I Do Not See The Appeal Of Silent Hill 2: Remake

 

The Silent Hill 2 Remake is one of those games I've been shitting on since it was announced.  Starting with the annoucement that the gaggle of incompetant hacks, Bloober Team, are making it and then with every shoddy trailer to drop since then I've only had increasingly harsh words to say about it.  But then the launch trailer appeared on YouTube and under it was a sea of positive comments of people hype to play it and I'm just completely baffled.

It really does feel like I'm going insane in some ways.  Like, imagine if you were in a resturant and the waiter serves you literal dogshit on a plate.  You respond by saying "this is dogshit! I'm not eating that" but then all your friends and the other people in the resturant are just shovelling the dogshit into their mouths and just GUSHING about how good it is.  That's what watching the trailer and then looking at the comments section feels like.

On a gameplay level, the things shown in the launch trailer look OK, I guess.  Maybe the most acceptable part of the whole deal.  This is only because they are using the same 3rd person over the shoulder style that a ton of games in this genre have been using since 2005, it's a hard thing to fuck up at this point.  That said though, Silent Hill: Homecoming and Silent Hill: Downpour were also using this style of game play and managed to fuck it up so even though it looks fine in the trailer I'm very much expecting it to suck ass when I actually get around to playing it.

But the gameplay is not what I'm really purplexed by, it's everything else.  The subtlety seems to have been completely thrown out of the window in the overall presentation.  The game looks like its pulling all the tricks for "scares" that things like Dead Space uses.  Like there's one bit in the trailer where James turns a corner to a TV with static on it and a monster in front of it.  As he gets closer the TV turns off and the monster just shuffles out of view.  I can almost guarantee that the next move after that is if you turn the camera the monster is gone.  One of the oldest and least effective tricks in the book being used in not just any modern horror game but in a SILENT HILL game of all things.  Even in the, admittedly kind of ass, 2001 E3 trailer for the original game they weren't pulling any bullshit like that.  The games creepiness spoke for itself in the few snippits that they showed off between some cutscene bites.  

But the cutscenes are where the remake seems to scandalize me the most of anything.  The new voice acting and character designs look like absolute trash.  The two big offenders so far are Angela, who's had her weird quirky line delivery removed for ham fisted, obvious bullshit and Eddie, who has, quite frankly, become a parody of himself

The trailer shows off a section of his speech near the end of the game where he says "It doesn't matter if you smart, dumb, ugly, pretty! its all the same once you're dead! and a corpse can't laugh" and the presentation and line delivery of the scene are so HORRIBLY bad and miss the point of the original so hard that I physically winced.  Whoever is voicing Eddie in this remake needs a fat slap or a better director.  Preferably both.  This is just two scenes out of the whole game too so how much actual pain I'm going to feel playing through it is sort of daunting.

Now the obvious thing to say here would be "if you hate it so much, just don't play it".  But that doesn't fly because Silent Hill 2 means a lot to me and if I'm going to be in a position to talk at length about how much this remake sucks shit, I have to play it through AT LEAST a couple times.  Plus there's always the astronomically low chance that I'm wrong about all this and it turns out to be great.  I think I have more of a chance of surviving a plane crash and then winning the lottery right after but the chance is a smidge higher than 0%, at least.

But here's my theory on why SH2R is seeing so much positivity.  Most people played, or more likely watched, Silent Hill 2 and didn't really get it.  The looked at some video essays or articles about the game after the fact and parroted that bullshit to seem smart online but they were essentially just pretenders wanting to be in on the popular thing.  Then Bloober comes along and gives you a version of the game that is louder, dumber, less intelligent and easier to digest but has JUST ENOUGH of the original in there to still looks smart with your peers online for enjoying the "art game".  If that's not it then I weep for the standards and tastes of general gaming audiences.  

I knew the bar was low, but this is on a whole new level of trash.  I, of course, will be playing it at some time soon after release and will be coming back to either validate this post or maybe do a complete 180, lets see how it goes.