The Silent Hill 2 remake is a horror game with the lights on

Combat in Silent Hill 2 is not about danger or dodging, or any of the regular video game feelings. It’s aesthetic, whether it is intended to be or not. Most of the enemies (outside of iconic antagonist Pyramid Head and a couple of other bosses) are choked feminine forms, suffocating forever. Some are sickly figures trapped in bed frames. In every killing, James recreates the game’s primary trauma: His murder of his sickly wife Mary over and over again. (For a deeper analysis of this, please check out Astrid Anne Rose’s essay “Nurse With Wound.“) That ambiguity is baked into the game’s design, where, outside of boss fights, you don’t actually need to fight anything. There is a question of how much Silent Hill‘s monsters actually mean harm. The enemies don’t seem to appear to Laura, a little girl who also knew Mary, who moves through Silent Hill with total ease. Or perhaps they simply do not hurt her.

In Remake, combat is less avoidable (there are even sections where you can’t progress until you kill a certain amount of enemies). James slips into combat mode easily. He pops out the pipe from a portal in his jacket as soon as an enemy approaches. He can switch from a gun to a melee weapon without any awkward scramble for purchase. He can do combos, and has i-frames. The result is something that feels both more and less hostile. The combat is tenser and faster. Individual enemies pose more of a threat and are less predictable. But it also makes killing less eerie. It is less like killing an innocent, and more like fighting video game enemies. It’s also more like Alan Wake 2, which is like Dead Space (2023), which is like Resident Evil 2 (2019). Remake reconfigures Silent Hill 2 to be like every other AAA horror video game out there.

Silent Hill 2‘s unique texture extends beyond combat. Most often the camera follows James, but he is small in frame, swallowed in darkness or mist. Entering a new room means getting a new perspective, which can emphasize particular images or hide terrors yet to be discovered. Silent Hill 2 features some close-ups, but relies much more on body language. James looms over its women, the space between characters emphasized. The game’s awkward script and stilted line-readings give the sense of people talking past each other, a fear and suspicion that suffuses every one of those who Silent Hill summoned to itself. Without more intensive facial animation, the game had to rely on blocking and movement to communicate character.

Despite (or perhaps because) of a greater fidelity, Remake has fewer subtleties. Nodes of meaning found in text become ponderously labored-over cutscenes. Intense close-ups directly communicate meaning, moving away from the alienating cinematography of the original. James glowers into the camera, which looks straight at his face, every pore visible. Moments of shocking ambiguity, like the flickering, half-seen shadows of Mary’s videotape (in which James is only briefly seen killing his wife) turn into direct, unambiguous exposition. Shots of haunting stillness like the wide, misty shot of the graveyard in the “Leave” ending turn into multiple postcard frames of places throughout the town. It’s so much more and yet, so much less. Silent Hill 2 is about the space between people, the effort it takes to bridge that dark gap, and the violence that shapes us when we fail to reach across. Remake thinks it would be best to turn the lights on.

There is a common attitude, especially in video games, that limitations “get in the way” of art. Silent Hill 2‘s developers have even expressed frustration at Silent Hill 2‘s final product. But no game, not even Remake, has really matched Silent Hill 2. In many ways, I want more games like Silent Hill 2, but I don’t want it again. And certainly not like this. It wouldn’t be what it is without the context that made it. The limitation is the art. Like scratches on a roll of film, limitations are what give art its texture and character. It’s better that way. (Reid McCarter makes a similar argument in the essay “Restful Dreams“).

Silent Hill 2 came from a time when video game narrative was far less settled. Silent Hill 2 didn’t know it was a classic; its team was just trying to make something meaningful. And while it has many obvious inspirations, it synthesizes them instead of merely recreating them. It is something all too rare in video games: something entirely its own. Since Resident Evil 4 and Naughty Dog, a narrative-driven AAA game has come to mean a narrow set of things. Silent Hill 2 is a game with many ideas, but its remake has essentially just one: reconfiguring the original game into the 3D action mode of other horror remakes. Playing Silent Hill 2 is a reminder that video games can do everything. Its remake is a beleaguered, crafted, tepid example of what they’ve found themselves stuck doing instead.