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Ah, fixed camera angles, how much I miss you – says no one in 2024, ever. Playing five or so hours of Silent Hill 2 Remake at the Tokyo media premiere only strengthens my resolve: I love how modern survival horror games implement third-person shooter combat as integral to the genre's reforged DNA.
I'm happy to report that James Sunderland's revamped nightmare is no exception to the rule. It might be operating on a more simplistic level to the action-forward likes of Resident Evil 4 Remake, but after getting familiar with two key weapons during my Silent Hill 2 Remake preview session, I'm officially sold. It just goes to show that even with the remake renaissance hailing the return of the best survival horror games, to varying degrees of like-for-like accuracy, some things are better left in the past. Even if, according to Silent Hill 2's key production team, the game's refined combat system is not meant to be central to it.
Never (bul)let me go
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I'm pacing through the decayed dereliction of the Wood Side and Blue Creek Apartments respectively, nothing but four handgun bullets and a trusty plank of wood at my side. Tell-tale radio static buzzes in my ear, louder and louder as I round a corner and prepare to meet…well, something. The experience is made all the more immersive for Silent Hill 2 Remake's over-the-shoulder viewpoint. Hallways feel narrower from this angle, the walls ever threatening to close in on James as he systematically throws himself against locked door after locked door in search of – OH GOD.
Suddenly, a spider mannequin leaps out from the shadows and right up into my face. An involuntary scream erupts from my chest as I quickly go about battering the thing with my plank – the only appropriate way to thank it for the jumpscare. Once I've furiously coughed up my own swallowed tongue, though, I find myself breaking out into a proud smile. This is exactly what I'm talking about, Bloober Team.
The third person perspective lends itself so well to shooter and melee combat encounters that it really can't be overstated how much of an impact it has on the gameplay experience. At a base level, it proves to me that Bloober Team and Konami are serious about adapting the 23-year-old horror game to suit modern genre expectations, even if it means changing up something that once felt so enmeshed with Silent Hill 2 from a stylistic perspective.
But from camera perspective to creature design, Polish developer Bloober Team knew it had to handle Silent Hill 2 Remake with care. "At the very beginning, we didn't want to change anything completely, because we were too afraid of touching the game," lead producer Maciej Głomb said at the media premier Q&A forum. "Especially at the beginning, we had a lot of conversations about characters, about monsters. We got into deep conversations about how we should approach them."
Before you panic about that approach to changes, you should know that they aren't really that dramatic. In fact, Masahiro Ito clarified at the premiere event that not only are there "absolutely no brand-new monsters in the game," any and all changes to them were necessary on a mechanical rather than design level.
"While we have not made any massive changes to all the enemies that have been present in the original, we have reworked the combat mechanics, because the combat mechanics were, frankly, not very smooth in the original game," he'd said earlier in the Tokyo event. "While working on the combat, we also decided to add some minor variance – some very visual, slight changes – to all the enemy designs."
In short: a third-person camera angle necessitates refining the combat style, and a refined combat style means James and the monsters will fight each other in different ways to accommodate all the changes. As a result, some might look or move differently to how they did in the original. Personally, I'm very much on board with all of the above reworks – granted, I was six when Silent Hill 2 came out in 2001 and felt wholly exasperated by the clunky controls when I eventually played it in my mid-teens.
But despite all these necessary tweaks, Ito-san has made one thing clear: "this game is not supposed to be oriented heavily toward combat." That is where things start to make a little less sense to me in terms of what is being said about the Silent Hill 2 Remake versus what it actually feels like.
All bite, no bark
"The combat mechanics were, frankly, not very smooth in the original game."
Team Silent
Third-person shooter sensibilities have become a mainstay in modern survival horror's design brief, and with that, I've come to expect a heightened action experience. The gunplay in Silent Hill 2 Remake feels smooth and sharp, the DualSense controller making snappy work of my enemies whether I'm aiming down my sights or walloping a Lying Figure with reckless abandon. I know I can simply creep around these enemies, which is perhaps what Ito-san is getting at, but why on earth would I not want to make use of this simple yet extremely fun combat system? And why say that this game is not geared towards combat when, for the most part, I feel James is in a state of perma-combat?
Hear me out: I like all the combat, and I like the sense of danger on every corner. It's the same approach I take to Resident Evil, The Evil Within, and indeed any survival horror game I get my hands on. I don't like to leave witnesses, so if the bullet fits the bad guy, you can bet your bottom dollar I'll kill my digital enemies first and ask myself if it was a good use of ammo later. Killing everything is made all the more attractive by the fact that there does not seem to be any weapon degradation system in Silent Hill 2 Remake. That means my faithful wooden plank, bloodied and bent out of shape though it might be, proves reliable whenever I get a bit too trigger-happy. The result? A great many beatings.
I didn't expect it, but the simple pleasures of whaling monsters to death with a wooden plank or shooting them in their misshapen ankles are standout factors to me in Silent Hill 2 Remake. I'm not asking for a Resident Evil 6-style total genre twist further down the line if Silent Hill 3 gets remade, don't get me wrong. But as Konami and Bloober Team work to bring this dormant series into the 2020s, I think it's okay to enjoy killing monsters in video games again – and it's okay to admit that combat is important to the genre, too.
There's a host of excellent upcoming horror games to watch for this year and beyond, and we've collected them all right here for you.
