Silent Hill 2 Remake Review - Born From A Wish
Despite several recent successes in remaking classic horror games, there’s been one project that seemed to be an enormously daunting, if not impossible, task: Silent Hill 2. For some, the game represents the holy grail of the survival-horror genre, with its uniquely dreamlike mood, haunting monsters draped in metaphor, and an oppressive atmosphere as thick as the titular town’s signature fog. Depending on who you ask, Bloober Team has either been auditioning for the reins to this series or liberally cribbing from it for years with games like Layers of Fear and The Medium. Now, in cooperation with Konami, all that groundwork has led to the team’s remake of Silent Hill 2, and the end result is a meticulous, loving, and stunning recreation of one of horror’s most significant efforts.
Silent Hill 2 stars James Sunderland, a man who arrives in the dreary town of Silent Hill in search of his wife, Mary, who has written him a letter begging to see him again despite allegedly dying three years ago. For James and the player alike, this classic horror story setup of an amnesiac surrounded by ghouls soon peels away like dead skin, revealing a series of surreal nightmares that blend moods and aesthetics in ways that purposely confound and unsettle. This ultimately gives life to something that may feel familiar to players, if only because the original Silent Hill 2 has been such a prominent genre touchstone for more than two decades.
The town and its inhabitants behave like the setting and characters of a dream one may half-recall upon waking. Moving through Silent Hill often defies basic concepts of what a town even is, evidenced by the enormous fences cloaked in dirty sheets that abruptly end some avenues. They look as though they exist to quarantine the town from the outside world, but the thick fog envelops so much of the space that it also immediately and ceaselessly feels like no other place possibly exists.
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