Alan Wake 2 Might Be The Closest We Ever Get to Silent Hills

ign.com:

We’re rapidly approaching 10 years since P.T. left a seismic imprint on the horror video game landscape. It was a playable teaser that was terrifying in its own right, but it also promised a gateway into a familiar town ready to provide new scares – Silent Hills. It’s a promise left unfulfilled, and one, sadly, we’ll likely never see completed. But what we do now have is Alan Wake 2, Remedy’s superb survival horror and arguably the best we’ve seen in the genre since P.T. jumped out at us a decade ago. It’s not Hideo Kojima’s Silent Hills but it might just be the closest we ever get to playing it.

There’s no denying the impact the original Silent Hill games had on the creation of Alan Wake 2. Small towns covered in mist whose lurking horrors are to be navigated by unreliable narrators, both dealing out their fair share of psychological terror. But what about Silent Hills? Well, comparisons can be made there too, even from the smallest of snippets we’ve seen. Both the reveal trailers for Silent Hills and Alan Wake 2 share eerily similar imagery: a man alone on a lamplit misty street, light source in hand as he stares into the camera lens; the colour palettes match, as does the mood, so much so that when Remedy’s latest was revealed at the 2021 Game Awards, I briefly mistook it for a revival of Kojima’s lost project.

Its gameplay may remain a mystery but we can infer from P.T. that Silent Hills would blend some of that creeping dread with traditional Silent Hill survival horror action. It’s something Alan Wake 2 does with aplomb, even borrowing certain techniques from P.T., such as looping corridors where the smallest changes create the biggest ripples of fear. Of course, P.T. itself wasn't original in this, taking