 2, it feels like the game’s fanbase has been sucking air through its teeth, keeping one wincing eye on development to see how badly Bloober messed up.The Silent Hill 2 remake feels like the PS2 classic in a Resident Evil 2 remake wrapper
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I don’t think it has. Having spent three hours with the game, it’s not perfect, but I didn’t come away thinking the devs behind Layers of Fear and The Medium have massacred a classic. Instead, I think people’s scepticism has inclined them to play things safe, turning out a UE5 embellishment of the original that feels a lot like Silent Hill 2 filtered through the design sensibilities of the Resident Evil 2 remake.
For die-hards and purists (terms I don’t use pejoratively; I’m a die-hard and purist about plenty of stuff), that shift will likely be too much by itself. But if you’re just Silent Hill-curious, or someone with vague memories of the now-23-year-old original game who’d like to return to that town? I think Bloober might have actually pulled it off.
Leon Sunderland Kennedy
It does feel a lot like that RE2 remake though, in terms of how it plays. The three hours I spent with Silent Hill 2 took me from its opening—James Sunderland getting his head together in the roadside toilet we all know and love—through the streets of Silent Hill and into the Wood Side and Blue Creek apartments. If I’d squinted I probably could have convinced myself I was playing Capcom’s 2019 banger using some kind of greyscale ENB preset.
Bloober has dispensed with the fixed camera angles and tank controls of the original game and given us something all about shaky over-the-shoulder aiming and rotating objects you pick up in the world. A transition from Resident Evil (old) to Resident Evil (new) in gameplay.
If you’re not wedded to those fixed camera angles, it works. The pitch-black and creaky flats of the Wood Side apartments didn’t feel any less tense and fearful just because I was looking at them from over James’ shoulder and not from a viewpoint placed somewhere in the corner of the room, and I suspect the angle will be a lot more palatable to a disturbingly adult-aged population of players who didn’t grow up with games that refused to let you control the camera.
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