Tis the damn season, am I right? Mist-as-character. Departed loved ones return to life. They write us ominous letters and invite us to rescue their mortal corpse/spirit/soul. In a vacation town, no less, that we enjoyed together once or twice. Missives from the great beyond. Blood everywhere. An unreliable-ish narrator. It’s October!
We keep our finger on the pulse of everything here at DKNetwork, and we know that passions for sports gaming often are in lockstep with a passion for video gaming. And so, this autumn, we’ve got a battery of AAA games (keep those eyes peeled, Dragon Age and Assassin’s Creed fans) on the review docket.
We begin today with our Spooky Season review: Silent Hill 2: Remastered, the PS5 exclusive that released on Tuesday, October 8th. It took me just over a week (give or take; I had a bit of a cold) to play through the story the first time. And I want to add some very important context: This was my first time ever playing a game in the Silent Hill franchise. I figured, what better place to start than what’s rumored to be scariest game of all time?
Important to note that this review will be from the perspective of someone treating this as a fresh story. Though I do, at some point, recall in my younger years watching someone have James Sunderland reach into a squelchy wall-hole for a key. I also saw a bit of the movie adaptation, which was irredeemably bad. But that comprises my entire exposure to Silent Hill.
This likely won’t be the case for future reviews, but seeing as Silent Hill 2 is a bit of a mystery, I’m going to try to avoid as many story spoilers as possible. I want to focus mostly on the experience and malevolent spirit of the game, because that’s what will stay with me the most.
Off we go. Mary’s waiting for us!
Silent Hill 2 Remastered: The DKNetwork Review
The atmosphere
I don’t think I expected to want to languish as much as I did in the mist, especially at the beginning of the game. I mean very beginning, just after you leave the rest stop bathroom and James Sunderland reads Mary’s letter aloud: “Waiting for you…”. And then, once you first reach the town through the graveyard where you have your first encounter with Angela. Interact with some NPCs, trod down the trodden path—a vector to the Vale.
This is, of course, where you settle into the familiar game mechanics: areas to clear! Clues to find, items to collect! Silent Hill does a phenomenal job of lulling you to sleep, in that way. Sure—you fight your odd husk or slitherer here and there. You bash their brains(?) in. But, otherwise, you’re in an action-adventure game, with dungeons nested within dungeons. Puzzles and unlockables. Doors that are locked, doors that are not. The relaxing pendulum of adventure games: encounter an obstacle, wander, find a Sphinx, answer the Sphinx’s riddle, return to obstacle, crest it, repeat.
Such is the experience, likely, of your first two or so hours in Silent Hill 2: Remastered. Hard not to see the inspiration for games like Alan Wake and The Last of Us, both of which have levels in their franchises with startlingly-similar environments to the various outdoor Vales in the town of Silent Hill.
No mist, though. Wake, of course, uses the dark as the omnipresent, environmental character that terrifies you. And you never quite feel safe in a Last of Us cityscape, because the idea that you are trespassing without knowing, being watched by predatory eyes, is the unseen threat, there. Here, we forge on through the mist.
I recently reread Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, and there were moments when the first bits of Silent Hill 2: Remastered reminded me of a James brand of horror: slow and drifting and ambiguous and atmospheric. In the way that Turn of the Screw sort of feels like a familiar, evergreen story setup (what with it being a ghost story told around a Christmas hearth), so, too did these first few hours of Silent Hill feel, to me, like I was being ushered into a tale as old as time. Welcomed, even. Chekov’s visitor come to town, settling into the comfort of a narrative, cord of desire driving our every movement: Mary.
Welcome to Silent Hill! In searching for someone you’ve lost, you, too, are lost—both player and player-as-James-Sunderland (not here to be confused with Henry James)—and you begin to get the sense very early on that no one in this story should want to be found. You least of all. A premise as archetypal for a video game as the fire in Turn of the Screw‘s Christmas hearth. And so we linger in the mist, explore the abandoned buildings, break all the glass windows, search for supplies and clues, solve delightful little puzzles, all the while ignoring that everything we do has undertones to it that are, at their softest, occult. At their most damning? Evil, and anciently so.
We don’t know we’re doing this as we do it because, surely, we are already afraid to move on and in denial of it. How glorious, then, that—now having played through the entire story—it’s clear this was all purely by design? A narrative trap as old as time: fires in hearths are cozy, but they are flames nonetheless. And dead wives can’t write letters. There’s no welcome here.
And, I promise you, as I pressed on, I’ve never been more terrified in my gaming life. Remember: this was my first time playing any installment in the Silent Hill franchise. I came into this story blind to its enemies, but for knowing of Pyramid Head’s existence as a recognizable and sleep-dogging video game villain. That was the single detail I knew. And the depths of horror to which this game brought me to are as impressively-vertical as they are sweeping.
Which is to say, any endearing quality to the PNW-esque pines and mist ends altogether when you enter Woodside Apartments for the first time. There, you experience a claustrophobia I’ve felt only once ever before in video games, during a similar level in The Last of Us, when you find yourself, as Joel, trapped in the dorm rooms of a now-noxious Colorado State University. You may be familiar. Woodside Apartments is where the real work begins.
But, make no mistake, there is beauty—stark beauty, but beauty nonetheless—in Silent Hill‘s early hours. I encourage you to languish. Better, even, if you fool yourself into a false sense of security, as I did.
The terror
So many of Silent Hill 2‘s best scares can be framed within James’s first few encounters with Pyramid Head, when we first find ourselves in the Otherworld.
I wonder what it’s like for those of you who’ve held this franchise dear for decades, and who have such formative memories of the several moments in Blue Creek apartments when you first encounter Pyramid Head. Bladeless behind a barrier of iron latticework, statuesque in the sanguine glow of an emergency exit light; at the good work of Mannequin butchery in an apartment kitchenette; and, of course, armed and awaiting James in Scott’s room after solving the infamous grandfather clock riddle. The first real battle of consequence, it seemed.
Years and years of terrifying boss fights—many of which surely drew inspiration from this first basement skirmish with Pyramid Head—have inured and buttressed me to getting shaken during these sorts of exchanges. But kudos to the remake for leaning into the indeed-otherworldly, glitchy gait that makes navigating the Pyramid fight something out of an advanced Souls-like game. Even as I tried to steady myself, Pyramid Head had me vertiginous. But we try to remember our training. Study the monster’s moves, identify his weak spots, master the timing. Again—we settle into the familiar mechanics of action-adventure gaming, and bulwark ourselves against the darkly imaginative horror bearing down upon us.
Except!—and that’s what I learned with Silent Hill 2; it’s so deliciously sinister in the ways that it disrupts those cozy rhythms of action-adventure gameplay—his footsteps get heavier, and the cages where he keeps his imprisoned carcasses rattle louder, and his moveset becomes more varied and unpredictable, and it’s hard to find the weak spots with the way the lights keep flickering. But still, we stick and move. We dodge. We try to be smart with our bullets. And we’re positioned to slay this evil fucking dread with our last rounds—
Until Pyramid Head, of course, calls the fight. Of course! We are reminded: we are not whatsoever in control here. How many bullets did we just waste? Health potions and syringes? Did we even have to fire a single bullet?
I had heard that Silent Hill does afford players opportunities to escape enemies just as readily as they might fight them. I certainly encountered this with later mini-bosses (I’m looking at you, Abstract Daddy, Eddie, etc.), but I’ll go down wondering whether or not I could have simply saved all of my resources and dodged Pyramid Head until he got angry enough that the sirens sounded.
How scary is it, then, that a siren is supposed to be alerting a massive swath of land, but Silent Hill 2: Remastered only gets more claustrophobic as the game goes on? The siren gets louder and more omnipresent. But it’s not for Angela. Or Mary, or Eddie. It’s for you, player-as-James. But you’ve been right here the whole time. Why do they feel so much louder as the game goes on?
Perhaps, as some of the memos suggest, the sirenic quality is a part of James.
The sensory experience
Let’s dig a bit deeper into those classic Silent Hill 2 sirens. You hear echoes of them everywhere. The soft emergency pulses in the apartment buildings and mansions and municipal buildings, the lap of the waves in Rosewater Park, the blinking of generator lights in long-abandoned and maliciously-haunted domiciles. Just as the mist is the game’s visual backdrop, the lilting, revolving, air-raid-warning quality to all its din is the auditory backbeat.
It reminds me so much of the first passage of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, in which he’s talking about a siren that goes unheard by most but is, nonetheless, as present as the ones in Silent Hill. Fair warning—Franzen lets rip, here. Again, this is page one of his National Book Award-winning 2001 novel. Read this with Silent Hill 2‘s sirens and its echoes in mind:
Ringing throughout the house was an alarm bell that no one but Alfred and Enid could hear directly. It was the alarm bell of anxiety. It was like one of those big cast-iron dishes with an electric clapper that send schoolchildren into the street in fire drills. By now it had been ringing for so many hours that the Lamberts [Alfred and Enid] no longer heard the message of “bell ringing” but, as with any sound that continues for so long that you have the leisure to learn its component sounds (as with any word you stare at until it resolves itself into a string of dead letters), instead heard a clapper rapidly striking a metallic resonator, not a pure tone but a granular sequens of percussions with a keening overlay of overtones; ringing for so many days that it simply blended into the background …
I give you: Silent Hill 2‘s sirens and mist. So many notes and memos throughout this game describe a pulsing evil. Something breathing, brooding. I experienced this no more than in the Labyrinth beneath Toluca Prison/Silent Hill Historical Society, but less as an auditory character. Now eight-or-so hours into my playthrough, we’re underground, and the pulsing has become as much a part of us as we are a part of it. We—player-as-James—are a component sound in the siren.
And we realize: as in the coin riddle so early on in the Lakeview Apartments, we might be the man enabling this evil and resigning our already-dead wife to re-death. We are far more a part of it than a beacon meant to purge it. Though, still, we try.
That realization stayed with me until the end, all the way through the Otherworld Hotel. And it was the undercurrent of pure horror, the desire to turn back—if I go any deeper, I know I’m only putting us all, everyone but, maybe, Maria, in peril—that made playing the remainder of the game such a gloriously miserable experience.
Bottom Line
As for the ending my playthrough yielded, I will not spoil it here. I want to take care to keep in mind those of us, like me, who are being gifted the experience of being haunted by this universe for the very first time. All I’ll say, however, is that your decisions still do matter with regards to the ending of your story. Mary, Maria, Not-Mary, water or no water—try to keep track of your decision-points.
Credit to Remastered for not falling into the trap of rebooted games: extra bullshit content, skins we don’t care about, an addition of some sort of micro-transaction business model. None of that, here! They don’t even try to diversify the monsters they want to terrify you. I’ve counted, and I only clock a dozen enemies (including major bosses) that you face during your frenetic search through Silent Hill.
I’m really a sucker for thriller games that send someone desperate on the hunt for a missing loved one. I mentioned two (Alan Wake; The Last of Us) above. They are the closest two games, re. gameplay and character desire, to which I can draw similar experiences. Those two both rank higher for me than Silent Hill 2: Remastered. But, as mentioned, the Henry James ambiguity, and the claustrophobic, imaginative terror are something I’ve only experienced in this game particularly. It is purely excellent, and just in time for the season. Make no mistake, however: It lingers with you.
Because, surely, in my restless dreams, I’ll see (hear, fear, etc.) that town.
Score: 9.2 / 10
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