I couldn't care less about the perpetually single, square jaws who slurp raw steak and snort protein powder for the sake of their restrictive masculinity; to me, a real man is the physical manifestation of subconscious guilt and stalks the dilapidated halls of a tarry mind while maintaining his effortless six pack by toting a very menacing – and certainly tetanus-inducing – megalithic knife. So, that's why I love Pyramid Head, especially after Silent Hill 2 remake developer Bloober had to make significant changes to his first boss fight.
"There was a risk of losing specific feeling from the original game," creative director Mateusz Lenart said at GDC 2025. "It can be seen especially with the boss fights, which we needed to redesign completely."
Lenart goes on to give Pyramid Head's initial boss fight encounter as an example [major spoilers to follow]. In Konami's 2001 game, the brief scene begins with blood-soaked Pyramid Head in a stairwell humping a moaning mannequin, who sounds like a really awful video I saw of a pufferfish gagging on a carrot. Pyramid Head dumps her body like a heavy bag of groceries when he spots protagonist James, as blond and dazed as ever, so he broods over him for a while before retreating down a submerged set of stairs.
"It will not work with the new perspectives and systems that we are creating," such as third-person camera, Lenart said definitively.
"We needed to make the room bigger," he explained, "which forced us to find a new place for the fight, which naturally made the need for Pyramid Head to be more aggressive and faster. This change also forced us to resign from the 'water staircase' idea, which was really memorable from the original game."
These might be substantial tweaks to an iconic scene, but, as a longtime fan of Silent Hill, I was relieved when I saw what Bloober had done to my man Pyramid Head. When I played the original Silent Hill 2 on PS1 nearly a decade ago, I kept sloppily failing his boss encounter, which forced me to watch Pyramid Head pushing himself onto a groaning mannequin over and over again, which made me want to put my face in a blender.
Bloober's remake ditches the assault entirely, which I appreciate as both a woman tired of gratuitous sexual assault in horror, and also as person who saw a pufferfish choke on a carrot. Bloober's Pyramid Head is also more willing to swing his great knife, too, making for a more tense confrontation, and added rain gives his cadaverous skin a nice, moonlit glow. See? That's the Pyramid Head I know.
"So, we've been losing something, but we are gaining something, too," Lenart said.
