With Silent Hill 2, Bloober Team Is Entering a New ‘Phase’ of Its Existence as a Horror Developer

ign.com:

Eight years after Bloober Team formally became known as a horror game developer, the studio is preparing for another shift, though it’s admittedly a touch less radical. It wants its games to start competing with industry giants of horror and adjacent genres like Resident Evil, The Last of Us, and Hellblade, and it’s starting with the remake of Silent Hill 2.

Speaking to IGN at DICE Summit 2023, Bloober Team CEO Piotr Babieno says it wants to change the way it tells stories. He wants to move beyond games that lean on simple mechanics typically found in “walking simulator” games – a term that Babieno acknowledges still attracts undeserved derision from gaming audiences.

Instead, he wants Bloober to be making games with larger scopes and more complex and involved gameplay mechanics on the level of other giants in the horror genre. He wants Bloober to be known as the studio that defines the future of video game horror, especially as he observes more people turning to horror for catharsis amidst increasingly chaotic and terrifying real-world events.

“We still would like to make meaningful games, we still would like to keep our DNA to tell [stories] about things which are important to us,” he says. “However, not by environmental storytelling, but by full action, to have much more mass appeal. And I think that this is the reason why we have chosen Silent Hill.”

I ask Babieno if the studio’s remake of Silent Hill 2 means that Bloober will continue to carry forward the Silent Hill franchise on behalf of Konami with more titles in the future. He replies that Konami is interested in conversations with Bloober, and “I’m not going to say never,” but affirms Bloober is focused for now on Silent Hill 2 and its secret project with Private