‘Silent Hill 2’ review: masterful horror remake dials up the dread

It was like I closed my eyes for a second and I was back in that place. Back out on those pale misty streets, haunted by the menace of radio static. Back in those rusted, gore-smattered rooms, lit only by a flashlight’s ring. Back in those crumbling corridors full of clanking and scuttling and slithering things, out of sight in the dark but so goddamn close. Back in those toilets – sweet Christ, the toilets! – where such ungodly lavatorial acts had happened that we never dared give them a name.

• READ MORE: Twenty years later, ‘Silent Hill 2’ is still a disorienting masterpiece

I couldn’t remember much from before, from the last time – was it really 23 years ago? – or maybe something made me forget. For a decade now, since 2012’s disappointing Silent Hill: Downpour brought the game series to a lumbering halt, the entire Silent Hill franchise has felt like a fragment of a half-remembered nightmare, glimpsed briefly in terrifying flashes – on 2014’s P.T. teaser for Guillermo Del Torro’s later cancelled Silent Hills, or in this year’s 90-minute Germanic reimagining Silent Hill: The Short Message. We knew this iconic series had pioneered cinematic psychological survival horror long before The Last Of Us in some of gaming’s most atmospheric and disturbing titles, but how?

The moment I – or the grieving husband James Sunderland I was back then – stepped out of that first diabolically fouled lavatory into the cloying fogs of Blooper Team’s engrossing and compulsive Silent Hill 2 remake, though, it all came back. The mysterious letter from my wife Mary, dead for three years, urging me to come and find her in our “special place”. Arriving, with a filmic tenderness, in this now ruined lakeside town, deserted but for a few Lynchian inhabitants – more vivid now, better acted, but still bafflingly weird – and the other things…

After a gently ominous first half-hour, the nightmare flashbacks came thick and fast. The crackling radio alerting me to nearby dangers in the mist. The crawling, acid-spewing slug people, the limb-challenged ambush freaks and the least sexy nurses in pop culture history. And, venturing into rotting buildings and the hellish otherworld beyond, the torment of countless empty first aid boxes; the frustrated grunt of running into yet another locked door with a horde of hellspawn on your tail; the foolhardiness of desperately injecting yourself with any syringe you come across in this corroded hive of hepatitis. It felt, being here again, as dread-inducing as returning to your university town where only the people who remember your most humiliating student transgressions stayed on.

The street map is the same, yet the place is… different. More detailed now – swarms of insects scuttle creepily across metallic walls; posters in smashed shop windows advertise carnivals that long since left town. More intimate, more over-the-shoulder in the Dead Space style, allowing the atmosphere of menace and oppression to wrap itself tighter around your shoulders. Longer somehow too, as if time itself was warping in Silent Hill, the same story beats taking twice as long to play out, an original runtime of eight hours now stretching to 18.

It took a while to fathom it out. The cutscenes are slower and more artful, playing more intensely on the bristling mania of gun-toting loner Eddie, the trauma of abuse victim Angela and the eerie sexuality of the Mary-like vamp Maria, as well as James’s churning emotions – particularly necessary considering his general nonchalance about the macabre insanity unfolding around him. That record store wasn’t open before, with its extra layer of item-hunting to complete; nor a dozen or so other shops, areas and locations, mostly giving you the chance to spend five bullets taking out a monster guarding just two, but sometimes adding rich lore and inventive puzzling to an already classic mix.

Plus, the core locations (Wood Side Apartments and their hellish Blue Creek counterpart; Brookhaven Hospital; Toluca Prison, a more harrowing place now, with its timed lighting levers and wall-crawling beasts) have been remapped and expanded in more complex formations, as have the elaborate puzzles they contain.

Relishing a return to the days when meaningful mental challenges were fundamental to survival horror – and Silent Hill did it best – I took it on combat Standard, puzzles Hard. And while a shortage of clues made some puzzles cryptic to the point of requiring substantial guesswork (the Brookhaven coin cabinet, say), most were rewardingly tricky and now elongated by having to venture off into entirely new monster-filled side-areas for the artefacts needed.

At times the expansion and remodelling make once manageably unforgiving sections feel quite a slog. Nobody who’s ever visited Silent Hill before thinks that ducking into Wood Side Apartments is going to be a respite from the storm outside, but now you spend extra hours limping from health drink to health drink with no hope of a weapon upgrade or skill tree shunt-up to help you survive. And for all the extra grot to explore, Silent Hill 2 still seems remarkably empty compared to most modern games. The improved street furniture still does nothing, and all you can dream of from those hopeful white interaction dots is health, ammo, key story items or, if you’re very lucky, a better weapon.

With such dramatic upgrades to graphics, atmospherics and layout here, it’s a shame that Blooper didn’t incorporate more modern RPG elements to help us feel we were getting somewhere through all this punishing gloom. There never even feels any risk involved with jumping down a seemingly bottomless pit or plunging your hand into a gooey hole or fridge full of guts. Yet there’s enough variety to the new areas to maintain Silent Hill 2‘s morbid fascination factor throughout, and there’s something strangely compulsive about pushing on through the extra miles of gristle and rust.

Overall Blooper have made the game a deeper, more enthralling and – yes – scarier experience, not least in the fantastically reworked Labyrinth section, where all sense of reality falls apart. If there’s a more terrifying and compelling sequence in gaming than being chased through its collapsing hotel maze by the rectangle from hell, I’ve yet to play it. And that Pyramid Head figure from all our most frantic fever dreams – he’s still there, dragging his giant, squealing blade, hunting. I know I shouldn’t go, but something in Silent Hill 2 is calling me back.

The ‘Silent Hill 2’ remake is out now on PS5 and PC