Silent Hill 2 Review – IGN

Given it was released more than two decades ago, there’s every chance you don’t have the foggiest idea what made the original Silent Hill 2 so impactful. Aside from its sinister small town setting that felt like stepping into the pages of a Stephen King novel, Silent Hill 2 stood apart from other survival horror stories of its era by putting just as much focus on the battle with personal demons as it did regular scraps with the snarling physical kind. Protagonist James Sunderland, who’s lured to a remote mining town by the promise of making contact with his deceased wife Mary, is not a battle hardened member of a zombie-killing special unit – he’s an ordinary man forced to confront some truly extraordinary things. The struggles with his own guilt and trauma both humanise him and add believable heft to the horrors that unfold around him.

While the roles of James and the handful of other lost souls he meets along the way have been recast with voice actors of a noticeably higher standard in this remake, the campy dialogue they deliver remains mostly unchanged. This does preserve the off-kilter, David Lynchian feel of the original character interactions, but comes across as a little bit jarring at times given the vastly improved standards of storytelling we’ve seen in more recent horror landmarks. I was no less entertained by Silent Hill 2’s quirky characters this time around, even if I never became emotionally invested in their plights to the same extent I did with the supporting casts in The Last of Us or Alan Wake II. Regardless, I found the mystery surrounding the fate of Mary was still more than intriguing enough to drag me through the darkest depths of Silent Hill 2’s story.

Hell Comes to Fogtown

The difference in look and feel between this Silent Hill 2 remake and the 2001 original is night and day – or perhaps that should be nightmare and daydream given the surreal nature of its small town’s continually altering state. The streets are blanketed by believably heavy fog and rich with detail, right down to the missing persons posters taped to telephone poles that flutter in the breeze. Dimly lit dwellings are overrun with discernable signs of decay, and drywall and cinder block splinter off in shards from startling shockwaves felt in hurried hallway chase scenes. Hordes of cockroaches startle and scatter in the beam of your flashlight as you make your way down each putrid path that winds you through an increasingly hellish otherworld. Silent Hill 2’s festering environment is at once both off-putting and alluring, like a scab you can’t stop picking.

The enemies too have been dressed up in far more disturbing and disgusting designs. The most common type, the Lying Figure, which appears to have its arms wrapped up in a straightjacket made of its own skin, seems slick with a decidedly icky sheen and more smoothly shifts from two-legged stagger to writhing prone along the ground in preparation for a surprise attack. There’s also the twitchy, Bubble Head Nurses introduced during the Brookhaven Hospital section (who now come in both pipe and knife-toting forms), and of course Pyramid Head, who’s sharply pointed skull once again brings a more literal meaning to the term apex predator. This lumbering death-dealer remains one of the most terrifying presences in the horror genre, only now he seems somehow even more sinister thanks to extra details like the realistic rust on his jagged head and the ghastly inky goop that coats his powerful frame.

Of course, that’s when you can actually see the enhanced enemies and environments around you, since Silent Hill 2 is also oppressively dark for significantly long periods at a time. James’ chest-mounted flashlight has a shorter throw than Mr. Burns, meaning it’s regularly the case that you can only see a few feet in front of his nose – testing your television’s black levels, tightening the unrelenting sense of claustrophobia, and leaving you vulnerable to ambushes from the creepy Mannequin enemies that stand eerily still in the corners of rooms like they’re floor lamps purchased from Hell’s Home Depot.

It’s during these moments, when your peripheral vision shrinks down to a pinhole, that Silent Hill 2’s incredibly unsettling audio design really comes to the fore. The signature radio static hisses that intensify around imminent dangers, the shrieks in the distance and whispers that are uncomfortably close, and the accompanying discordant drones maintain an ongoing and ominous sense of dread. Stalking through Silent Hill 2 left my nerves more shredded than a guitar solo played by a shirtless Hugh Jackman.

Cloudy with a Chance of Street Brawls

Thankfully when things get loud in Silent Hill 2, we’re much better equipped to fight back this time. Gone is the stiff, auto-targeted shooting and cumbersome pause menu-based weapon-swapping of the original, Silent Hill 2’s combat feels much more like what you’d expect from a survival horror adventure post-Resident Evil 4. Enemies can be manually targeted from an over-the-shoulder viewpoint, weapons can be quickly shuffled between at the tap of a d-pad button, and James is also able to perform quick dodges to nimbly sidestep around lurching enemies or the streams of acidic bile they spew. Additionally, melee attacks can be used to smash through glass in order to gather health drinks and ammunition from cabinets or locked cars, and even to crash through weakened sections of walls to gain access to secret areas hidden amongst its expanded environments.

That said, although Silent Hill 2 gives you far more control over each shot fired, it remains staunchly true to the original in terms of its noticeably limited arsenal of weapons – James is an underpowered everyman by design, after all. There are two types of melee weapons plus a handgun, shotgun, and rifle, and that’s your lot. There are no weapon upgrades or mods to expand the capabilities of your arsenal further, and ultimately I didn’t particularly favour one weapon over the other – I pretty much just switched to whichever gun I had the most ammo for at any one time. Actually that’s not entirely true – according to the story completion stats page, I did prefer one weapon more than most: the lead pipe. Partly since ammo was so scarce, but mainly because it just feels amazingly satisfying to relieve Silent Hill 2’s near-constant tension by clubbing a hellborn beast to the ground and continuing to pound their slimy skulls in until they’ve long since expired.

Silent Hill 2 Remake Vs Original Comparison