The Hills Continue Being Silent

11 Oct, 2024

Or, my Descent into Silent Hill Obsession Continues

In which I admit a truth about myself

So here's the thing that you should know about me which is that in spite of me loudly and repeatedly saying I am not really a guy who likes horror, I sure do seem to run across a lot of horror - I'm talking about both video games which are horror games and also, I have come to realize, movies as well. I have a memory of going to see Skeleton Key in college because the girl I was into and would eventually fail to date was in the group of me and maybe two other people was interested in seeing the movie. This is also the reason I ended up seeing The Exorcism of Emily Rose, I think. Neither of these movies are particularly good, but they did establish a pattern of me seeing horror films because a woman was involved.¹

My point in all this is that it is less of a surprise that I got into Silent Hill than I may have implied in my last post on the subject. I didn't even imply being surprised particularly hard, but basically in the last week or so I have looked around at all the fuckin horror games and horror films I have played/watched and started to think that yeah maybe there is something there. This isn't even mentioning the horror comics anthologies I own and the horror books I have read.

I'm beginning to think genre is bullshit, or at least I'm beginning to think that saying "oh I'm not into x genre" is bullshit because odds are good there is something you will like in every genre. I feel pretty goddamn confident saying this, more than I reckon I have ever felt about writing off entire genres.

This is all to say that I did in fact finish off Silent Hill 3 just as I suspected I would, and indeed finished it off within three days or so of writing a whole goddamn essay about it. The PC version (patched, of course) performed admirably, although it did crash a couple of times in the final level. I'm still not 100% sure what caused this, but it is another mark in favor of "Konami please put out a nice Silent Hill collection like you did with Metal Gear." I would like to be able to play nice versions of these old video games! This is tied into the Silent Hill 2 Remake, which I'll get to in a minute!

The point is, though, Silent Hill 3 continued to be good until the very end. I enjoyed it a lot and, in fact, was very close to just... starting a new game+ run immediately. It's a fun game and it took me like six and a half hours or something to beat, what's not to love? What, you're going to look at me with a straight face and tell me Heather Mason isn't fucking awesome? Get the fuck out of here with that nonsense.

Silent Hill 2 is as Good as You've Heard

After finishing Silent Hill 3, it became obvious that the thing to do now would be to play the Silent Hill game everyone talks about. Which is to say hey, I'd gone through the trouble of installing the Enhanced Edition of Silent Hill 2 when I'd hunted down the PC version of Silent Hill 3, so why not play it?

It should be stressed that I knew the entire story of Silent Hill 2 going in. As previously mentioned, I'd watched a complete playthrough of the game (plus the little extra campaign Born from a Wish that came out with... I think the Director's Cut or something? It was with the PC edition, I'll say that much). The Big Twist, which I guess I will talk around for the benefit of the five people who have somehow remained unspoiled for 23 years, is not the point of the game. The point of my playing the game, or at least the point as I approached it, was more or less down to a belief that experiencing a thing through the lens of other people playing it and talking over/about it is different than picking up a controller and playing it my own damn self.²

Which holds true for Silent Hill 2: I had headphones on more or less the whole time to get the most out of its spooky fuckin' soundscape, I was playing either at night or (thanks to it being Fall in Southwest Germany) in overcast, rainy weather, I only occasionally had my brother on a discord call with me for moral support. The story, gameplay (for the most part - the labyrinth just... kind of sucks, it's not spooky and it feels too long in spite of being pretty short), atmosphere, everything kind of ruled. Even the janky-ass voice acting works! It all fits in, and most of that is probably down to just how fucking good the soundtrack is. I mean I knew from Silent Hill 3 that Akira Yamaoka is one of the best to ever do it, but goddamn!³ Silent Hill 2 feels like a triumph, especially if you're playing the Enhanced Edition. Just a real goddamn delight from start to finish in a way I was really pleasantly surprised by!

Whoopsie-doodle

I had every intention of holding firm to my initial plan of jumping into Silent Hill next - and did in fact boot it up and begin making my way through it! I also, because I have this horrible completionist streak (and it was on sale for €6, that is also a big part of it) picked up Silent Hill 4: The Room and did the (very minor) work required to restore the hauntings which were lost in the port from PS2 to PC. Unfortunately I haven't gotten the controls to not be utter ass, but presumably there exists somewhere a solution for that issue (or I'll just play with mouse and keyboard, why not).

Anyway yeah the point is I was all set to run through the o.g. Silent Hill and then play Silent Hill 4. What I did not intend to do, because in spite of how much I enjoyed Silent Hill 2 I wasn't dying for a remake of it, was to buy the remake and start playing it. No prizes for guessing how that turned out - the reviews hit and most were positive, and everyone (even the people who really had no patience for Bloober Team and their particular brand of jump-scare heavy, ham-handed/downright harmful handling of trauma and abuse) seemed floored by the fact that Konami appeared to actually spend the time, money, and oversight to produce a solid remake. When people started comparing it favorably to the Resident Evil 2 remake, I got curious. When I actually sat down and watched some people start the game from the beginning, I figured "well, I did just play through Silent Hill 2, and wouldn't it be an interesting exercise to immediately play through the remake to see how I felt about it?"⁴

So I bought the remake on my PC, installed it, and booted it up.

In which I am of two minds

The first thing I should get out of the way is that the game looks like a modern-ass video game. This is not necessarily a compliment, because it chases fidelity above all else and I think that's a real bad trend. Also beacause eventually everything kind of just looks the same. This is not the case with Silent Hill 2 for the most part, but it is something I'm worried about and sort of keeping an eye on.

Silent Hill 2 dodges that trap because it has the benefit of the original's art direction - and it sticks to it faithfully. The creatures look real fuckin' nasty, and the environments also have that run down, abandoned, rotting feel that the original game has. There's just more detail, and that's pretty nice to look at! The game also runs pretty well on my PC barring one major issue, which is that because they didn't want to put loading screens in their video game they stream in the environment on the fly.

The problem is, something about they way they decided to do it fuckin' sucks so every so often the framerate goes from a fairly stable 60-80 fps (and higher in some indoor environments) directly into the fucking shitter. It's real bad stuttering that I doubt they'll ever be able to completely fix, but hopefully a patch can at least make it a little less awful. I would appreciate that, because as of yet I've had one cutscene completely fuck up because the game was busy choking on its own engine. Disappointing! Kind of infuriating that nobody noticed this one!⁵

That said, we'll go ahead and do some quick and dirty impressions here:

1. I've really liked the voice acting and - crucially - the facial acting during the cutscenes. It's not as janky as the original, and sometimes that means you don't get the absolutely exquisite delivery of "...Lost" from Angela and sometimes that means James sounds like an actual human. I actually really like James' performance so far, it's been my favorite new thing.

2. The game's got some fun references to both the DLC and at least one kind of nod to Silent Hill 3 in its use of a particular location. It also keeps winking and nodding whenever they change a puzzle - you can find where those original puzzles were and the game gives a little ding when you investigate them as if to say "ah yes you remembered this part but this is a remake and we've changed things" which is sometimes interesting and sometimes feels completely arbitrary in a way that rubs me the wrong way. Eddie gets a different sort of vibe in the game, and that's fine, but also there's one decision in particular that left me thinking that oh no, maybe Bloober is gonna fuck this up after all in spite of being told that no, they are not going to fuck this up.⁶ After seven and a half hours with the game (longer than it took me to beat Silent Hill 2!), I'm only just in the second half of the hospital section and let me tell you...

3. It is painfully obvious they were told to make the game longer, and they went about it by making simple puzzles drag on when they weren't dropping entirely new puzzles which are there solely to make it so getting to the next level/location takes longer. Sometimes this is fun and it gives the characters (Maria specifically) a little more depth, and that's nice. Other times I'm left scratching my head as to why we're doing this. It's felt really noticable in the hospital, where some pretty iconic puzzles and moments are just gone in favor of stuff that's more time consuming and less thematically interesting. Don't worry though, you can look at the places where the original puzzles were supposed to be and maybe that will do something to your ending or who knows?

4. Some of the little extra things are neat. There's these polaroid photos you can find and I have no idea what they are for but I'll bet it is something interesting. I'm being thorough in my explorations because I would hate to miss one. If nothing else, they've put a little mystery into the game that I want to solve. Also, some of the re-worked puzzles have given me really satisfying ah ha moments, so I can't bitch about them too much. If I'd never played the original, none of this would probably stand out to me as annoying.

5. There is way too much combat in this game. The Silent Hill series has never been particularly combat-heavy - yeah, there's boss fights and monsters but you can really just run past a lot of them - and while the new combat system is certainly less awkward it doesn't mean I want to spend 90% of my time killing fucking mannequins. Why the hell Bloober decided they needed to shove like a hundred thousand mannequins into this game is beyond me, I feel like I have killed more monsters in the game than I did in Silent Hill 2 and 3 combined and I'm not even out of the second big environment yet! The fighting misses the point of Silent Hill. To me the games are about dreading what's around the corner and barely escaping with your life, but you can't run from the monsters in the remake because they are all way faster and also they all hit like a fucking truck. I bumped the combat difficulty down to easy about two hours in because I got tired of taking one hit from a monster making my while fuckin' screen turn Oh Shit You Need to Heal Now red.

This makes it seem like I don't like the game, I realize, but the thing is I really am having a good time! I'm interested to see what other stuff they've changed (that's always the fun part of any adaptation - and make no mistake, this and the Resident Evil remakes are adaptations in that they are bringing old narratives into different engines and design sensibilities), and I would absolutely tell someone to play this game.

I just might tell them to play the original first. Weirdly, I wouldn't do this for Resident Evil - you can just start with the RE1 remake and go from there without missing much, honestly - but that is because the Resident Evil games have always lent themselves to more action-heavy gameplay, and the voice acting is reliably corny and the plots over-the-top nonsense from day one. It's fun to play the original Resident Evil, I think, but Silent Hill 2's original form feels more necessary in terms of looking at the stories games can tell - and in 2001, no less!

This is why I look at what Konami's done with Metal Gear Solid - put a high-quality, probably-gonna-be-pretty-great remake of a beloved entry into the franchise into production but also put out a (lovingly? Well, let's not go that far⁷) collection of the original(ish, see previous footnote) versions of these games. What if we got a Silent Hill collection that took games 1-4 and included whatever design documents and such they could dig up (if indeed Konami could be relied upon to save anything of their own history)? I want to believe that someone over there has at the very least considered it, and held back on doing so for fear it would cut into the sales of the Silent Hill 2 Remake. Maybe there is such a collection in development - I want to believe this is true, although obviously even with multiple Castlevania collections and the aforementioned MGS Collection I still don't trust Konami to do right by its franchises.

While we all wait and see, I still have to get through the rest of the remake and Silent Hill 4. I don't know if I'll go into any of the post-Team Silent releases (Origins, Downpour, Shattered Memories, Homecoming, probably some others I've never heard of), but I'll certainly think about it. Like at least once.

Seriously though, that Silent Hill 2 soundtrack.