Silent Hill 2 Remake Isn't Very Good

 

I finally did it, I finally slogged through the Silent Hill 2 Remake and saw the ending.  I got Leave if anyone is curious.  I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the game but overall I'm pretty negative on it.  There's a couple of things here and there that were done decently but overall it's an annoying and boring version of the original with a bunch of the sublety removed and a final act that seems to just not understand how good storytelling works at all.

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.

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.

The Silent Hill 2 Remake Gets Worse

 

So without me realizing it some new Silent Hill 2 gameplay footage dropped and while I'm not usually one to watch these kinds of promotional material I just HAD to see what was going on with this absolute trainwreck of a remake.  I knew from the start that SH2R is doomed to be awful in every way but, at least from what I can glean from this trailer, it is way worse than I had ever imagined.  

First thing I have to mention is the graphics, the game LOOKS like complete shit.  Now you could argue that it's early footage or whatever but this game has been in development for a good while already and if this is where we are up to then things look pretty grim.  What's weird is that the visual design of their games is literally the only thing Bloober Team is any good at.  Layers of Fear, for example, is a gigantic piece of steaming garbage but if you go on the store page for it and take a look at some screenshots it looks pretty well put together.  Hell, I imagine a lot of their sales for that game came off the back of tricking people with talented 3D artists to get curious shoppers to buy in.  In particular within that trailer james is fighting some Lying Figures and they look AWFUL.  They sort of look like they've been pulled right from the movie but not the actual 3D model used from that film but an amateurs recreation of that model, horrendous.

Then there's the problem of the combat itself.  It's pretty much stock standard over the shoulder gameplay but there's something about it that looks really bad.  The way it looks gives me weird Homecoming vibes and the abundance of QTE gives me flashhbacks to Silent Hill Origins and that is NOT a good combo at all.  People like to piss and moan about tank controls and shit but that style of gameplay was FINE for a game like this and once you get used to them they don't really feel at that bad at all.  I don't subscribe to the "it makes James feel like he sucks at fighting" thing either, that's fucking stupid bullshit spouted by people who just suck at playing the game since Harry, James and Heather, unlike the highly trained members of S.T.A.R.S can at least have some mobility while aiming.  Not having the camera locked to the right side of James's shoulder though allows the developers to do some things with enviroment design that would probably get missed with a camera so zoomed in.  There's a lot to say for tank over the more modern system but that's another post for another day.

The final thing about the trailer, the thing that stuck out the absolute most out of all the others was some writing on a wall that read "Reap what you sow"

Silent Hill 2 was never this kind of game, never this brand of horror.  It was slow burn, atmospheric, oppressive before lurching into some really scary stuff for a short time and then pulling you back into weird spooky serenity.  Think the part in the hospital, its a great example.  Calm and creepy up till the the bit where Laura locks you in a room with those weird things from the ceiling, then opressive as all fuck and THEN holy shit triangle man is chasing you down a hall and it all ends with James in the hospital defeated, sad and alone while some calm music plays.  I get that this trailer is just supposed to be a short compilation of "the scary bits" but look at Bloobers other games and tell me that you think that they are going to be able to pull off what original Silent Hill 2 was doing.  Of course they fucking aren't, the whole game is going to be always like that all of the time.  Silent Hill 2 via Dead Space and "Reap what you sow" written on a wall in bright text is a perfect signpost as to just how little anyone working on this remake understand what the original was about or trying to do.

Remakes can, in general, suck my ass as in most cases they are a shitty way for some execs to use nostalgia as a method of getting a bigger bonus for the year. But this remake, which is doing that but made by people who clearly lack a lot of talent and probably don't even care about the source material can extra suck my ass through a straw after I have consumed a large amount of spicy food

Fuck SH2R