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Silent Hill 2 Remake
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker2
- Start date
Still never got a PS5 and my PC would only handle lower to medium settings at best I think.
Now it's the price of a last gen game.
9to5toys.com
I highly doubt it will do much, considering how great the game runs without it.
Rare all-time low price now live on Silent Hill 2 remake for PS5, Final Fantasy I-VI Collection, more
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9to5toys.com
I highly doubt it will do much, considering how great the game runs without it.
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gamerant.com
Lame. Seems like a ridiculous amount of work for a pointless sentence.
The game's kinda doing a meta thing where it implies that it's part of a recurring cycle that started with the original that James is trapped in.
Not in a Final Fantasy 7 Remake way, where that is the whole point, it's very understated, but occasionally it throws in little references that acknowledges that everything in it has happened before.
Clever little puzzle, and makes miss those fun little secrets lots of larger devs did back in the day.
7 hours into the game.
And holy shit, that's what I'm talking about! Barely any cheap jump scares, but with such an atmospheric vibe the game has me constantly on the edge. I mean it actually makes me glad to be out in the creepy fog, instead of being inside the creepy apartments. At least outdoors there are hopes of out-running the monsters; Inside, even at the save points, I always feel something is gonna go wrong.
Speaking of which, I have forgotten how terrifying the monster designs are. Yeah we can have creepy AIs in a sci-fi, or a demon that haunts dreams in a fantasy, but monsters in this game are "grounded", looking like inanimate objects coming to life. I am reminded of my childhood when I couldn't sleep, and all the normal stuff in my room looked like scary monsters in the darkened room with their silhouettes.
I heard many people have complained about character design choices, particularly for Maria and Angela, but I am honestly fine with them. In fact, I think it's a fine line between making them look realistic and idealistic. Resident Evil 4 Remake had amazing designs for the likes of Leon and Ada, but I think they looked too good; Here, I see their facial hairs, freckles, and wrinkles that gives them a more realistic look. Yet, both of them are still beautiful. Hell, I even got really comfortable with James's facial design.
I have finally gotten used to the combat; Turns out I have been constantly pausing and going to the menu to switch weapons, when in reality all I needed to do was not aim to use my melee weapon. And since I just need to press buttons on the d-pad to switch firearms, combat feels much easier. There doesn't seem to be any way to upgrade the weapons (as it is in the original), and James seem to have slower reload animation compared to other survival-horror game protagonists, but I think this was a smart decision; James isn't a fighter. He's not a soldier or a cop who is fighting off against a horde of infected, or a survivor in a post-apocalypse setting being resourceful with whatever he finds. He is just an average man, looking for his wife. I don't think he has ever gotten into a fight in his life, and it shows especially when he's swinging his melee weapons; he swings wide, slow, and with lots of force while grunting. This honestly would be how anyone in his situation would look like; unless they had experience w/ improvised weapons.
I love the puzzles. Instead of giving you blantant answers, some puzzles requires deciphering the poetry or reading the environmental clues. It made me physically WRITE DOWN the clues on a piece of paper, and I haven't done that in ages. I could've just simply looked up the solutions online, but for some reason I was compelled to go with the traditional method. It reminded me of the classic games where physical notes where practically necessary to solve the puzzles.
I never completed the story in the original game, and pretty sure I've made it farther here in the remake. But so far the depression fuel is real. Eddie, Laura, Maria, and Angela all seem to reflect James' psyqiue of his guilty consiouses and regrets, and it has sort of started to project to me as well.
And holy shit, that's what I'm talking about! Barely any cheap jump scares, but with such an atmospheric vibe the game has me constantly on the edge. I mean it actually makes me glad to be out in the creepy fog, instead of being inside the creepy apartments. At least outdoors there are hopes of out-running the monsters; Inside, even at the save points, I always feel something is gonna go wrong.
Speaking of which, I have forgotten how terrifying the monster designs are. Yeah we can have creepy AIs in a sci-fi, or a demon that haunts dreams in a fantasy, but monsters in this game are "grounded", looking like inanimate objects coming to life. I am reminded of my childhood when I couldn't sleep, and all the normal stuff in my room looked like scary monsters in the darkened room with their silhouettes.
I heard many people have complained about character design choices, particularly for Maria and Angela, but I am honestly fine with them. In fact, I think it's a fine line between making them look realistic and idealistic. Resident Evil 4 Remake had amazing designs for the likes of Leon and Ada, but I think they looked too good; Here, I see their facial hairs, freckles, and wrinkles that gives them a more realistic look. Yet, both of them are still beautiful. Hell, I even got really comfortable with James's facial design.
I have finally gotten used to the combat; Turns out I have been constantly pausing and going to the menu to switch weapons, when in reality all I needed to do was not aim to use my melee weapon. And since I just need to press buttons on the d-pad to switch firearms, combat feels much easier. There doesn't seem to be any way to upgrade the weapons (as it is in the original), and James seem to have slower reload animation compared to other survival-horror game protagonists, but I think this was a smart decision; James isn't a fighter. He's not a soldier or a cop who is fighting off against a horde of infected, or a survivor in a post-apocalypse setting being resourceful with whatever he finds. He is just an average man, looking for his wife. I don't think he has ever gotten into a fight in his life, and it shows especially when he's swinging his melee weapons; he swings wide, slow, and with lots of force while grunting. This honestly would be how anyone in his situation would look like; unless they had experience w/ improvised weapons.
I love the puzzles. Instead of giving you blantant answers, some puzzles requires deciphering the poetry or reading the environmental clues. It made me physically WRITE DOWN the clues on a piece of paper, and I haven't done that in ages. I could've just simply looked up the solutions online, but for some reason I was compelled to go with the traditional method. It reminded me of the classic games where physical notes where practically necessary to solve the puzzles.
I never completed the story in the original game, and pretty sure I've made it farther here in the remake. But so far the depression fuel is real. Eddie, Laura, Maria, and Angela all seem to reflect James' psyqiue of his guilty consiouses and regrets, and it has sort of started to project to me as well.
Planning to finally pick this up later today once I get a good moment to. After spending my whole gaming life hearing about how great the original was, and this year hearing about how great the remake is, and since I enjoyed the hell out of the remakes of Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space, I've got plenty of reasons to get it already; the discount from the Steam sale is just what pushed me over the edge.
And since the PC version is compatible with a Dualsense controller out of the box, I even get the enhanced haptics.
And since the PC version is compatible with a Dualsense controller out of the box, I even get the enhanced haptics.
I've the the pyramid guy in a hallway. This town is dirty as fuck.
I guess here's my summary:
I think it's an absolutely valid remake of the original, better in some respects, worse in others but overall nothing that even I, as a die hard Silent Hill fan, would have any major issues with.
There are a lot of ways in which I think it improves on the original and modernizes it successfully. The environmental designs are beautifully detailed and look absolutely gorgeous, the camera and controls are a lot more intuitive from a modern perspective and the creature designs look just as unique and grotesque as they did originally. Oh and the sound design is incredibly immersive, it's a game you absolutely need to play with headphones! Artistically it is really a triumph and it does the original proud.
The combat is kind of a double edged sword in that it is unambiguous better than it was in the original but there's also more of it which I'm not really a fan of. I've said it before, in classic survival horror games, the crux of the combat was in the deciding when to engage in it and when you can avoid it. The remake clearly wants you to fight just about every single enemy you come across and especially in the late game there are quite a lot of them and they're really aggressive. And I'd have to lie if I said it didn't get a bit tiresome.
My biggest criticism is the pacing. I'm not sure if this would have stuck out to me if I hadn't played the original but it's hard not to notice if you have. The remake is about twice or thrice as long than the original SH2. If I had to give my best estimation, I'd say the original was about 6-8 hours, the remake clocks in at about 20 hours. So in other words, it adds a lot of content. Which isn't a bad thing, the issue is that it also sticks very closely to the original games plot, so while it adds gameplay content it doesn't add much in the way of additional plot, making most of it just feel like detours.
Some of it is perfectly fine. I didn't mind the little broken record detour on the way to the first dungeon, I liked the extended section between apartments and hospital, I thought most of the dungeons were fine but some sequences just stuck out negatively to me. If I had to rate the dungeons one by one I'd say the Apartments were pretty good, the Brookhaven Hospital was mostly fine but it did have some severe pacing issues. It's one of those things, survival horror games pretty much always have a lot of that typical adventure game design. You know "use the pool cue to reach the button to open the gate to get the tweezers to retrieve the playing cards to solve the puzzle to get the number combination to open the save to acquire the key to open the door to get to the next plot beat." and if it's done well, you don't notice it but when it isn't you do realize that you're just being given the runaround which I very much did in that section.
The otherworld town after was pretty cool but then you get to the historical society and straight up, that's when they really should have made some cuts. Now, don't get me wrong, I always felt that that section was a bit long and had a bit too much stuff going on to begin with but the remake really stretches it out too much. In the remake it's effectively two very large dungeons back to back, the prison and the labyrinth and that's where I felt myself getting a bit tired of it. I feel like at least one of those two sections really would have needed to be reduced by a lot. Probably the prison one, tbh. I felt like I was never gonna see the light again and, you know, maybe that's intentional, maybe it was meant to be a long, punishing, claustrophobic gauntlet that makes you wonder whether you'll ever be able to leave, but I found it annoying more than oppressive.
At that point I was a bit frustrated with the game but to their credit, they absolutely nailed the final dungeon, the hotel. They understood that the historical society part was the games climax in terms of challenge and horror and that for the hotel they'd have to slow down and focus on the story and the emotional aspect and they really succeeded there. It's longer than in the original but doesn't feel stretched out and, very uncharacteristically, they actually decided to somewhat reduce the otherworld section and turn it into more of a linear, cinematic sequence, which was absolutely the right call. Also and this is something I think they deserve all the credit in the world for it, they didn't actually repeat the original games mistake of using the Abstract Daddy boss as a regular enemy in that section. I always felt that really took away from its impact and its significance to the character arc of Angela.
So, what I'm saying is, ending on a strong note is definitely what elevated the game for me from "It's alright" to "It's quite good." If I were to get into the nitty gritty... voice acting was pretty good, the actors playing Angela, Laura and Eddie were killing it. Maria/Mary was kinda off, losing some of those kinda lynchian abrupt mood swings. James was interesting. The new actor mostly maintained the general feel of Guy Cihi's original performance, i.e. sad and confused, but on occasion there was this feeling of repressed anger to it that, I suppose, adds some nuance to his moral ambiguity.
They removed Pyramid Heads cleaver as a weapon, which I thought was kind of a shame. There's kind of a shoutout to it where you get to drag it around for a short section but you never get to swing it, which is kinda lame. No, it was hardly a viable weapon in the original either, don't get me wrong, I think I made one or two token attempts to actually use it during the final boss fight but... I don't know, it was fun it existed. Speaking of which, I also felt the final boss fight was trying a bit too hard. They fleshed out all of the bosses greatly, most of them for the better, but for the final one I feel like less would have been more, it didn't need three phases. It made it a bit too over the top for my taste.
And then there's the one thing that the remake does to the story, aside from adding two new endings I felt were fine: Leaning into the idea that the story might secretly be a cycle James is going through. Which is interesting. It's done subtly so it's easy to dismiss if you don't care for the possibility but between the collectibles spelling out "You've been here for two decades" and some other hints towards an element of recurrence it's an interesting detail to have. Again, narratively I can take it or leave it. I do prefer to think that the "leave" ending means James actually found redemption and gets to live out the rest of his life and that the "In Water" provides at least some sort of escape but still, I reckon it's an interesting idea to entertain.
I guess overall I'd say the remake is a perfect example for a sidegrade. A Let's Player I watch was very eager to call it the "definitive version" of the game and I can't quite join him there. I do think it loses some of the originals tight pacing and compact narrative by extending it so much. But it does have plenty of genuine improvements, mechanically and visually that I can't call it a downgrade either. It's an interesting alternate version of a classic that I'm happy exists and I got to play. I've said it before, if you can at all get your hands on the original I would recommend playing it before the remake, I don't think it quite replaces it. But honestly, even if you don't it's still a beautiful way to experience this classic story.
I think it's an absolutely valid remake of the original, better in some respects, worse in others but overall nothing that even I, as a die hard Silent Hill fan, would have any major issues with.
There are a lot of ways in which I think it improves on the original and modernizes it successfully. The environmental designs are beautifully detailed and look absolutely gorgeous, the camera and controls are a lot more intuitive from a modern perspective and the creature designs look just as unique and grotesque as they did originally. Oh and the sound design is incredibly immersive, it's a game you absolutely need to play with headphones! Artistically it is really a triumph and it does the original proud.
The combat is kind of a double edged sword in that it is unambiguous better than it was in the original but there's also more of it which I'm not really a fan of. I've said it before, in classic survival horror games, the crux of the combat was in the deciding when to engage in it and when you can avoid it. The remake clearly wants you to fight just about every single enemy you come across and especially in the late game there are quite a lot of them and they're really aggressive. And I'd have to lie if I said it didn't get a bit tiresome.
My biggest criticism is the pacing. I'm not sure if this would have stuck out to me if I hadn't played the original but it's hard not to notice if you have. The remake is about twice or thrice as long than the original SH2. If I had to give my best estimation, I'd say the original was about 6-8 hours, the remake clocks in at about 20 hours. So in other words, it adds a lot of content. Which isn't a bad thing, the issue is that it also sticks very closely to the original games plot, so while it adds gameplay content it doesn't add much in the way of additional plot, making most of it just feel like detours.
Some of it is perfectly fine. I didn't mind the little broken record detour on the way to the first dungeon, I liked the extended section between apartments and hospital, I thought most of the dungeons were fine but some sequences just stuck out negatively to me. If I had to rate the dungeons one by one I'd say the Apartments were pretty good, the Brookhaven Hospital was mostly fine but it did have some severe pacing issues. It's one of those things, survival horror games pretty much always have a lot of that typical adventure game design. You know "use the pool cue to reach the button to open the gate to get the tweezers to retrieve the playing cards to solve the puzzle to get the number combination to open the save to acquire the key to open the door to get to the next plot beat." and if it's done well, you don't notice it but when it isn't you do realize that you're just being given the runaround which I very much did in that section.
The otherworld town after was pretty cool but then you get to the historical society and straight up, that's when they really should have made some cuts. Now, don't get me wrong, I always felt that that section was a bit long and had a bit too much stuff going on to begin with but the remake really stretches it out too much. In the remake it's effectively two very large dungeons back to back, the prison and the labyrinth and that's where I felt myself getting a bit tired of it. I feel like at least one of those two sections really would have needed to be reduced by a lot. Probably the prison one, tbh. I felt like I was never gonna see the light again and, you know, maybe that's intentional, maybe it was meant to be a long, punishing, claustrophobic gauntlet that makes you wonder whether you'll ever be able to leave, but I found it annoying more than oppressive.
At that point I was a bit frustrated with the game but to their credit, they absolutely nailed the final dungeon, the hotel. They understood that the historical society part was the games climax in terms of challenge and horror and that for the hotel they'd have to slow down and focus on the story and the emotional aspect and they really succeeded there. It's longer than in the original but doesn't feel stretched out and, very uncharacteristically, they actually decided to somewhat reduce the otherworld section and turn it into more of a linear, cinematic sequence, which was absolutely the right call. Also and this is something I think they deserve all the credit in the world for it, they didn't actually repeat the original games mistake of using the Abstract Daddy boss as a regular enemy in that section. I always felt that really took away from its impact and its significance to the character arc of Angela.
So, what I'm saying is, ending on a strong note is definitely what elevated the game for me from "It's alright" to "It's quite good." If I were to get into the nitty gritty... voice acting was pretty good, the actors playing Angela, Laura and Eddie were killing it. Maria/Mary was kinda off, losing some of those kinda lynchian abrupt mood swings. James was interesting. The new actor mostly maintained the general feel of Guy Cihi's original performance, i.e. sad and confused, but on occasion there was this feeling of repressed anger to it that, I suppose, adds some nuance to his moral ambiguity.
They removed Pyramid Heads cleaver as a weapon, which I thought was kind of a shame. There's kind of a shoutout to it where you get to drag it around for a short section but you never get to swing it, which is kinda lame. No, it was hardly a viable weapon in the original either, don't get me wrong, I think I made one or two token attempts to actually use it during the final boss fight but... I don't know, it was fun it existed. Speaking of which, I also felt the final boss fight was trying a bit too hard. They fleshed out all of the bosses greatly, most of them for the better, but for the final one I feel like less would have been more, it didn't need three phases. It made it a bit too over the top for my taste.
And then there's the one thing that the remake does to the story, aside from adding two new endings I felt were fine: Leaning into the idea that the story might secretly be a cycle James is going through. Which is interesting. It's done subtly so it's easy to dismiss if you don't care for the possibility but between the collectibles spelling out "You've been here for two decades" and some other hints towards an element of recurrence it's an interesting detail to have. Again, narratively I can take it or leave it. I do prefer to think that the "leave" ending means James actually found redemption and gets to live out the rest of his life and that the "In Water" provides at least some sort of escape but still, I reckon it's an interesting idea to entertain.
I guess overall I'd say the remake is a perfect example for a sidegrade. A Let's Player I watch was very eager to call it the "definitive version" of the game and I can't quite join him there. I do think it loses some of the originals tight pacing and compact narrative by extending it so much. But it does have plenty of genuine improvements, mechanically and visually that I can't call it a downgrade either. It's an interesting alternate version of a classic that I'm happy exists and I got to play. I've said it before, if you can at all get your hands on the original I would recommend playing it before the remake, I don't think it quite replaces it. But honestly, even if you don't it's still a beautiful way to experience this classic story.
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I made it about 4 hours into my playthrough of this game before I had to stop out of boredom. I get where people are coming from in the sense that Silent Hill 2 is a horror classic, and maybe the original game is. However I found the game boring and not at all scary in the slightest, mainly due to the music and the radios. Too much about the monsters are given away to the player well before they are seen or even heard thanks to the radio warning you about them being nearby. Even when the radio isn't buzzing, the music gives signs of danger being close.
And while it does serve to be atmospheric and tense, like a great horror game should. It's incredibly light on plot. James comes back to Silent Hill because he thinks he got a letter form his wife who's been dead for three years, in that letter she says she is waiting for him in SH. Okay....why didn't he drive to the town instead of parking on an overlook way outside of town only to have to take a fairly long hike into the town properly? He meets a girl in a graveyard who's acting a little odd, but offers no real hints of plot, and then you are in town for quite a while.
The first big "puzzle" (which isn't a puzzle it's just a fetch quest) is to fix a jutebox. Notes tell you where to go and outside of a few monsters along the way it's fairly straightforward. The entire section takes almost an hour though and throughout there is no story to drive you or James into fixing the jutebox. You just have to do it to get to the next section.
This is where the set up loses me. These obtuse puzzle locks worked in the resident evil games because you had a clear goal of escaping the mansion or the police stations or whatever. So the crazy puzzles made a bit more sense because they were part of an umbrella lab or part of an old museum and the characters where never really intended to solve the shit, but they have to because there are zombies outside so solving the locks are the only way out.
Here it's just like....why? The town is clearly abandoned, and James is mistaken as to his wife possibly being here. Why push forward, why even try to traverse the foggy town, why not try to wait out the fog and come back when you can see people? Why not leave the second a gimp monster pukes on you?
Unlike Racoon City, James isn't trapped, he can simply go back to the car and bounce. There is nothing pushing him forward either. His wife isn't baiting him (yet, that probably happens later but for now it's all bullshit).
Anyway you finally fix the jutebox and get a key to another section of town. Then you find a note to go check out some apartments, under the name of someone not relevant to James in anyway (that I know of). The note is basically, "Yo Bob left his car parked in back, someone should go to his place and see if he intends to come get his car anytime soon." And the player is like, "I guess I'm going to find Bob for some reason."
So for me it doesn't give me anything to care about. I don't have any reason to push forward, and I don't have any reason to care about James because he isn't trapped and can just walk back to his car whenever.
In the apartments begins another long string of breaking and entering in which you gather bullets, health items, and key pieces for some big master lock puzzle. Pyramid head is in one of the hallway for some reason, but he doesn't hang out long. Probably have to fight him later but I have a gun now so it'll be fine.
What am I doing here?
And while it does serve to be atmospheric and tense, like a great horror game should. It's incredibly light on plot. James comes back to Silent Hill because he thinks he got a letter form his wife who's been dead for three years, in that letter she says she is waiting for him in SH. Okay....why didn't he drive to the town instead of parking on an overlook way outside of town only to have to take a fairly long hike into the town properly? He meets a girl in a graveyard who's acting a little odd, but offers no real hints of plot, and then you are in town for quite a while.
The first big "puzzle" (which isn't a puzzle it's just a fetch quest) is to fix a jutebox. Notes tell you where to go and outside of a few monsters along the way it's fairly straightforward. The entire section takes almost an hour though and throughout there is no story to drive you or James into fixing the jutebox. You just have to do it to get to the next section.
This is where the set up loses me. These obtuse puzzle locks worked in the resident evil games because you had a clear goal of escaping the mansion or the police stations or whatever. So the crazy puzzles made a bit more sense because they were part of an umbrella lab or part of an old museum and the characters where never really intended to solve the shit, but they have to because there are zombies outside so solving the locks are the only way out.
Here it's just like....why? The town is clearly abandoned, and James is mistaken as to his wife possibly being here. Why push forward, why even try to traverse the foggy town, why not try to wait out the fog and come back when you can see people? Why not leave the second a gimp monster pukes on you?
Unlike Racoon City, James isn't trapped, he can simply go back to the car and bounce. There is nothing pushing him forward either. His wife isn't baiting him (yet, that probably happens later but for now it's all bullshit).
Anyway you finally fix the jutebox and get a key to another section of town. Then you find a note to go check out some apartments, under the name of someone not relevant to James in anyway (that I know of). The note is basically, "Yo Bob left his car parked in back, someone should go to his place and see if he intends to come get his car anytime soon." And the player is like, "I guess I'm going to find Bob for some reason."
So for me it doesn't give me anything to care about. I don't have any reason to push forward, and I don't have any reason to care about James because he isn't trapped and can just walk back to his car whenever.
In the apartments begins another long string of breaking and entering in which you gather bullets, health items, and key pieces for some big master lock puzzle. Pyramid head is in one of the hallway for some reason, but he doesn't hang out long. Probably have to fight him later but I have a gun now so it'll be fine.
What am I doing here?