In 2021, Polish video game developer Bloober Team, based in Kraków, released The Medium, a horror game almost no one expected to be so convincing or cutting-edge. The game’s trailers already caught “strong Silent Hill vibes”, and shortly after The Medium‘s release, the gaming community exploded with discussions about how well this team was suited to work on reviving the Silent Hill series, also known as the cornerstone of the psychological horror genre, the “gold standard”, and a “national treasure”.
Game critics and Reddit posters pondered whether Bloober Team was capable of recreating the PlayStation 2-era masterpiece or speculated that maybe it wasn’t the best studio for such a complicated task. This sparked many hopes, doubts, and memes. The situation was tricky because Konami, publisher of the Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid series, had ignored these once-core franchises for years, allowing them to rust into oblivion. This oversight became especially apparent in contrast to Capcom’s successes with a run of Resident Evil remakes.
In 2022, the remake of the second and most iconic installment of Silent Hill seemed to appear out of nowhere. The reanimation of this fundamental yet long-abandoned horror game franchise was accomplished by a relatively young studio many had never heard of. However, fans of this video game genre were familiar with Bloober Team’s oeuvre, at least since their first major success, Layers of Fear, in 2016.
Some deep divers might recall that the company’s roots trace back to Nibris, another Kraków-based studio set up in 2006 to work on titles for Nintendo consoles. Nibris was known for the Wii “gothic horror” game Sadness. This innovative game featured mechanics like the ability to repel rats with fire. Set in Ukraine, the game was abruptly cancelled in 2010. The Nibrist studio – stuck in development hell, closed. Yet, this project might have inspired the developers of another set of scary games, the A Plague Tale dilogy.
With “just over 20 people”, as CEO Piotr Babieno said, Bloober Team used investor funding to separate from its troubled parent company and become independent just in time, before everything flopped. The only game that Nibris came close to finishing was Double Bloob for the Nintendo DS. It was completed and published by Bloober Team, becoming one of their first projects and supposedly the inspiration for their name. Looking at this “singularly bad” example of arcade action games, as game reviews site IGN put it, along with titles like A-Men, Brawl, and the rest of the projects the future creators of Silent Hill 2 Remake made before 2016, it’s surprising how, in just six years, they evolved from simple puzzle game developers to an up-and-coming indie team that unexpectedly created the innovative psychological horror Layers of Fear.
Even more impressive is that in the six years since then, Bloober Team grew into developers of an AAA title (upcoming games in development) capable of competing with industry leaders. Given the mixed reviews of Blair Witch, the Layers of Fear sequel, and even Observer, featuring Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, it wasn’t clear that a team with such a track record could successfully revive a legendary franchise that had almost stopped breathing 12 years prior, following the release of the decent yet controversial Silent Hill: Downpour. The turning point for Bloober Team came with the aforementioned release of The Medium, their first true AA title (mid-market video games). It cost €6.7 million to develop—a considerable sum for a small indie developer.
This third-person psychological horror felt like something close to a big hit— filled with an atmosphere reminiscent of the Silent Hill series. Bloober Team’s first truly successful project, Layers of Fear, was inspired by P.T., the playable PlayStation 4 teaser for the unborn Silent Hills game, starring American actor Norman Reedus and directed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro. With these industry heavyweights, the humble Polish developer seemed prepared to handle the Silent Hill 2 legacy properly. The timing for the game’s release couldn’t have been better, given the revival of horror remakes and sequels that began with the highly successful release of Resident Evil 2 Remake in 2019. Rumor has it that in that year, Konami—supposedly impressed by Capcom’s experiments in reimagining their back catalog—came back to Bloober Team, following a Silent Hill 2 pitch the studio made in 2018, with an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Based on the supposedly leaked images from that pitch demo, Silent Hill 2 was a solid presentation; visually, it looked remarkably close to what we see in the release version of the remake. The abandoned rooms of Brookhaven Hospital and other locations, with peeling walls and a pervasive atmosphere of desolation, perfectly convey the feelings many experienced in 2001 when the original game came out. Fans’ concerns were put to rest when we saw how the wind blows garbage off the table in the hospital’s reception area or how the clouds of fog spread across the yard of Bluecreek Apartments.
At the beginning of this dark and foggy journey into despair, the players are protagonist James Sunderland, who comes to a remote mining town searching for his late wife, Mary. We take our first steps through suburban areas toward their “special place”, an empty and lifeless environment. Yet, this is just a first impression partly caused by our expectations of modern games overwhelmingly saturated with options and live services.
Silent Hill 2 Remake is crafted with a clear understanding of how the old games worked. There are no endless side quests, oversized locations, or overly interactive environments here, like in open-world RPGs. However, the further you progress through the game, the more options you get. An enjoyable innovation is James Sunderland’s ability to crash through glass with his melee weapon of choice. James Sunderland can find useful supplies inside by smashing car windows and store displays. Even after earning the Shattered trophy for 50 broken windows, it’s hard to resist crushing closets, TVs, and other glass-fragile stuff just for fun.
The following three extensions of the Silent Hill 2 Remake experience involve collecting strange photographs scattered in the most unpredictable places in every location, searching for so-called “glimpses of the past”, aka, places and items that were crucial to the original game, and… tugging on closed door handles, which can earn you another achievement for 50 such attempts.
Speaking of gameplay and level design improvements, they are so tiny and carefully woven into Silent Hill 2 Remake‘s fabric that those who played the original version probably won’t notice the difference. Considering that the original game looked like the first three Resident Evil games or a random point-and-click adventure with mostly fixed camera angles and clunky combat mechanics, it’s interesting how many we remember our experience as it was. In our colorful memories, Silent Hill 2, which is frankly quite clumsy by modern standards, still looks like this remake. All the Bloober Team has done is extract this sugar-coated image from our collective memories. While it sounds simple, this is the most challenging part of the work on any remake: meeting the expectations of the core fanbase while simultaneously pulling the original product up to modern standards.
According to game site HowLongToBeat, it takes about 8-13 hours to beat Silent Hill 2, while Silent Hill 2 Remake takes almost twice as long, around 15-20 hours. Longer if you’re almost paralyzed with fear of every dark corner like many would be. Did the Bloober Team add Ubisoft-style climbing towers or an additional storyline to make the walkthrough longer? No. Bloober Team has only slightly expanded some mechanics, locations, and puzzle sections.
James Sunderland is no longer a weak, ordinary everyman, awkwardly swinging a plank with protruding nails and nervously shooting a gun with shaky hands. Thanks to the Silent Hill 2 Remake‘s third-person over-the-shoulder viewpoint and modernised combat, we can now freely aim and shoot enemies in their legs to slow them down or line up headshots while dodging their punches like Nathan Drake of Uncharted. Of course, playing it in the Soulslike style in tight spaces and without a lock-on targeting mechanic isn’t easy. Still, even Alex Shepherd, the Special Forces soldier from Silent Hill: Homecoming, would be jealous of such abilities.
The next key difference with Silent Hill 2 Remake is the level design. Bloober Team’s designers expand the world’s boundaries without touching the overall look of each location, sometimes making this little town even scarier. Not to mention the more natural fog—which is crucial for the series—and the overall level of Unreal Engine 5-powered graphics. Indeed, all the game’s locations are now much richer in detail: every room, desk, and corner is littered with screenshot-worthy stuff, from amazingly convincing scattered household junk to paper ads and notices fluttering in the wind.
In Silent Hill 2 Remake you can enter many establishments that were inaccessible 23 years ago, diving deeper into the lore of this strange town. Many were created from scratch and smoothly squeezed into familiar streets. Know-it-alls of the Silent Hill series will find many references to the classic, like the “checked from 0000 to 4013” note, alluding to the Brookhaven Hospital box code glitch in pirated versions of the game, which forced gamers to manually enter a four-digit code, trying each number, one by one, for weeks on their modded PlayStation 2 consoles. To grasp the scope of the work Bloober Team has done, watch how much simpler and more sparse the original version of the game looked:
The Remake’s character models have also become much more voluminous and expressive. All scenes were recaptured and recast with noticeably more professional actors, who provided their voices and faces. Despite changing the appearances of these beloved lost souls, the Bloober Team managed to preserve the characters’ essence and how they are perceived. They still do the same things and struggle with the same problems that troubled them decades ago, but now it feels much more dramatic and, dare I say, cinematic. They take long pauses in deliberately slow dialogues, make realistic, subtle movements that show disapproval or skepticism and behave like people living on the edge. Combined with aesthetic camera angles that could even make A24 jealous, their ominous—and sometimes, by modern standards, not very convincing—dialogues appear much more spectacular. The original framing was already sophisticated for a game of that era, but now it has become even more intense and realistic.
As you can see, Bloober Team didn’t turn their remake into an open-world live service game with RPG elements or a”gotcha” mechanics (though, as a Zenless Zone Zero fan, I wouldn’t mind). You can’t even upgrade your weapons here. They brushed up the prior game, gently deepening the lore and enriching the visuals. Silent Hill 2 Remake is scarier and more tense thanks to Bloober Team’s subtle injections of modern gaming zeitgeist. Take, for example, the audio design, approved by Akira Yamaoka, who also took part in the development process.
Silent Hill 2 was already profoundly unsettling, with its threatening distant noises and disturbing rustlings around every corner. In the Remake, the first word in the psychological horror genre becomes even more meaningful with its deep, droning tones, dark ambient melodies, and more intense sounds of creatures lurking about. These effects grate on your nerves perfectly, even almost without jump scares like those in Alan Wake 2, which, as its game director Kyle Rowley admitted, is overdone.
Sometimes, it’s hard even to force your character to move. For example, thanks to the decision with levers that temporarily switch on the lights in the halls of Toluca Prison, this section becomes twice as scary in the Remake. You can almost feel the pressure of those frightening beeping sounds as the switches turn off the lights, leaving you in pitch-black darkness. The work with dim light in dark segments (most parts of the game) was already top-notch in Silent Hill 2, even on PlayStation 2. But now, with the high-quality shadows, volumetric light shafts, ray-traced lighting and reflections, and other graphics effects, even strolling through empty corridors becomes a form of torture. Add a new breed of enemies, like a more robust version of the Bubble Head Nurses wielding knives, and new monster features like the Mannequin’s ability to seamlessly hide in the least expected places or its new variant that can crawl all over walls and ceilings. It’s downright gross. Thank you for that, dear Bloober Team.
Players used to playing games in a more relaxed, leisurely way—exploring every corner and reading all the notes– won’t have such luxury in Silent Hill 2 Remake. In this case, the total playthrough time can be around 30 hours. Sometimes, crawling through tight spaces teeming with monsters—whose numbers have increased significantly—can become exhausting. Some sections, where you need to cover long distances and fight hordes of creatures to find a few keys or clock hands, feel padded. After such workarounds, it’s sometimes hard to recall who Mary is. Furthermore, the less-than-smooth optimization doesn’t help with a player’s patience, who will face occasional performance issues like stuttering, major frame drops even on high-end systems, glitches with defeated enemies standing still, two significant progress glitches in Brookhaven Hospital and the Labyrinth (which, fortunately, have already been patched), and a few other disappointing technical bugs.
Many who played The Medium on release day encountered technical problems during split-screen moments, like frame rate dips and GPU overheating. Bloober Team’s other games, like Observer, weren’t polished enough and had many issues that are typical of indie developers. It’s easy to imagine how things could have gone south with their first AAA project. Despite their track record with its ups and downs, mixed reactions to their previous projects, and a noticeable lack of experience with high-budget productions, they managed not only to create a triple-A-level game that sold over 1 million copies in just three days and received “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews on Steam and an 86/100 on Metacritic.
As mentioned, there couldn’t have been a better moment for the release of Silent Hill 2 Remake, amid the horror game renaissance, with the releases of Alan Wake 2, the Dead Space resurrection, Resident Evil 4 Remake, the Alone in the Dark reimagining, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, and Slitterhead from the creator of Silent Hill on the way. This is how, with a few lucky breaks and sheer persistence, a small Polish indie developer got on a roll. Let’s hope their recently announced video game Cronos: The New Dawn will be a real “shut up and take my money” deal. Here’s hoping Konami will let Bloober Team remake all the other Silent Hill installments, including the original and Silent Hill 4: The Room.