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I got a message.
No, the name on the envelope didn't say Mary. It wasn't an envelope at all, actually. The text was from a decades-old friend who, like me, had waste– uh, dedicated most of their adult lives to Konami's seminal, and often criminally undervalued, horror series.
We'd each heard whispers that the franchise's most acclaimed installment, Silent Hill 2, was getting a remake. We'd each decided – separately, then collectively – that it was bollocks. Silent Hill was long dead, killed by 2012's horrifying "Summer of Silent Hill" and further desecrated by Konami's very public divorce from its hitherto golden child, Hideo Kojima, just two years later. Sources told me that, occasionally, Konami would poke its lifeless corpse with a stick, as though daring it to move. And while I've never been a fan of the hashtags or the tired Pachinko jokes, I knew enough about Konami to be certain that there was no way – I repeat: no way – it would ever touch that sacrosanct sequel. Especially not after the Silent Hill HD Collection debacle, anyway.
And yet here we are. 50 days off from one of the most eagerly-anticipated horror remakes of all time.
Homecoming
Check out our Silent Hill 2 preview to see what we made of the remake's first five hours
Can I be honest? I have an uneasy relationship with Silent Hill 2. Whilst it is, without doubt, one of my favorite games of all time – it was the very first to ever make me ugly-cry – it's also one of those stories where its legend has been engorged and distorted so much, its real magic has been eclipsed by hyperbole. There are so many video essays pulling Silent Hill 2 apart, scene by scene, frame by frame, that much of it now lays bare like a bludgeoned Mannequin, and even its darkest, most secret parts have been distilled into crass soundbites and memes.
But people are quick to forget that once upon a time, we didn't know anything. When Silent Hill 2 released 23 years ago, none of us really understood its secrets or symbolism. We knew about Pyramid Head, but we didn't know why Red Pyramid Thing looked or acted the way it did. We understood that shocking plot twist, but we may not have appreciated just how deliciously cruel some of Silent Hill 2's alternate endings truly were. We may have seen an Abstract Daddy, but many of us didn't even know it was called that, let alone the reasons why. Some of its motifs around death, deception, and duality are not subtle. Some of them undoubtedly are. Finishing Silent Hill 2 often left more questions than it ever answered, and the canny decision to include a 30-minute Making Of documentary with the PAL release only deepened its mysteries.
Preparing for this article, I dipped back into the annals of Silent Hill Forum, my online home that's now old enough to drink (not just in the UK, but in the States, too). Still stickied to the top of the Silent Hill 2 section is the Quick Links thread, a post that collates dozens upon dozens of the most common questions players have posed over the years. It's a lasting testament – not just to its (mostly) thoughtful, cerebral fanbase, but also to the impact Silent Hill 2 had on those who played it back then. Few, if any, of us set down the controller as the credits rolled and did not feel moved. Few, if any, knew what the hell had just happened in that final boss fight.
Today, I don't suppose anyone booting up the original sequel for the first time will come away with much other than supreme disappointment and unwavering certainty that all those best games of all time lists are lying to you. On a wholly objective, mechanical level, Silent Hill 2 is… unsettling, sure, but it's ultimately pretty dull to play. Especially by contemporary standards. The story may even feel a little trite now. A little… well, obvious.
Back in 2001, though? There was no such thing as psychological horror because Silent Hill 2 hadn't invented it yet. We didn't know much, if anything, about unreliable narrators, and adult themes in games were almost unheard of. All the tropes horror fans collectively roll their eyes at now – the Bad Dad trope, repressed sexual desires, a private hell that punishes you for your sins – simply didn't exist. I'm not saying Konami invented that stuff with Silent Hill 2, but it sure as hell inspired it.
So: how do you go about trying to recreate that? How do you take a source text so revered and reimagine it for a contemporary audience that never grew up with tank controls or fixed camera angles and may not know that Silent Hill isn't supernaturally foggy, it was just designed that way because the developers were struggling with the limitations of its own tech? At first blush, it appears Bloober Team is either incredibly confident or astonishingly naive to have even considered it has the chops to do this. But this week's shock-dropped story teaser hints that whether you think it belongs in column A or column B, Bloober just may pull this off.
For not only is Bloober attempting an unthinkable remake, but it chose to showcase its progress today by essentially making a shot-by-shot recreation of one of my favorite E3 trailers of all time – Silent Hill 2's 2001 E3 teaser.
And that's the true legacy of Silent Hill 2, I think. Not its monsters and its melancholy but its people; the people who dared to make the original, the people daring to make it again, and the people who banded together to try and figure out what this strange, dark, desperate game was trying to tell us. Just as you can't appreciate a win without a loss, or appreciate light without stepping in shadow, this horror game shines because of its darkness. Silent Hill 2 is a game about love, loss, and faith, yes, but it's also every bit about rebirth, redemption, and forgiveness, too. Oh, how glorious it is that so many of us – green and grizzled Silent Hill visitors alike – get to experience it for the first time all over again.
