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A statement I read once was "if video games were an art museum, then Silent Hill 2 is its Mona Lisa".
And... you know, I think that's accurate. Silent Hill 2 isn't even my favorite Silent Hill game, but the impact of that game in the industry and how it affected me (and countless others) on a deeply personal level is more than I can cover in a simple post. There's a sophistication, respect, maturity, nuance, and intelligence behind the game that is almost unmatched in any other game, where every inch of it seems meticulously designed with intent and purpose. It's a game that reveals itself the more you understand its story, themes, and creation. Its horror and psychological themes aren't there just for shock value or edginess - it tackles DARK themes with shocking amount of respect and understanding.
Surreal and ugly, violent and beautiful, dark and romantic, depressing yet hopeful... there was truly nothing else like it, even in Silent Hill series as a whole. If I could experience it again for the first time, I would. The mysteries, the revelations, the unanswerable questions...
The closest equivalent game I can really compare it to, in my opinion, is Dark Souls. How it leaves so much of its "answers" up to the player to determine for themselves based on their own ideologies and morality. A world so oppressive and awful, yet full of meaning and purpose if you determine it to be so.
If Silent Hill 2 Remake is even a fraction as good, we'll be in for a treat.
I feel the same... and this is someone who played the series for the first time very recently. I'm 23.
(Huge wall of text incoming)
There are things of SH 3 that I prefer over 2, but the latter is just something... special. I said this before but Silent Hill 2 is like the perfect time capsule, whilst somehow being timeless in many ways. To "replicate" it in today's culture and landscape would be an excruciatingly difficult task.
It felt like more than a game and more than just a story; a recipe of many elements. Despite having a story that feels like it could have (arguably) been better conveyed in a movie format, "clunky" gameplay that would render it bad "video game" in the eyes of the modern audience, and being held back by the hardware limitations of its time, it somehow manages to be the most convincing case of videogames being a new medium of art. When focusing on individual aspects, it feels like this is just another "good" video game, but when viewed holistically, it reveals itself as being more than that.
Someone more eloquent than me pointed this out perfectly: The "magic secret sauce" for the game was the raw, experimental, uncanny valley, 1999-2001 game design and the devs having an innovative, daring 'workaround' mentality towards hardware limitations of that era.
The uncanny quality of the game combined with the narrative also helped me see the dialogue and voice acting of this game in a new light. At first, I was taken aback by how "bad" and stiff the voice acting was. I'm not gonna sugarcoat it, I thought fans of the game were just filling in headcanon, getting all "artsy" and intellectual about something that isn't even there. Granted the voice acting IS a bit rough and goofy at times, it became a lot more digestible and made more sense as the story unravelled. After finding that Team Silent drew inspiration from the Lost Highway and Jacob's Ladder, I was quite convinced that this was indeed (for the most part) a deliberate, stylistic choice on the devs part.
Even the camera placement and movement, while disorienting at first, was something that I began to appreciate overtime because combined with the fog, the dark and dirty environments, that classic "fear of the unknown" is what kept me alert and engaged even though I found SH2 to not be nearly as scary as SH3. It's another design choice I grew to appreciate.
When offset with the epic soundtrack and atmosphere, I found myself completely immersed in the game.
But I digress, I think we would need a dev team that's not concerned with modern AAA trends, who have incredible understanding of the original game and the environment in which it was created, and a team that hasn't been influenced by other successful modern horror franchises, to get the remake to be a "faithful" retelling of the original. Considering that this is Konami we're talking about, and that the mainstream AAA level, most devs seem to follow safe modernised game design methods and guidelines, I don't have any hope that this remake will be a similar or improved version of the original game.
I'm fairly hopeful that will be a decent, and even great, standalone game. But in all the ways that matter, it will be an inferior version of the original.
All that said, I think regardless of whatever dev team you hand this project to, a remake that can match the original would be mind-numbingly difficult to make. I think SH2 is a game that is one of the last I would personally touch to try and 'modernise' it and one of the most difficult games to remake, because part of its charm is due to its age and place in history.
But yeah, these are my thoughts and experience on this game and the remake. The fact that a younger person such as myself, could play this game decades later and be completely enamoured by it is a testament to its quality. I detest fanboy mentality and speaking in hyperbole, and I'm critical towards almost all games I've played (including my favourites). But this is a game that despite picking out its flaws, I can't help but love it WITH all those flaws - it truly is an experience.
It was definitely a slow burn, but the more I think about this game, the more I uncover, and the more I cherish it. All it takes is the right mindset but once I was hooked, it was quickly uphill from there.
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