The Silent Hill 2 Remake misses the point

October 27, 2024 • 6800 words (29 min)

The Silent Hill 2 remake is, for better or worse, a modern survival horror game. It updates much of the original game to modern expectations; in a few cases, this is an improvement, but for the most part, the remake's choices feel strange, unnecessary, or miss the point of the original entirely. The remake misunderstands many of the elements that made Silent Hill 2 great, particularly its atmosphere, and it dumbs down the unique style of the original in favor of generic horror tropes. This, along with some baffling script changes, renders the remake and overall mediocre game.

Structure

The Silent Hill 2 remake is twice as long as the original. The reason for this is obvious: you can't sell a $70 game that's only eight hours long, and AAA studios won't sell games that are less than $70. In some parts of the game, this increase in length feels natural, with more complexity in the environment layouts that leads to more time spent traveling and solving puzzles. However, the game also spends a lot of time on padding, especially in the beginning. Before even getting to Silent Hill, you have to wander around an auto shop to find a key, which serves as a tutorial on an extremely intuitive game mechanic. The first encounter with a lying figure, originally a short and creepy scene, is expanded into a chase through several alleys and houses, complete with a few jumpscares for good measure. This expansion also calls into question why the monster is even running from you. The mannequins later on do try to hide and get the jump on you, which adds a nice bit of personality and humor to them, by why this first lying figure? They're typically found wandering aimlessly, and even the ones that crawl out from under cars feel like their position was more incidental, like they weren't trying to ambush you but just happened to be there. This lack of a clear motivation behind the monster's actions makes the entire chase sequence feel staged and drawn-out.

Another drawn-out sequence in the start of the game is the sidequest to repair a jukebox in Neely's bar. Again, this feels like an tutorial on interacting with objects, which is somewhat useful, and on level design, introducing the player to a mini-apartment level before the real one later. During this sidequest, you also track the story of some janitor told through notes. The remake expands on the environmental storytelling of the original, not through actual environmental details, but through endless memos. The original game's environmental storytelling was effective because it was short, creepy, and evocative. The hair in the box in the hospital (which was removed in the remake for some reason) is compelling because it implies more than it says, letting the player's mind construct an eerie narrative out of a few fractured clues. The remake's memos try to tell a more complete story, but don't give us any reason to care about the unseen characters involved. Things are too simple and well-explained, and many of the weirder details in the original are left out.

One of the explanations behind increasing the remake's runtime was that the game would let players explore inside buildings in town, which you couldn't really do in the original. However, the remake doesn't give you much motivation to do so. Ammo and health are more limited, so you might want to search for helpful items, especially on higher difficulties, but on normal mode I never felt compelled to. I would only look inside a building if I happened to notice it was open, and it wasn't too much of a pain to deal with the monsters inside. The streets are wide enough that it's annoying to cross back and forth looking for an open door, though the remake does tend to guide your eye with light. There's also nothing interesting going on inside the new buildings in terms of storytelling; at least, the Neely's bar sidequest doesn't establish that there would be, so I didn't go looking for it. If I missed the a random amazing micro-storyline in the game, then that's on me.

Outside of the opening, the remake seems allergic to letting the player run around the town. In the original, it was easy to find yourself with no idea of where to go next, and to wander around until you found enough blocked roads guiding you to the next destination—this wasn't necessarily a good design decision, but it made the town feel more expansive and real. Rather than remedying this with clearer directions, the remake makes the town exploration sections as short as possible. This is a shame, because the remake adds a bit of interesting worldbuilding with the town's monsters. I loved how they became more active when the wind was blowing and the air sirens were going, as if the town as a whole was becoming more alive. They were also more numerous and aggressive in the nighttime section after the hospital, which is a great bit of contrast between the normal and otherworld sections of the game, but it was pretty annoying to play. If you don't want to waste resources fighting them, the monsters can gang up on you and kill you quickly. This section also lacked the foreboding atmosphere of the original's nighttime section, which is an issue across the game that I'll discuss later.

I wasn't very invested in the remake throughout the beginning and first half of the apartments, but it got much more interesting in the otherworld apartments. This is where the game peaked for me (a bad sign, considering that the original, in my opinion, peaked with the prison and later after the videotape reveal). The enemies got new difficult forms with interesting new mechanics, and there was a unique structure to the exploration. Rather than continuing in the same vein as the normal apartments, the otherworld section was much more linear, focused around solving a central, multi-step puzzle. Unfortunately, the unique surprise of this change died with the hospital's otherworld, which followed the exact same structure.

The otherworld apartment was also the only place where I felt a sense of dread even remotely close to the original game's atmosphere. You start to come across the bodies of monsters that you didn't kill, as well as the long scraps of Pyramid Head's knife across the floor and walls. The background noise could be the building settling, or it could be him looking for you. I passed through the stairwell where the original boss fight took place without incident, meaning that Pyramid Head could be around any corner; I didn't know what to expect. As I opened up seemingly unmotivated locked doors that only existed to give you a minor shortcut, I became nervous that I would be chased back through the area, and having those shortcuts would give me an advantage—the game also doesn't pause with the map open, so I couldn't stop to find my way if I was being followed. Maybe the remake would use the one modern horror trope that would work excellently in Silent Hill 2 and have Pyramid Head be a proper stalker enemy. In a game obviously chasing after the success of the Resident Evil 2 remake, why not let Pyramid Head be an even more terrifying Mr. X? However, my hopes never came to fruition. The apartment culminates in a boss fight that is somehow worse than the original (which I'll discuss in detail later). Pyramid Head is most effective as a regular enemy, rather than a boss, but the remake doesn't expand this role, and even makes his best scenes worse. One of the greatest moments of surprise in the original game is his appearance in the otherworld hospital's basement, where he comes out of nowhere and it takes the player a few seconds to even realize what's happening, thanks to the close quarters and constricted camera angle. In the remake's version of this scene, though, Pyramid Head is introduced with a cutscene, destroying any element of surprise.

The transition to the otherworld hospital isn't as striking as the original (although I like the cutscene more). All of the otherworld areas of the remake are designed more in line with Silent Hill 1's style, featuring rusty grates and endless darkness beyond them. In the original, the otherworld areas tended to have unique aesthetics, which I talked about in my review. While I think the remake's otherworld apartment is strong, the fact that it's so similar to the hospital only acts to the hospital's detriment.

On the other hand, the prison doesn't feel like the otherworld at all. This was the most disappointing area of the remake to me. While the prison was one of my favorite areas in the original game, the remake's version has none of its oppressive atmosphere, replacing it with a drab, boring aesthetic. The sense of dread, whether it's from jumping down hole after hole, the distant clanging of prison bars, or just the original's griminess, is greatly diminished. The timed light system felt pointless—I was expecting to encounter some sort of force that would descend on James when the light ran out, like maybe the invisible walking demon from the original, but all the light did was repel the spider mannequins, who weren't threatening to begin with. (The invisible demon was also relegated to a single cell tucked away in a corner, where it wasn't remotely ominous). The basement of the prison has a far more interesting design than the bland white and blue walls above it: a mix of dark stone and rusting metal that was reminiscent of the dark mottled colors of the original, but this basement was far too short to be effective.

Nowhere, or the Labyrinth, was more interesting than the original, but that's not saying much. The three distinct sections added a bit of visual variety, but the way each of them looped back to the main area just made them feel like padding. The only section that stands out is the Ruined section, which features a set of "enemy rush" rooms, where you're locked in while the enemies come to life for a few minutes. While this took me off-guard the first time, the strategy for each of the rooms just came down to running in circles, which was not very engaging.

There's also an extremely lame new encounter with Pyramid Head in the Labyrinth where you just walk backwards away from him. However, it does lead into an interesting scene later, where you have to use his giant knife to pass through a wall of writhing tentacles (which I loved the look of, and I wish there was more like it). The imagery of James dragging the huge knife, mimicking Pyramid Head while burdened with that immense weight, is fantastic. It's a shame that the controls with the knife are so terrible. If you get off-course even slightly, it's painful to reposition yourself to avoid running into walls.

The ending of the game was a severe disappointment, but I'll discuss that in later sections of this review. However, I did enjoy the changes to the "no items" area of the hotel. That was one of the most pointless areas in the original game. In the remake, it's a fun and thankfully not very difficult stealth section.

Controls

Before getting to the meat of this review, I have a few notes about the remake's controls. I played on Steam Deck, but I imagine it's similar to the Playstation 5. I thought it was funny that the health items button was mapped to the original's map button, so I kept using health drinks by accident while distracted. I also like the balance of the health items: the better syringes take longer to use, making them more risky in combat. Speaking of combat, the gun controls can be finicky if you're running and aiming at the same time, using two fingers for the two trigger buttons. I only noticed this during the final boss, where the gun just wouldn't aim sometimes while I was running. The gun reload can also be inconsistent, where manually pressing the reload button can be interrupted by other actions and leave you with a half-full ammo clip. Also, sometimes the reload or health buttons take a few tries to work if you're pressing other buttons like the triggers at the same time.

The "broken lock" messages on unusuble doors were removed, which I like, since it didn't make much sense to begin with and removed a bit of credibility from the realistic environments. However, I'm not a huge fan of walking into doors to open them. It makes them feel less real, although it is good that monsters can also come through the doors. I had a fun moment where a spider mannequin leapt right through a pair of doors to land on me. I also like how monsters can attack you while you're in item or map viewing screens.

It can be annoying to get into the right position to interact with objects. With some of the puzzles, it can also be difficult to see where you're placing an item. This is especially a problem with the gemstone puzzle in the hotel, where the contrast isn't high enough to see the white outline of what you're interacting with. I also really didn't like the white cloth as a point of interaction. This is a cliche of modern games that could be easily accomplished with better environmental design like lighting to guide the player where they need to be. During the first part of the game, I didn't even notice the white cloth because I didn't pay attention to the tutorial prompt, but I was still able to find my way around without issue.

There are a lot of collectibles—more modern game shenanigans. The strange photos are too common for how pointless they are. They're very similar to the photos in a few modern Resident Evil games, but those show you the locations of hidden items. I don't think the photos in the Silent Hill 2 remake have a use outside of an abstract implied storyline. There are also "flashback" moments that show you locations and items from the original game. I had replayed the original only a few weeks before playing the remake and I was confused by the first few flashbacks because I didn't recognize them; it took a good bit into the game for me to realize what they were. Some of the flashbacks can also feel like they're mocking you, like the audio tape in the hotel, a cutscene that was removed for no reason. It was an important piece of backstory in the original that conveyed James' desperation about Mary's illness and explained where he got the "three years" he mentions in the beginning of the game.

The save system, on the other hand, is surprisingly old-fashioned. If you die, the game typically puts you back at the last save point, although it will sometimes autosave at big progression moments, providing a bit more leniency than the original. Still, it doesn't autosave every five seconds like some modern games, and you can be set back quite a bit if you mess up and die, which is much easier to do thanks to the remake's more difficult combat.

Combat

The remake's combat with regular enemies is, in my opinion, its only point of improvement over the original. Although I would have preferred a combat style that plays on claustrophobia and tight spaces like the original's combat suggests (but fails to make good use of), the remake's higher difficulty plays on the typical survival horror "give and take." Every encounter is a question of whether you should fight a monster or run from it, and what you can manage to do with your limited supplies. Fighting also requires much better timing, forcing you to pay attention to the monsters' animations. While this can feel tedious in the beginning, once you get used to the controls, the combat becomes much more engaging. After that point, the combat only gets easier until the end of the game, because there aren't any new enemies that really challenge your skills. The remake also motivates switching between melee and ranged attacks while fighting, which you can do with a single button, unlike the original, where that would involve going through menus. There's also more motivation to actually turn off the flashlight for stealth, which I did during Eddie's boss fight (where it's basically required) and a short section in the otherworld hospital. Unlike the original, the screen goes almost completely black without light, making it far more difficult to navigate.

Another new aspect of the combat that I enjoyed was the introduction of enemy variants. This made the otherworld feel more distinct from the normal world and provided a step up in challenge. For example, the toxic lying figures emit a wide spray of acid when they're knocked down, punishing the instinct of players of the original to stomp on every enemy to finish them off. I also loved the expanded use of the mandarin enemies, which were extremely underwhelming in the original. They replace the abstract daddy as the more powerful regular enemy in the hotel, which is a great use for them, since the abstract daddy always felt too symbolically significant to just be wandering around—although I have some huge issues with its new boss fight. I also think the enemies only started to respawn in the hotel, which was disappointing, since they have a chance to respawn anywhere in the original. However, the remake makes enough use of enemies playing dead or coming back to life from event triggers that it's not a big deal.

On the other hand, the boss fights are among the worst changes the remake made. For the poorly-designed bosses from the original, like the Pyramid Head encounters, the remake refuses to fix their fundamental flaws and tries to cover them up with flashy environmental details. For the bosses that were actually decent in the original, the remake warps them beyond recognition into ridiculous multi-stage fights that completely miss the point of what the original was going for.

The remake somehow makes the Pyramid Head fights worse. The first one operates on the same timer system as the original, meaning that the gameplay consists of the same running around in circles. Pyramid Head's animations look ridiculous as he waddles after you, a problem that repeats itself with many of the remake's bosses. The only significant difference is the arena, a room filled with cages that Pyramid Head smashes, with walls that fall apart as the fight goes on. This space is far less claustrophobic, and the fight doesn't end with Pyramid Head descending into water, so the only two good things about the original fight are gone. In the second fight with the duo of Pyramid Heads, I think you actually have to fight them instead of waiting out the clock, which is a good change. Other than that, it involves the same lame tactic of running in circles, made only slightly more engaging by having to actually aim your weapon. The remake did its most iconic enemy dirty by not only removing some of his scariest scenes as a regular enemy, but by making his boss fights even more mediocre than the original.

Several other bosses were given ridiculous, over the top animations, with changes to their fights that destroy the original's tone in favor of more difficult combat. The fight where Laura locks James in a room with hanging enemies is turned from a claustrophobic encounter with several large enemies that fill the screen to a fight with a single guy who jumps around the room and turns into a spider in the second phase, which just looks stupid. This is an issue shared by the final boss. In the original game, the final boss isn't very good, but at least it's over quickly. The remake gives it multiple phases and a higher difficulty, which drags the fight out and taints the ending of the game with irritation rather than catharsis. Between the intense lag (at least on Steam Deck) and the tight dodge timings, the fight is just unpleasant to play. Its only saving grace is that you don't have to replay the entire thing if you die.

Eddie's fight is the only improvement on the original, and that's because the remake took the fundamental principles that made the original fight good and played into them. The fight is genuinely tense, forcing you to search for the slightest movement in the dark, and the dense fog and hanging meat creates the only suffocating atmosphere in the entire remake.

The remake's worst boss fight by far is the abstract daddy. The original is a deeply uncomfortable encounter that conveys a ton of meaning in a small timeframe. Again, the remake draws this out to a painful degree. The main mechanic is more running around aimlessly while the boss chases you. There are also some glimpses of Angela running around too, which just looks kind of stupid. After the chase sequence is the actual fight. This took so long that I looked up if I was doing something wrong so I wouldn't waste ammo—apparently, it's weak to melee damage, which the game never hints at. The boss's menace and uncomfortable atmosphere is rendered null by its ridiculous-looking running animation and the over the top nature of the fight as a whole. The cutscene afterward is the rotten cherry on top, where James just sounds tired with Angela, rather than concerned like in the original. The only remnant of the viscerally uncomfortable room the original takes place in, one of the best pieces of psychological horror in the entire game, is some machinery tucked away in a corner. It's genuinely impressive how hard this fight managed to miss the point of the original encounter. The boss is goofy, the fight goes on for so long that any of the claustrophobic atmosphere it might have mustered is dead, it's just a huge mess.

While the regular combat was mostly improved, the remake falls flat on its face with its bosses. It manages to make the worst choice in every situation, maintaining the worst parts of the original fights and actively removing any elements that made them good. The bosses are brought in line with modern expectations, resulting in bloated, overdone fights that are no longer uncomfortable or frightening, instead crossing over into ridiculousness. The remake destroys the emotional core of what the original's best boss fights were going for in favor of raw mechanics.

Atmosphere

The Silent Hill 2 remake is much more focused on overt horror, rather than the subtle psychological horror of the original. To be fair, I did criticize the effectiveness of the horror in the original game—however, my remedy to this would be to intensify what the original was already going for, rather than veering into generic horror tropes.

The remake loves using jumpscares, which are not a form of horror that scares me to begin with, and they can be even less effective thanks to the free camera. If you're not looking where the game wants you to, all you get is a random noise and maybe some particles across the screen. The difference in camera also means that the game can't play with situations where you know a monster is nearby and aren't able to see it, outside of a few isolated incidents like monsters being behind locked doors.

The remake's sound design also reflects this change toward overt horror. The forest section in the beginning, rather than being quiet enough to let your mind wander and wonder if you really heard footsteps or not, is full of generic spooky creaking trees and mysterious rockfalls. The sound design in general puts a lot of emphasis on generic spooky ambience, instead of the mechanical soundscape of the original. Even the reused music tracks have generic high strings layered over them. The difference in sound quality between new sounds and reused old ones is also weird—I'm not sure why they didn't recreate the classic sound effects, other than the fear that everyone would complain about it, like I'm doing now. In general, there's a step away from the rock-heavy industrial vibes of the original music in favor of a more generic sound. Some of the original compositions were also rearranged and rerecorded by Akira Yamaoka, and for the most part I like the changes. There's a new guitar riff in "Promise" that stood out to me in one of the first trailers, as well as a flute melody that plays under Mary's letter in the beginning that I enjoyed (as a biased flute player). The only remix I heard in my playthrough that I really didn't like was "Theme of Laura" during the credits of the Leave ending.

The town of Silent Hill in the remake is more run-down, littered with crumbling buildings and graffiti, rather than the eerily clean apocalyptic look of the original. It doesn't feel like the people just disappeared, but like the town was abandoned and has been that way for a while. Many of the areas that were extremely claustrophobic in the original are also much more open. This starts with the first lying figure encounter, which happens in a much larger room than the cramped end of the road of the original, presumably to give you more of a chance to learn the new combat style. The streets also feel more open and clear, and the fog and later darkness aren't as thick, making them less indimidating. The interior exploration sections feel the same way, and they aren't helped by individual moments that fall flat. For example, in Eddie's first scene in the remake, you can easily walk around and see the man he killed in the fridge. In the original, the fridge is blocked off in a narrow kitchen, creating a sense of eerie ambiguity at only being able to see a bit of the dead man, unable to get close to him. As I already mentioned, the only section of the game that created a palpable sense of dread for me was the otherworld apartment, but its ending did not live up to the expectations it set.

The prison suffers the worst from this lack of intimidation. The only area of the remake's prison that made me feel anything close to the original's atmosphere was the chapel, a dark and uneasy room near the entrance. The original prison also contained repeated references to the cruelty of the prison system: punishment, torture, and execution. These details aren't gone from the remake, but lack their original menace. For example, the puzzle that was originally about finding the innocent among six hanging bodies now takes the form of pressing buttons, a far less visceral method of puzzle-solving. The remake's hospital also has issues with tone. In the original, the hospital was more focused on the question of if Silent Hill is real and if James can believe what he's seeing. The three main patients parallel James, Angela, and Eddie, with the doctor as a possible embodiment of the town speaking directly to James. The remake plays the hospital as more of a general "scary mental illness" trope, which is hardly surprisingly considering Bloober Team's history of portraying mental illness.

The moment of the remake that utterly misses the point and fails to capture the heavy atmosphere of the original comes after the videotape reveal. The videotape itself forgoes the eerie silence of the original by adding music behind the scene, and it's also more clear what's actually happening, compared to the quick, unnerving, distorted flashes of the original. However, the real emotional weight of the reveal comes in its aftermath. This is the point where the original hotel warps all at once, unlike in the remake, where it edges closer to the otherworld a few times during the preceding exploration section. The original's rotting building, the closed-in environment, and the incredible music create an overwhelming sense of despair. The final hotel section truly feels like a descent into hell. The atmosphere of the remake's post-reveal hotel is pathetic in comparison. The hotel isn't rotting from specifically water damage, which is symbolically significant, it's just generically falling apart. There's an emphasis on sickly light coming in the windows, which makes the building feel more open. You don't get the sense that you're trapped, but that you could just step outside any moment and leave. The hotel also doesn't start looping, another key element that made the original so claustrophobic. This baffling omission from the remake, combined with the other strange choices, makes it so the remake hotel lacks the suffocation and sense of losing your mind that the original excels at. The fact that the hotel feels like another generic otherworld exploration, rather than an attempt to grapple with the horrifying reality of what James has done, destroys the emotional impact of the game's central twist.

The suffocating atmosphere of the original Silent Hill 2 is what made it so effective as a psychological horror game. In the remake, this atmosphere is diminished or nonexistent. Its overreliance on generic horror tropes and changes to remove the most iconic elements of the original renders the remake utterly ineffective as a psychological horror game.

Story and Characters

The story of Silent Hill 2 wasn't changed much in the remake, but there are some added cutscenes. The drop in the quality of the writing makes it obvious which cutscenes are new. The original game had few enough cutscenes that each of them needed a distinct purpose, and they worked to develop the characters as much as possible in their short runtime. In contrast, the remake's added scenes can feel aimless. The scene with Maria and James at Heaven's Night is supposed to develop Maria a little more and help us care about her, which was one of my criticisms of the original. However, the remake does this incredibly poorly with many awkwardly written scenes that flatten her character. There's also a new scene with Angela later in the game, which only serves to reiterate what we already learned about her in the mirror scene: that she's traumatized and anxious around James. The only new information it provides is that she's hallucinating someone, similar to James and Maria.

The remake also tries to inject new bits of folklore, with a lot of emphasis put on the story of the Lady of the Light. I really don't understand the point of its inclusion. It's a painfully obvious parallel to James' journey to the hotel—Is it supposed to provide justification for him going to the hotel, replacing memories of staying there with Mary? Those memories still exist, but he doesn't mention them to Maria for some reason. Instead, she drags him to Heaven's Night for the "special place" he mentioned, which clearly just makes him uncomfortable. It also characterizes Maria as kind of awkward and out of touch, rather than flirtatious, which the original achieved with a joke she makes about the hotel being a special place ("I'll bet it was"). Additionally, is the folklore supposed to make the world feel deeper and more lived-in? It fails at that because the story is so boring, lacking the creepy edge of a lot of the other historical stories in the game, like the sinking of the ship in Toluca Lake.

The endings also run the gamut on how much they were changed. The Leave and Maria endings seem to be mostly untouched, and there are some small changes to the joke endings. However, I truly hate the dialogue changes in the In Water ending. They're the epitome of the remake's lack of subtlety, with James blatantly spelling out the thesis of the ending: "I can't forgive myself for what I've done." The ending also confirms that Mary's body was in the back seat of James' car (which I actually saw in the beginning of the game when I first tried to play it on my crappy computer and turned down the graphics settings enough that I could easily see into car windows). This detail is a particular pet peeve of mine. There's nothing in the original game that really suggests it, outside of maybe the "Now we can be together" line in In Water, as well as Rebirth ending and the implication that James has Mary's body somehow. However, because Masahiro Ito, the original game's art director, tweeted that Mary was in the car, it's been treated as fact. There are many non-canon details and fan theories that have subsumed interpretations of the game online and been presented as the only correct way to interpret the game. I just find this irritating, as someone who tries to base my interpretation entirely off of what the game itself presents. However, this is easily the least egregious non-canon detail the remake could have included, so I don't mind it so much.

There are also two new endings. Stillness just feels like an In Water for this version of James, with a softer edge and without the cruel irony of the original. Bliss, on the other hand, brings up an interesting concept: the idea that James is eternally trapped in Silent Hill. This would explain the sense of familiarity through the game, with the flashbacks and some of Maria's dialogue, where she feels like she's acting out a part or knows what's going to happen, like in the hospital's basement. Although it wouldn't have fixed its problems, making the remake a meta-commentary on the nature of remakes and repeating stories over and over would have been really cool. Unfortunately, this concept is tucked away in a hidden ending.

Even though the original cutscenes were left intact, there was a lot of dialogue changed, resulting in different personalities and portrayals for the remake's characters. These new interpretations of the characters often left me frustrated.

One of my favorite lines of James' in the original comes after he kills Eddie, where he says, "I just killed a human being. A human being…" The dissociation in those words is one of Guy Cihi's best deliveries in the game and is fantastic for characterizing James. He's more emotionally disconnected and ambiguous in the original, which makes him a far more interesting character than the sympathetic version in the remake. This new James is too much of a normal person. He's a lot warmer toward the other characters, acting like their therapist and actively trying to help them, rather than existing in their orbit as another doomed soul. He's meant to be a player surrogate, our window into the world of Silent Hill, and his emotional connection to the other characters is meant to facilitate our own. He doesn't say anything strange because we, as normal people, wouldn't; he even has to be prodded into the strange actions of the original James, like sticking his hands into mysterious holes and jumping down bottomless pits. In the original, James is a mystery to unravel. You come to realize that there's more to him than the blank player surrogate of someone like Harry from the first Silent Hill, a hidden depth and darkness that's slowly unveiled.

Following this trend of guiding characters into more generic versions of themselves, Eddie's remake design is more overtly creepy than the original. He has bright blue eyes, a high-pitched voice, and a fat face that doesn't match his skinnier limbs. He also eats ice cream directly out of the can with his bare hands, playing up his "disgusting" fatness. In the original, he's designed as more of a normal chubby guy. While characters do comment on his weight, it's usually him repeating the words of bullies, or Laura childishly mocking him. The game itself doesn't seem to hold malice toward his appearance like the remake does. Despite this, the remake weirdly downplays his unsympathetic qualities. He hammers home the point that he didn't kill the man in the apartment, rather than half-heartedly denying it like in the original. Remake James also assures him that he believes him, while original James doesn't seem to care all that much. The cafeteria scene in the remake also goes on for way too long, with James and Eddie going back and forth as Eddie tries to justify yet another murder. He also doesn't mention the dog he killed before coming to Silent Hill until his boss fight, and never mentions that he thinks the cops are after him, two pieces of backstory from the original that provide more context for his actions. In the remake, it feels like he randomly decided to go on a killing spree, rather than it being built up from his previous actions. The remake also removed two of my favorite lines, "How can you sit there and eat pizza!?" and "Eddie, have you gone nuts?" which is an unforgivable crime.

Angela goes mostly unchanged, outside of her terrible boss fight. Bloober Team somehow managed to mess up the emotional climax of her story without changing any of her dialogue, which is an impressive feat. I'm just glad her character is intact. Her actor, Gianna Kiehl, gives a fantastic performance. I love her voice and mannerisms, and she breathes life into some of the more stilted lines from the original. I also don't have much to say about Laura. She's another character who got the sharp edges scraped off of her, so she's not as much of a little jerk as the original. Still, her changes aren't as bad as ones to the more pivotal characters like James or Maria.

The worst casualty of the remake's writing changes is Maria. All of the edginess of the original is gone, replaced with a much softer and inexplicably supportive version of the character. Her first scene is strange; she seems too innocent, like she's playacting the darker side of the original, and the lines that carry over just don't sound believable coming from her mouth. One of my favorite scenes, where she catches up with James again in the otherworld hospital, isn't uncanny like the original, making her rapid emotional changes feel like weird acting or directing choices, rather than an intentional attempt to unsettle the player. Her "death" in the hospital is strangely calm, less emotional than the original, even though the remake tried and failed to flesh her out more. Similarly to the videotape reveal, a lot of this lack of emotion comes down to the aftermath, which fails to convey James' despair. I just don't get the feeling that this James even cares about Maria. His reactions to her feel like he's annoyed by her, in contrast to the mix of being unnerved and entranced that he conveyed in the original. Maria also got the most dialogue added of any character. Throughout the town section after meeting her in Rosewater, she comments on every little thing with lines that border on Marvel-esque "well that just happened." This adds nothing to the scene and doesn't do her character or the player's opinion of her any favors. The only scene of hers I thought was pretty good was the one I was most worried about the remake messing up, the prison scene. I like how she almost looks like a doll behind bars, her head positioned strangely on her body, like the two don't quite fit together. While her performance isn't as strong as the original actor's in that scene, I thought she did a great job as Mary coping with her illness in the hallway at the end of the game.

Conclusion

The Silent Hill 2 remake is fraught with issues. It clearly set out the fix some of the more glaring problems with the original, but created new ones while it was at it. For example, in improving the regular combat, it butchered many of the boss fights beyond recognition. The remake also misunderstands the characters, with new cutscenes that add nothing and script changes that remove the depth and ambiguity of many of the characters, especially James and Maria. Its level design lacks the atmosphere of the original areas: the sense of claustrophobia and suffocation is notably absent, and many of the eerie and unique design choices of the original are gone in favor of generic horror tropes. The remake is torn between recreating the original game and establishing its own identity as a modern survival horror game, and it ultimately fails at both.