First of all, I want to address the gameplay because that part of the game is at least OK. Silent Hill 2 Remake plays basically the same as every other 3rd person over the shoulder horror game that you've ever played. Resident Evil 4, 5, 6, remakes, The Evil Within, Silent Hill Downpour, Dead Space, all that shit. It plays just like those and therefore there isn't really much to say, if you have played any modern horror game since 2005, you've played a game just like Silent Hill 2 Remake. What is kind of cool about the gameplay of Silent Hill 2 Remake is the exploration and the remixed areas that James has to explore on his quest to find his dead wife. When I bought the game for 60 quid I was worried that I was going to blast through the game in a couple hours because I'm pretty familiar with the original and can blast through it in an hour or two. The areas of 2R have been expanded quite a bit though with new puzzles to solve or expansions on old ones. For example the coin puzzle in Ashfield Apartments has been carried over from the original game only this time the coins have two sides that you have to contend with and solving the puzzle comes in the form of a 3 part poem with different coin arrangements for each part. There are certain sections of the game where the expansions to these areas feel like padding such as in the prison, labryinth and one absolutely unforgivable puzzle segment in the hotel but overall the changes to the areas and exploration are decent. Not better, not worse, just different and for a game that I'm extremely familiar with, I welcome the effort.
Another positive thing I want to touch on are the changes to the boss fights. The bosses in original Silent Hill 2 are kind of wank. For a town that's trying to punish James with monsters from his own pscyhe, it's not trying very fucking hard. In the remake though, from a gameplay standpoint, I like the bossfights. The change I liked the most is the Eddie fight in the meat locker. In the original the AI would run at you, get stuck in a loop punching a piece of meat and then die in a couple of hits. In the remake he's running all over the arena, shooting at you, trying to confuse you by fogging the place up. At one point the hanging meat starts moving around and so if you're trying to gun him down then that's another thing you have to be managing while you shoot at him and avoid his revolver. It's cool shit. The fight with the double pyramid heads at the end of the game is also significantly more intense and while it's not difficult in any regard thanks to James having Dark Souls-eqsue i-frames when dodging, the sheer spectacle of fighting these two hulking fuckers with spears is very cool.
There is some stuff that's absolute dogwank though. The game learned one trick very early on that was to hide its sentient pairs of legs around corners and have them ambush you and instead of just letting that be a one time or a couple-time thing, it's spamming that nonsense for the ENTIRE GAME. Even when nightmares start intersecting with each other and James is supposed to be seeing Angela's monsters in the hotel, the remake decides to not do that and instead just fill the hotel with MORE FUCKING LEGS. Legs and Pukey Boiz, that's all you fuckin' get for like 15 hours. Maybe a nurse if the game is feeling generous but you fight them in the exact same way you fight the legs so what's the fucking point?
But that's all gameplay stuff. Admittedly, the game part of the video game is alrite, solid, even if it does run like shit and crashed on me once in the hotel. But the game isn't the real reason we're here is it? or at least it shouldn't be. The story is what counts in Silent Hill 2, an absolutely masterfully written supernatural tragedy and how did Bloober handle it? Well they fucked it up in nearly every single cutscene. It was so bad that I started to dread getting to the end of segments because I knew something was going to piss me off royally as soon as the characters started flapping their gums.
There's too much to go through in a simple blog post, maybe I'll do a video on it one day, but the general gist of why it all annoys me so much is the complete removal of subtlety from the story. Everything that was hinted at or implied through imagry or line delivery is gone and instead replaced with obvious statements made by Hollywood-ass sounding voice actors. Angela doesn't sound weird and stilted like she's supposed to, Eddie is overly pathetic, the letter read at the end of the game from Mary sounds like a weird dollar store version of the original. Granted, for most of the game it's only mildly annoying, stuff that me and my friend were saying "yeah it's OK but they fumbled it a little bit, I guess". But then you watch the video tape in the hotel and everything, narratively speaking, goes to complete shit to the point where I wanted to take a plane to the Bloober offices and just punch every "writer" they have it that place right in the fucking jaw. The game was made for them, all they had to do was copy it and yet they made all these weird changes to the sequence that aren't just different and a bit crap, but actively ruin the effect that the original was trying to produce.
I understand that Bloober is a team of not very talented people and the fact that SH2R is as acceptable as it turned out is an christmas fucking miracle but what they did to the ending segment of the hotel is nothing short of art vandalism and I'm already sort of swerving into spoiler town enough with this post so again, another post for another day or maybe even a 14 hour video about why it sucks if I ever find the time to produce such a thing.
Overall, Silent Hill 2 Remake is a medicore experience that teeters very close the being just flat out bad more often than not. A few good decisions here and there but, quite frankly, it would be better if this game had never been made.
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