Silent Hill 2 Review

After a string of

With Silent Hill 2, Konami has delivered a deep, long (10-15 hours) adventure that’s scary in a disturbing, eerie fashion. The game’s mechanics show an attempt to improve the genre’s general failings, and more importantly don’t get in the way of the game or the story itself. As a PlayStation 2 game overall, Silent Hill 2 is graphically stunning, while providing a full production package of surround sound techniques and good voice acting to boot. Konami’s survival-horror game doesn’t break the genre’s mold so much as it modifies and eases up the rigid boundaries set early in the genre’s early games. Konami’s effort is a damn scary game, entirely worth every last cent. It’s frightening, deep, clever, and tries to improve the genre, if just a little, and in the end, that’s all I really want in a survival horror game. – Doug Perry, September 26, 2001

Score: 9

Read the full Silent Hill 2 (2001) review

Similarly, many of the original game’s puzzles have been preserved here, whether it’s the eccentric, point-and-click adventure kind like using a specific tool in order to retrieve an item from an apartment suite garbage chute, or the more ingenious form like swiveling an ornate box on its axis in order to manipulate the towering, MC Escher-inspired room of impossible staircases inside a late-game labyrinth. Meanwhile, other brainteasers like the coin puzzle early on have been given additional steps to complete, which prevented their solutions from ever becoming too predictable as someone who played the original all those years ago. With the exception of some obligatory valve-turning here and there, puzzle types are largely unique and consistently stimulating, and there are plenty of them to solve. (Like combat, you can also vary the difficulty of puzzles via the in-game menu in order to best suit your tastes).

However, some of the simpler puzzles have been expanded upon a touch too much. Take one early obstacle in the original that effectively required you to solve a fairly straightforward riddle in order to wind a grandfather clock to a specific time. In this remake, I had to undergo a sequence of multi-part treasure hunts to gather up each of the three hands for the clock face – fending off enemy hordes and completing additional puzzles along the way – which ultimately meant that close to an hour of my playthrough was spent simply attempting to make the clock chime and unlock the way forward. This is just one example of a number of instances where the new Silent Hill 2 bogs down slightly in terms of story progression, and I have to admit that as I jumped through yet another elaborate series of hoops just trying to get my hands on the key to a locked door in the Wood Side Apartments, I did catch myself wishing the owner had simply left a spare under their welcome mat.

To Cut a Short Story Long

It’s because of the expanded puzzles and combat sections, that the new Silent Hill 2 is considerably longer than the original despite the fact it seems to stick to all the same story beats. The main campaign of the 2001 Silent Hill 2 can be completed in around eight hours, but my playthrough of this 2024 remake hit the credits at just over 15. While it’s almost twice as long, I don’t really feel it’s doubly as good. This remake is genuinely excellent for large stretches at a time, particularly during the escalating stakes of its climactic final third, but there are definitely moments throughout the early parts of the journey that are lined with more padding than the walls of the Brookhaven Hospital psychiatric ward.

It also means that although Silent Hill 2 features eight different endings to unlock – two more than the original’s six – I can’t see myself investing the time for any repeat playthroughs because I’m slightly put-off by the protracted length. Although admittedly alternate endings aren’t the only incentive to return in Silent Hill 2’s New Game+ – there are also extra weapons to find, additional graphics modes with CRT scanlines and the like to try, plus numerous secrets and easter eggs to comb for in the town’s increased number of interiors – I don’t feel a huge pull to step face-first back into the fog anytime soon.

Even so, although it might not completely trump the original in the same way that the Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes did, Silent Hill 2 is still an incredibly high quality reimagining that improves on its source material in more ways than not. I really like the way it uses distinct hues of light and distant audio cues to subtly steer you along the right path, allowing the HUD to stay free of any immersion-breaking objective markers. It’s great how James automatically marks his map with any puzzles or locked doors you find, vastly reducing the amount of aimless backtracking that occasionally plagued the original game. Developer Bloober Team has also really emptied its full bag of tricks as far as taking tense situations and bringing them to near-nervous breakdowns. The timer-based light switches in the Toluca Prison, for example, are an extremely effective device for creating panic – the intensifying countdown beeps echoed my own escalating heartrate as I hurried to complete my search of each cell before the whole block was plunged back into darkness. It’s fantastically fear-inducing stuff.