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I, like many horror fans, had serious doubts about Silent Hill 2 Remake. Specifically developer Bloober Team's ability to do justice to such an iconic game. The studio, founded in 2008, had yet to really prove itself with a single release you could point to as evidence that it had the chops to bring Silent Hill 2 to a modern crowd. Sure, there was Layers of Fear and Observer, horror games I'd describe as competent and imaginative, but there was also Basement Crawl and Blair Witch, which are both nothing short of appalling.
This is all to say, very few people expected Bloober Team to stick the landing with Silent Hill 2 Remake. But against all odds, it did exactly that and then some, delivering a new vision that's faithful to the original but modernized and expanded in meaningful ways. For one, its combat doesn't make you want to snap your controller in half. There's also a lot more of Silent Hill itself to explore, with an expanded and more interactive map that hides all sorts of secrets, items, and lore entries.
I'm not afraid to say that Silent Hill 2 Remake is an objectively better experience than the original Silent Hill for most people. It looks better, sounds better, plays better, and perfectly captures the thick, oppressively bleak atmosphere of the original. Purely from a technical aspect, the remake's modern visuals allow for more nuanced and evocative character expression, which translates to more emotionally resonant storytelling, which is one of many things the original game excels at.
The remake is also a whole lot scarier than the original. I attribute that to the highly aggressive enemy design that makes for a more immediate and omnipresent sense of threat, as well as the inherent advantages of today's hardware against the PS2 - and I'm not just saying better graphics equals more scary. Sure, the abominations designed by legendary Team Silent artist Masahiro Ito are even more nightmare-inducing when brought to life with modern AAA visual fidelity and sound design, but the town of Silent Hill itself is far more seamless, and thus immersive, when unshackled by the limitations of the PS2's CPU, which entailed lots of load screens and mechanical jank.
Horror from whole cloth
Of course, remaking a classic is one thing, but designing a whole new IP is another beast entirely. I'll give Bloober Team its flowers all day for Silent Hill 2 Remake, but until it can deliver a classic with its own DNA, I remain undecided on its staying power, at least in the AAA horror space.
In case I wasn't clear enough in the intro, I'm not saying I doubt Bloober Team's ability to make a great original horror game, it's just that I don't believe it has one in its catalog yet. The Medium is probably the next best thing for my money with its innovative world-hopping mechanic, but aside from that cool hook it very much falls in line with the studio's previous psychological horror releases, meaning you'd almost be forgiven for calling it a walking sim.
Layers of Fear, likewise, is another one Bloober Team fans might herald as a classic that I found to be atmospheric and well-written but ultimately, just kind of boring. To say there's little variety in the gameplay is an understatement, and the scares are mostly of the jump variety - the antithesis to Silent Hill 2's slow-building, creeping dread that embeds itself beneath your skin.
The pessimist in me fears we're getting another boring walking simulator, but the optimist thinks maybe, just maybe Bloober Team learned a thing or two not only from its past missteps but from Silent Hill 2 Remake. I'm no game developer, but I can only imagine Konami's opus is a masterclass in horror atmosphere and storytelling, building tension brick by brick, and scaring the crap out of people. Yes, Konami laid the foundation, but Bloober Team had to build upon it with the right tools and vision, and it did. It really can't be overstated how many things could've gone wrong in its development, and yet almost nothing did. Bloober Team deserves a lot of credit for that.
Glass half full
OK, it's high time we actually start talking about what Bloober Team is making next. It's called Cronos: The New Dawn, and it's a third-person sci-fi survival horror game with heavy Dead Space vibes set in a post-apocalyptic 1980s Poland. I was highly impressed by its cinematic reveal trailer, which shows two equally terrifying scenes: one with an old woman playing a deadly game of chess with some sort of armored creature, and another showing what appears to be a human wearing a spacesuit fending off zombie-like creatures and an alien-type thing that looks like the monster from John Carpenter's The Thing.
This may be a reach, but the design of the scary chess player – who by the way seems to murder his opponent with some sort of glove with long metal claws – reminds me a little of Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2. The mystery of initially not quite knowing if it's human or not due to the helmet obscuring its face, the silent, eerily calm threat it poses, and the sense of cunning all suggest to me that Bloober Team indeed took some cues from Konami in designing its bad guys. But again, let me know if that's hopium talking.
Whether or not its enemies are inspired by Silent Hill, and despite some decidedly Dead Spacey energy, it's definitely clear to me that Bloober Team's own DNA will still be present in Cronos: The New Dawn. The world design blends brutalism with retro-futuristic tech in the telling of a story divided into the present and future. In the past, you'll play in a world that's being ravaged by a cataclysmic event known as The Change, which "forever altered humanity." But you'll also play in the future following The Change, which turned the world into a dangerous wasteland crawling with all sorts of horrible creatures. It's unclear if you'll have the ability to jump between these two timelines at will, but it feels very Bloober Team either way.
I think that's the right play. One common criticism of Bloober Team is that its games can feel a little derivative, and yeah, it's pretty hard to point at one consistent theme across its catalog as Bloober Team-specific. The fact that it nailed Silent Hill 2 Remake won't do anything to remedy the perception that Bloober Team games are unoriginal, so building on themes and mechanics from its previous games seems like a smart choice.
Cronos: The New Dawn could be a make or break situation for Bloober Team. The studio utterly redeemed itself with Silent Hill 2 Remake, but I see it as more of a pre-exam than the final test. In an interview from October, the remake's co-director Jacek Zieba said Bloober Team is "done making shitty games" and that the studio had "found its niche." Cronos: The New Dawn will either be the proof in the pudding or a disappointment that regresses the studio's reputation to pre-Silent Hill 2 Remake days. Hopefully it's the former.
Let's all manifest the reality in which Cronos: The New Dawn is on our list of the best horror games.
