Silent Hill 2 Review

ign.com:

After a string of Resident Evil remakes, the resurrection of Dead Space, and even genre granddaddy Alone in the Dark stepping back into the spotlight earlier this year, it feels long overdue that seminal survival horror classic Silent Hill 2 should emerge from the fog and be given a modern makeover. Enter Bloober Team, the psychological horror specialists best known for Layers of Fear and Observer, who’ve been given the task of taking the morbid masterpiece from the PlayStation 2 era and making the fetid flesh of its many demonic ghouls seem fresh. As a big fan of the original, I’m happy to report that this resulting Silent Hill 2 remake is an exceptionally grim and grimy horrorscape that’s consistently compelling to explore, packed with new puzzles and beefed-up boss encounters, and enhanced with modernised combat that made my return to the small town of Silent Hill a regularly violent thrill.

Given it was released more than two decades ago, there’s every chance you don’t have the foggiest idea what made the original Silent Hill 2 so impactful. Aside from its sinister small town setting that felt like stepping into the pages of a Stephen King novel, Silent Hill 2 stood apart from other survival horror stories of its era by putting just as much focus on the battle with personal demons as it did regular scraps with the snarling physical kind. Protagonist James Sunderland, who’s lured to a remote mining town by the promise of making contact with his deceased wife Mary, is not a battle hardened member of a zombie-killing special unit – he’s an ordinary man forced to confront some truly extraordinary things. The struggles with his own guilt and trauma both humanise him and add believable heft to the horrors that unfold around him.

While the roles of James and the handful of other lost souls he meets along the way have been recast with voice actors of a noticeably higher standard in this remake, the campy dialogue they deliver remains mostly unchanged. This does preserve