Silent Hill 2 Remake Dev Bloober Team Giving Up Psychological Horror for 'Mass Market'

ign.com:

Silent Hill 2 Remake and Layers of Fear developer Bloober team is officially moving on from psychological horror games to instead focus on something more "mass-market".

As reported by Engadget, 2023's Layers of Fear — which was an all-in-one remake of sorts of the first two games and their DLC — will be the studio's final foray into the psychological horror genre, which also included games like The Medium, Blair Witch, and Observer.

Switching over to what's internally known as Bloober Team 3.0, however, the studio will begin making horror games that are more action focused and require more from the player, perhaps closer to something like Resident Evil.

"We focused on the story, we focused on the mood, we focused on the quality of graphics and music, but we didn’t put a lot of attention on the gameplay mechanics," said Bloober Team co-founder Piotr Babieno. "It wasn’t our target. But we decided that there was a ceiling that we couldn’t break if we did not deliver something fresh, something new.

"We decided that our next titles should be much more mass-market oriented. We’d like to talk with more people. We’d like to deliver our ideas, with our DNA, not by environment or storytelling, but by action. So all of our future titles will have a lot of gameplay mechanics. They will be much bigger."

The first of these games will be the Silent Hill 2 remake, though Bloober Team is yet to announce when this will be coming exactly. Announced in October 2022, the remake promises to have the original story told across updated, seamless gameplay with no loading screens, but these extras have led to some pretty frightening PC system requirements.

Ryan Dinsdale is an IGN freelance reporter. He'll talk about The Witcher all day.