Review Summary: For all its flaws, this OST delivers plenty of surprises.
I’m going to do something a little bit different for Akira Yamaoka’s
Silent Hill 2 (Original Soundtrack - 2024), because it’s a reinterpretation of one of the greatest soundtracks in gaming history, written for one of the greatest video games ever made. As such, I’m going to divide this into two parts: the first section talking about my thoughts on the actual game, the second part covering the album itself. The reason for this is because I feel both the developers over at Bloober Team and Akira himself approach this remake with a similar set of maxims in mind, both bringing welcoming positives as well as glaring issues.
Precursor
In the gaming community, the original Silent Hill 2, released in 2001, is widely regarded as one of the greatest video games ever made, arguably considered to be a masterpiece and a genuine work of art by many. For decades, the games industry was lumbered with the stigma that it was a mindless pastime for kids – a medium incapable of creating anything meaningful outside of blowing things up. However, the technology available in the 5th generation of consoles provided ambitious developers the opportunity to create story-driven video games with a cinematic flair to them; because of this, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Tenchu, and indeed Silent Hill are some of the powerhouse names that laid the groundwork for innovative gameplay and engrossing storytelling. In the case of Silent Hill, it stood out from even the best games on the PS1, because of its idiosyncrasies and approach to the horror genre. From the strange and complex story about an occult in a small town, to the gameplay and graphical style which pushed the Playstation’s hardware to its limits and turned any technical limitations into a creative opportunity – most pertinently the franchise’s iconic fog, which was used to mask the game’s short draw distance. Silent Hill was a terrifying psychological experience that relied on atmosphere, an abrasive colour palette of blacks, reds and browns to convey its visual dread, and more importantly, its sound design. However, its sequel would take a vastly different approach.
What makes Silent Hill 2 so significant is it takes the successful Silent Hill framework, but tips its concepts upside down. Team Silent garnered a wealth of experience from the 1999 classic and with it, set out to craft something very ambitious. In the first game, Alessa was able to manifest her pain and suffering onto the town, which is what created the hellscapes Harry had to traverse. After the events of the first game, the lore was expanded upon and Alessa’s powers were transferred onto the town itself – which set the groundwork for its sequel, which lures people into Silent Hill. Without getting into spoilers, the concept basically sees the town’s power working as a conduit and manifesting the troubled individual’s deepest horrors onto the town itself. The genius with this approach is that each person entering it is experiencing their own version of Silent Hill, based on their own experiences and tribulations – with moments where the game’s protagonist, James, occasionally falls into Eddie or Angela’s world when he’s around them. Suffice to say, this concept means there’s a plethora of punctilious detail nestled within every facet of the game’s world that can be easily overlooked if you aren’t paying attention: monster and level design, letters, messages, and even puzzles all reflect James’ psyche and what he sees and interacts with. At the time, the game was met with a solid reception from critics, but they didn’t fully comprehend the zeitgeist it would create for future titles, and the genre as a whole. Silent Hill 2 is the gold standard for all Western-developed attempts, using its concept of “troubled protagonist gets sucked into the town to atone for their sins” to the point of making it a cliché, with the execution always becoming ham-fisted and pretty terrible.
The Game
It goes without saying, Silent Hill 2 is lightning in a bottle and perfectly achieves its goals of being terrifying, mysterious, and tragic in a way very few games manage at this level. While it wasn’t understood or fully appreciated on release, time has allowed gamers to peel away at the layers and uncover its genius, creating a passionate community that has vehemently stood by it, capturing new generations along the way. While I prefer Silent Hill 4’s nihilistic approach, bleak atmosphere and powerful score, I recognise Silent Hill 2’s appeal, as it sits a close second as my favourite game in the series. But make no mistake; Silent Hill 2 is more of a psychological study on the human condition than a horror game, and why I’m a staunch believer this is the Mona Lisa of the game’s industry. Which is why, when it was announced it was getting a remake, I was deeply apprehensive about the idea. After all, we live in a creatively bankrupt era where new ideas play second fiddle to soulless remakes of beloved franchise. While Resident Evil 4 remake was a great rendition of the classic 2005 game, even expanding on it with some success, it can’t be said for the other ones, which felt rather shallow in comparison. Couple that with the fact the Team Silent games are more high art you savour than play and it was safe to say, judging from the initial promotion for the game, there was some warranted concern to be had, as it looked and played like every modern third-person-shooter on the market today.
The end result isn’t the disaster I was bracing myself for, but then, to the surprise of no one, it doesn’t come close to capturing the magic of the original. The positives are that it’s clearly handled by people who loved the original, sticking close to the original story beats while doing a good job of mixing it up enough to make it fresh for familiar players, most puzzles and boss battles are a great reinterpretation, the graphics and atmosphere are excellent, and the open-world and side missions feel very reminiscent of Downpour’s greatest quality. That said, the voice acting – arguably the most important part of the original SH2 – is extremely flat, and fails to convey the heavy themes being touched on. The original, inexperienced cast was intentionally hired to be as such to make the characters feel more like the everyday man, and the results for capturing these moments are insurmountably effective. As a kid, I never fully grasped the subject matter, but going back into it as an adult, Mary reading the letter at the end of the Water Ending was absolutely devastating. Similarly, I will never understand how anyone can complain about Angela’s original voice acting when her performance is so full of range and nuance, feeling completely disassociated from reality, carrying every scene she’s in and delivering the message with pinpoint precision, right up until the climax of her tragic story. Every character in the original game, with the exception of a couple iffy moments from Guy Cihi’s James, delivers their parts perfectly. While it’s light years away from the egregious blunder of the HD Collection voice work, in the remake, you can tell they’re all professionally trained voice actors, washing away their character’s idiosyncrasies in favour of a factory setting approach you hear from every video game voice actor in the modern day. Their performances are bereft of nuance and pull the cat out of the bag immediately. Eddie no longer has that bungling affableness seen earlier on in the original game, he just looks and sounds off-kilter and hostile from the moment you see him, while the performances of Maria/Mary and Angela try to ape their respective characters, but fail to provide the impressive nuances of the original voice actors. While this may sound pedantic to some, the voice acting is intrinsic to the story’s success and how it’s delivered, and in the remake, it’s as if the voice actors don’t embody or fully understand the characters they are playing.
Outside of the voice acting, the gameplay and pacing are the biggest problems. While I initially enjoyed the expanded level design, by the time I arrived at the hospital, the pacing was beginning to suffer immeasurably. The main issue is that each stage centres around a chief fetch-quest object that branches off into multiple paths, requiring you to get “the thing” several times before it allows you to get the main object to progress onto the next stage. This was welcomed at the start, but the process is repeated for every stage in the game, which in turn has you becoming bored of each environment. A minor niggle as well is the Homecoming/2006 movie rust influence which inspires some of the otherworld stages of the game. One of the biggest distinctions between SH2 and the other games, is how it handles the visuals. Where the other games take on a vulgar, abrasive style, SH2’s otherworld stages don’t rely on gore. In the service of the story, they looked dilapidated and abandoned, instead of making you feel like you’re in the mouth of hell, which is something diluted at times in the remake. The other big issue is the combat-heavy gameplay. While monsters were always prevalent in the original, they were never a hindrance on the game’s core focus: the story. As such, if you just wanted to bask in the oppressive atmosphere and take in the story, you could dispatch or avoid enemies entirely without thinking about it. However, the remake stamps its authority and makes sure you feel like you’re playing a Resident Evil clone, as you fend off waves of enemies in quick succession. The attempt at making enemies a wider threat is an admirable one, but an ultimately failed aspiration that undermines Silent Hill’s uniquely distinctive qualities in the genre. Silent Hill was never about combat, it’s always been about isolation, loneliness and being scared of what you can’t see. The approach is direct and lends inspirations from Homecoming – a game that, upon release, was reviled for its action-heavy gameplay. The tragedy is that in doing what Bloober have done, it undermines their efforts in the aesthetic department, because you aren’t afforded the time to soak it all in properly. Couple that with being blind-sided by mannequins in every other room you enter and it gets old fast.
Overall, though, in spite of the action heavy gameplay, flat voice acting and bloated level design, it’s a solid and relatively faithful rendition to one of the greatest games ever made, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a decent time playing through it. Like a mother who wants to smother her child with love, the biggest problem here is Bloober tries to give fans too much, with the thankless task of having to make a beloved game feel fresh but familiar at the same time. The final product is, like so many remakes made these days, competent, but lacking in the spark and soul that made the original so special.
The Score
Finally, we come to Silent Hill 2 (2024)’s score. I haven’t touched on the music for the original game yet, but I think it goes without saying it’s intrinsically tied to the game’s success. Like the game itself, it transcends its purpose and becomes more than just music for a game. The OST is one of my most listened to albums from any medium, simply for the fact it’s just exceptionally well-crafted music, and elevates and bolsters the subject matter in a way most composers would only dream of.
Silent Hill 2 (Original Soundtrack) perfectly channels the game’s themes of guilt, loss, isolation, rejection, and trauma to name a few, but does so with incredible nous and convenience. The appeal behind the score is that Akira manages to touch on these heavy emotions in a way that is both disturbing and beautiful – sometimes all at the same time. It’s melodic but oppressive, suffocating, melancholy and desolate. As an album, its pacing and flow is perfect, channeling all of the music into one streamlined experience that can be enjoyed again and again; in the context of the game, it intensifies the game’s emotional story beats, but is terrifying when it comes to playing the game itself. In short,
Silent Hill 2 (Original Soundtrack) has so many iconic standalone tracks, but even the tracks more fit for purpose in-game are all stone cold classics.
And so, like the remake itself, there’s a level of apprehension when approaching a revision of Akira’s career-defining album. Clocking in at a monstrous 3 hours and 15 minutes, this behemoth, like the game itself, attempts to give fans as much as it can, and deliver an experience that’s familiar but different. The analogy swirling round in my brain every time I listen to this is that of George Lucas’ infamous ‘Remastered Trilogy’, where Lucas attempted to ‘improve’ the movies by stuffing them full of CGI, effectively chipping away at the core essence of what made his movies so special. While I’m not claiming Yamaoka feels his original work is in any need of ‘improvements’ per se, I definitely get the impression he felt obligated, like Bloober, to make a fresh mark on these classic compositions. The result is a mixed bag. The renditions on
Silent Hill 2 (Original Soundtrack - 2024), similar to the Star Wars remastered trilogy are jam-packed with contemporary bells and whistles that, at times, do more damage to the songs than good. The biggest issue I have with the tracks here isn’t so much the new approach compositionally, but the dry and sterile production that houses these new songs. Throughout, the bass tone is extremely farty sounding and pulls you out of the mood for it being so distracting, no more apparent than on “Lament of Heavens Night”. The synths can be a mixed bag, sometimes sounding great, like the HEALTH
Max Payne 3-tinged “Beneath the Null Moon”, which has these big, billowing clouds of forlorn, other times they sound perniciously dated and corny, like on “Theme of Laura II”. Which, while we’re on the subject: this track is a perfect combination of the problems I have with this album’s sound overall. The original track synergised orchestral instrumentation with a rock band and the contrasting elements created hair-raising results that enveloped this well-rounded, natural sound with the mechanical edge of the electric guitars. To this day, every time I listen to “Theme of Laura” and it gets to the grand crescendo at 1:33, with that warm, emotive cello exploding into a transition where the guitars take the lead, I get chills from its perfect shift in tone. On “Theme of Laura II” however, the earnest emotion and peak to trough from the original is eviscerated, because Akira replaces the cello with – depending on which part of the song you’re at – more guitars or this repulsive synth sound, essentially robbing the track of its emotional agency. It’s a recurring theme with most of the big-player tracks from this game’s score, with a similar case in the incredible “Theme of Laura (Reprise)” and “Promise (Pragma Version) tracks, which come across very
off sounding. The latter uses a different note pattern and pads out the track with a load of unnecessary sounds, genuinely destroying the solemn disquiet that inhabits the original song, while the latter retains the flat, soulless production and adds a slew of self-indulgent ideas.
All is not lost however. When the album veers away from trying to revise its iconic numbers and enters the ambient realm, the album begins to show its greatest qualities. The menacing three-hit combo of “The Infinite Heartbeat”, “Eternal Dichotomy” and “Madcap Descent” harnesses Akira’s greatest attributes, with some genuinely unsettling sounds. Tracks like these, as well as “Manic Delirium”, “Savage Requiem” and “Esoteric Woe” do a fantastic job of creeping you out and showing you Akira hasn’t lost his edge one bit. However, it’s not all about making your skin crawl, with “Umbra Veil”, “The Haunting Mirage”/“Nocturnal Mirage”, “Tears of Magdalene” and “Serendipity” doing a fantastic job serving up these reverie-like numbers to break up the abrasive disturbances. Indeed, to the surprise of no one, the record is at its best when it’s trying to do new things. Obviously, at 3 hours and 15 minutes, the record is unbelievably bloated, but you could easily make a playlist from this and get a fantastic hour-long record out of it. If it isn’t obvious at this point, for me, this album is at its worst when it’s trying to reinterpret songs that were already perfect to begin with, and indeed, with the amount of stuff being shoved into them, they end up losing their enigmatic edge. When the record is forward-thinking though, there is some really excellent music to enjoy. If nothing else, it’s nice to see Akira still pumping out steadfast, quality music for this franchise, because, for all of this series’ blunders, Akira Yamaoka has always produced, at the very least, solid music for it. Like the actual game,
Silent Hill 2 (Original Soundtrack - 2024) was crafted with love and care, but ultimately, it’s far from perfect.