Platforms: PS5, PC
A hearty dose of courage is necessary to play most horror games, but to remake one of the genre's sacred texts takes a special kind of bravery. The original Silent Hill 2 remains a high-water mark for Konami's beloved franchise, so to rebuild it for modern players from the ground up is a huge risk – especially when the series' vocal fanbase is still salty over the sloppy HD remaster from 2012.
Thankfully, developer Bloober Team – a studio with its own track record in horror, responsible for titles such as Layers of Fear, Blair Witch, and The Medium – has succeeded beyond expectation. 2024's Silent Hill 2 is a stunning recreation of the original, keeping everything fans will remember from the PS2 classic intact but expanding and enhancing it all in ways sure to delight.
Every major area of the game feels like a series of interconnected conundrums, a sort of city-sized Lament Configuration.
The game remains focused on James Sunderland, drawn to the eponymous town by a letter he receives from his wife Mary – unsettling, given she died three years earlier. Yet rather than the idyllic seaside town they once loved, James finds a boarded up ghost town, drenched in a thick, permeating fog that obscures endless unseen horrors, while the few human residents he does encounter never seem quite right.
Despite shifting away from the fixed camera angles of the original version, favouring an over-the-shoulder view and freer movement, Bloober Team still crafts environments that feel oppressive and intimidating. That's aided by opening up the interiors of buildings, giving more places to explore – and to find crucial hints to puzzles or bits of lore – but making them feel like claustrophobic traps with no real way out of. And, while James retains a crackly portable radio, its static an indicator of a monster's movements, many enemies lie in wait in these tighter spaces, never triggering that early warning and leaving you to battle them with nowhere to run (usually while you're still trying to force your heart back down into your chest after they've scared the bejeezus out of you).
The main aspect that feels expanded in 2024 is the intricate series of puzzles scattered through the hellish town. Some minor ones from the original get expanded, while every major area of the game feels like a series of interconnected conundrums, a sort of city-sized Lament Configuration. That can result in a bit too much back and forth as you piece together some of the more tricky strings of challenges, but thankfully, the difficulty of both puzzles and combat can be tailored to personal preference. If you relish beating down stitched-together mannequins or flesh-warped nurses but want your hand held through the brain teasers, or vice versa, you can have that experience.
The authenticity of the remake is aided by the involvement of the original Silent Hill 2 creature designer Masahiro Ito and composer Akira Yamaoka. The modern tech allows Ito's disgusting (in a good way) creations to shine like never before, while Yamaoka's score remains a work of musical brilliance. More powerfully, the game's canny sense for when to use silence often ratchets up the tension in ways that will haunt players for hours afterwards.
That sense of lingering terror, of feeling uncomfortable at your core, even as you step ever-more tentatively into that blanket of fog, has always been the series' strength, though. While the likes of Resident Evil play with horror in a B-Movie kind of way – all jump scares, flashy monsters, and evil scientists – Silent Hill has always been chilling, more psychological, more personal. It's a deeply unsettling mood that Bloober Team has recreated perfectly, and 2024's Silent Hill 2 is all the better for it.