Silent Hill 2 hands-on: creepier than ever but just as clunky

3 hours with Konami’s classic horror remake

Silent Hill 2 / Konami

PlayStation’s 2001 horror smash Silent Hill 2 holds a special place in video game history, so it’s little wonder Konami has decided to feed it through its remake machine. What’s come out the other end, however, doesn’t quite live up to the legacy.

The game tells the story of James Sunderland, a man searching for his missing wife in a town that would be weirdly empty were it not home to a disturbing assortment of demon spawn representing repressed elements of his subconscious.

In fairness, the new Silent Hill 2 has everything you’d expect from a modern remake: fresh controls, a more immediate over-the-shoulder perspective, reworked combat, gorgeous ray tracing, and even several new endings. After three hours with it, though, it’s clear Silent Hill 2 is a fundamentally old game, and no amount of remake magic can fix inherently dated design.

Silent Hill 2 / Konami

Take combat, for example. Now you can dodge, perform sprinting attacks with your trusty wooden plank, and freely aim your handgun. Compared to the original, combat here is a lot more involved. That wasn’t difficult, however, seeing as combat in the original was practically non-existent.

Put it next to any modern game, and enemy encounters are dull and simplistic. Humanoid foes, such as the women who look like they’re trapped in leather body bags, and the fusion of two pairs of legs stacked on top of each other, have basic attack patterns, and as a result, yours tend to repeat.

Generally, it’s ‘dodge projectile attack, whack, dodge grab attack, whack again’. With little in the way of weapon feedback or visible damage, enemies start to feel less like ethereal horrors from a nightmare plain and more annoyances to be avoided. They don’t drop anything worth killing them for, either. 

Silent Hill 2 / Konami

Capcom’s Resident Evil remakes disguise retro game design with cutting-edge body degradation. Enemies break apart convincingly depending on where you hit them, breathing new life into what would have been a two-decades-old combat system. Encounters in the Silent Hill 2 remake have none of that, and therefore feel like relics from a bygone age.

The pacing is slow, too, even for a horror game. Progression is basically one long string of finding MacGuffins. 

In the open world, which takes place in the game’s signature fog-ridden streets, you’re tasked with finding two halves of a broken record, glue to stick them together, a jukebox coin, and a keypad button in order to play a song that triggers a memory, all of which require you to run down stretches of empty road while avoiding shambling enemies in the gloom. It’s neither scary nor engaging.

Silent Hill 2 / Konami

After this section comes the apartment, which uses claustrophobia to ramp up the horror. Here, the remake’s stellar sound design comes into focus, with every floorboard creak and muffled groan elevated.

Ray tracing is also put to great effect. Exploring dank apartments with your flashlight at the ready casts eerie shadows on walls, while smashing greasy windows cascades glorious white light into corridors.

Rooms within the apartment block are creatively unsettling. There’s one filled with thousands of moths fluttering above your head and crunching underfoot, and another in which you have to shove your hand into a dark hole in a bathroom wall while a grim, foreboding bass sound builds. 

Silent Hill 2 / Konami

Then there’s the room in which you find the handgun. Its newspaper-covered windows are pockmarked with hundreds of bullet holes inviting in thin shafts of light. You can’t help but imagine who the deranged previous occupier was.

It’s a shame the heavy atmosphere has to give way to underwhelming combat. Things don’t improve when you pick up the gun, which happens roughly two and a half hours in, with shooting feeling inert and unsatisfying. 

That’s despite brilliant enemy design. All these years later, Pyramid Head remains inexplicably menacing for what is essentially a man in an apron with a big metal pyramid on his head.

Silent Hill 2 / Konami

After a three-hour hands-on, Silent Hill 2 feels like a technologically rigorous remake. It’s got modernized visuals that look right at home on PS5, with luscious cutscenes humanizing previously cardboard-looking characters, reworked sound, and several new endings to unlock.

For new players without nostalgia for the original, however, Silent Hill 2 is a distinctly dated horror experience.