it's shit

Album Rating: 5.0

Haven't gotten feels like this since SH4. I'm a few hours in and honestly I'm impressed with the level of care for the original in tone and atmosphere. Graphically and sonically it's easily 10/10. I don't mind in the least that it's not one-to-one a recreation of the original (at least so far), as long as all the important moments are present that opens the door for a bit of responsible expansion and I'm really excited to see what lays around every corner.

Album Rating: 5.0

Think I'm still just gonna stick with the original, but I'm glad the remake didn't turn out to be a complete dumpster fire that shat upon this masterpiece's legacy.

"it's shit"

where are you and what don't you like about it? i had low expectations but i've been loving it

Album Rating: 5.0

Will probably waste 70 dollars on a remake like an idiot

"Haven't gotten feels like this since SH4"

yeah same. i played downpour and homecoming but this actually feels like silent hill again

I was holding off until I cleared some backlog but I might just jump in this week.

Album Rating: 5.0

I’m not a fan of the revamped OST for SH2 remake, but the game looks good. Even if I’m anal about some of the changes

Album Rating: 5.0

A world of madness almost sounds like an Arca track. Crazy ahead of it’s time stuff on this soundtrack

"where are you and what don't you like about it? i had low expectations but i've been loving it"

5 hours in and uninstalled.

Konami betting on a studio like Bloober, known for churning out mediocrity, was a misstep imo. Team Silent didn’t just make games with the Silent Hill series, they sculpted haunting, art-house experiences that redefined what gaming could be, they reached out of the medium, it was transcendental. SH2 was raw, it was daring, and you could feel the passion and brilliance bleeding through every mechanic and scene. Bloober, on the other hand, is nothing more than a group of new coders playing at game development. They put as much passion into this as they'd probably put in making video codecs or something.

All I needed to see in the Silent Hill 2 remake was James' clunky walk and run animations, the stupid combat, hideous framing in every cutscene (you can't emulate good cinematography), and that hideous excuse for a save menu. It’s all there, proof this remake is just another product, churned out for profit, devoid of the artistry that made the original legendary. Even visually, without Unreal 5's stock assets, this would be an absolute trainwreck.

With the risk of sounding extremist (which I am btw), besides R*Games and a few other select AAA studios, non-Japanese developers generally fail at doing proper animations, cutscenes, framing, they just have no grasp of real art and play it safe.

I’m convinced every glowing review of this game is a direct result of Bloober and Konami asslicking the press. It is a decent game, yes, the source material is just too good for this game to be objectively BAD, and that means exactly NOTHING. SH2 wasn't just a game, this remake gamified it and it's disgusting.

sOuLlEsS

Album Rating: 5.0

there's always the SH2 mod that fixes literally everything about the PC port and you can download it for free:

https://enhanced.townofsilenthill.com/SH2/

Album Rating: 5.0



> 5 hours in and uninstalled.



I spent so much of my life thinking I was on the extreme end of silent hill fandom. Did a semester-long project on its lore and symbolism in college back in '09. Ran SH3 speedruns for four years (held the record for a couple too, no big deal), replay them all regularly and own multiple copies of every installment on all the platforms.



Boy was I wrong.



SH fans are as bad as Tool, Rick and Morty, Pro Wrestling, FF7 etc types who can never just take a thing for what it's worth. They have to hate and do their best to make sure everyone knows how much they hate, in this case to include game devs and fans alike.



I groaned when I heard they were remaking SH2. It didn't need it. Silent Hill 1 DID, more than arguably any other game in existence, as that game was heavily held back by it's architecture and could tell its story and present it's world in totality with an update, if the project was driven by the minds most responsible for the original. Just like RE1 remake for the gamecube, arguably the best entry in the entire series. Yet I wasn't surprised by this, as Konami is nothing if not consistent in their money-driven decision-making. I groaned when Bloober was revealed as the developing studio, for all the exercises in mediocrity and scummy practices we know all about. I groaned when the announcement was later accompanied by several other SH titles that were obviously money-grabs and almost certainly will be trash.

Album Rating: 5.0

Not because I wasn't expecting any of this, but because it was yet another sign that the thing I loved was dead and gone forever. Because I'd inherently start to look forward to it even if I knew better, like when PT was announced and then canceled.



So I was quite surprised that the remake did a pretty good job of capturing the essence of Silent hill two full decades after the demise of the original studio, in a world wildly different than the one we lived in back then. Bloober seemingly did, when you really get down to it, the best you could likely do when presented with the challenge of modernizing a masterpiece.



>All I needed to see in the Silent Hill 2 remake was James' clunky walk and run animations, the stupid combat, hideous framing in every cutscene (you can't emulate good cinematography), and that hideous excuse for a save menu. It’s all there, proof this remake is just another product, churned out for profit, devoid of the artistry that made the original legendary. Even visually, without Unreal 5's stock assets, this would be an absolute trainwreck.



James ran like he had a three foot pole up his ass in the original. The combat is modernized because the combat in the original is terrible, terrible trash. Which SH fans have always readily admitted and been unconcerned with since the protagonist has no indication of combat training, and the clunky nature of it managed to build tension and immersion. Lets not pretend gameplay was even "good" in SH2. That's not where the game excelled. SH3 was when Silent Hill actually became a half-fun game mechanically, and this is coming from someone who has played the games for literally thousands of hours.

Half the cutscenes I've seen so far, especially the ones you think of when SH2 is on the mind (angela mirror room for example) are faithfully recreated, often mirroring the original sequences 1:1. And I won't even go into the save menu, which has to be the single most inconsequential thing I can imagine as a motivation for not wanting to play a game.



In the shortest way possible I'll just say this: You shouldn't have bought the game.

Album Rating: 5.0

You hated it before it released. I'll never understand why people like you and everyone else who responded this way to SH2 or FF7R before it have to so passionately go out of your way to make sure as many people as possible know you don't like it. Why they have to try to make others feel bad about NOT HATING IT. Remakes at their core are obviously soulless money-grabs, as any chance at artistry shifts from original expression to referential representation. But that doesn't mean that they can't serve a meaningful purpose, or be good games on a fundamental level. And given the right circumstances (Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions or again RE1 Remake) a remaster or remake can even be better than the original.



You're not stupid. You're aware that new humans have come into existence since 2001. And most of those humans aren't going to go find a ps2 and pay $400+ to get a copy of Silent Hill 2 because the internet says its a great scary game. They aren't going to go to lengths to get the ROMs and fixes required to play the PC version on modern hardware. So a mostly-faithful remake enables an entire generation of people a chance at playing what is, as more and more time goes on and less and less quality horror games are released, arguably the pinnacle of atmosphere, suspense and storytelling in the medium. And if sales are strong, maybe we'll get a new game. It will probably be misguided ass, like downpour, but it will be new and for longtime fans, a chance at reliving the magic. Regardless, it shouldn't be frowned upon for even those of us who were there for the original to get a chance to see and hear what it might be like to experience it on a modern system.



This is a far-too-long response but it kind of morphed into releasing my bottled-up annoyance from FF7R haters obsessively shitting on the concept of a remake and in that case, having the audacity to make changes. You're entitled to your opinion. I just can't understand this mentality. The original is still there. It's always going to be there.

Album Rating: 5.0

> it's always going to be there

if you pirate it, maybe. And if greedy corpos don't take out all the hard work very few but very passionate people put into preserving old games for posterity by copying and creating emulators.

video game preservation is trash, you know this very well.

Album Rating: 5.0

I mean in the grand scheme of things, obviously. It's not like original SH2 can be erased from existence. It's always going to be right there on my shelf.

Album Rating: 5.0

Haven't caught up in convo yet but I adore having the music tracks getting to shine so much more often just as you're walking around. It feels a little too similar to the Resi remakes and I'm not big on the homing melee attacks but those are my only real gripes so far. It's quality.

Album Rating: 5.0 | Sound Off

I’ve played it for a couple hours so far and it’s fine. It’s funny, because the devs have basically taken Downpour’s open-world style concept. Funny how that game got decimated on release (on a technical level the game is pretty dodgy, but it’s easily the best game since 4 imo, and had the most team silent vibe) but its influence is used just over a decade later.



I still think the voice acting in the remake, especially Angela, is awful. Graphically it looks incredible though

Album Rating: 5.0

> I'm not big on the homing melee attacks



I think I remember seeing in the settings that you can turn that off, but I might be misremembering. Didn't get to play yesterday.

Album Rating: 4.0

Have been listening to the soundtrack for 4 and it's honestly some of the best music I have ever heard in any genre, this guy is a genius