Meet me at our special place,” reads the cryptic note from protagonist James’ dead wife. That special place is Silent Hill, a Maine town lifted from the Stephen King playbook that may once have been picturesque but is now a festering slum shrouded in deathly fog. Passing through the miasma, you can just about make out the shapes of terrible, malformed things that thrash and writhe to their own tune.
Silent Hill 2 is, of course, one of the most iconic video games ever made, still spoken about in hushed tones decades after its 2001 release on the PlayStation 2. It was revolutionary, using its deeply unpleasant environments and oppressive, desperate gameplay to tell a genuinely horrific story of guilt, trauma and psychological collapse.
I vividly remember sitting alone in my university dormitory, headphones on, audibly whelping at every jump scare, dreading the inevitable appearance of the iconic – if faintly ridiculous – antagonist Pyramid Head.
Remaking such a revered title requires not only technical skill but a real grounding in the original text, a feel for what made Silent Hill 2 so utterly, compulsively terrifying. That task fell to Team Bloober, a Polish developer with a reputation as the ‘maybe-men’ of survival horror, with a string of indie games under their belt that ranged from inspired (Layers of Fear, Observer), to disappointing (The Medium) to absolutely rubbish (Blair Witch). Thankfully, Silent Hill 2 is their magnum opus, the moment they finally parted the fog and arrived in the mainstream.
Their Silent Hill maintains the sense of helplessness, the feeling of dread as you slowly peer around corners hoping not to discover some psycho-sexual monstrosity (enemies range from what look like gimps zipped into fetish gear made from human flesh to bloodied Halloween-costume nurses) but drags it into the modern era of gaming. If you thought it was gross being asked to squeeze your arm into a dubiously squelchy hole to retrieve a tube of glue, you can now look forward to doing it in ultra-high resolution!
The remake is more accurate and responsive than the original but manages to retain the sense that you are a man hopelessly out of his depth, scraping and panting his way through encounters, barely able to comprehend the horror of it all. Each time one of the weird sex monsters ran screaming towards me felt wild and savage. Sometimes when enemies are knocked to the ground they squirm away, so I’d find myself stomping on their prone bodies, often long after they were clearly dead. This isn’t helped by the fact your portable radio crackles with painful intensity when you’re close to danger: sometimes I’d kill whatever was in front of me just to make the noises go away; if that isn’t the definition of insanity, I’m not sure what is.
Silent Hill 2 became shorthand for horror excellence because it did so many things so well, combining a uniquely creepy series of locations – festering flats, an abandoned hospital, a pitch black prison – with unbearably menacing sound and a story that really sells the feeling that you’re gradually losing your mind. This remake captures all of that. Playing it again 23 years later, I’m back in my special place: Silent Hill.