Silent Hill 2is widely regarded as the best the survival/psychological horror franchise has to offer and a remake of it is tremendously exciting as a result. UnlikeResident Evil, whose remake of the 1998 sequel was arriving shortly after the series had reinvented itself once again in its seventh mainline entry,Silent Hillhasn’t had a big, confident renewal yet and Bloober’s remake ofSilent Hill 2will hopefully usher in Konami’s wave of potentially ground-breaking installments withfandTownfall.
Silent Hilldid recently receive a new game in thetwo-hour first-person spin-offThe Short Message, which didn’t make waves and is light in any legitimate tethers to the mythology it belongs to.
However, likeResident Evil, it’ll be interesting to see how the PlayStation classic is remade for modern platforms with a third-person perspective as its principle reimagining ethos. There’s a case to be made about not everylate-90s or early-2000s gameneeding a remake and yet it’s already fascinating seeing what can be achieved withSilent Hill 2’s atmosphere and exploration without fixed camera angles and tank controls. The remake’s over-the-shoulder camera is going to be a godsend in a lot of cases, but particularly in the tricky-to-navigate sequence where James Sunderland and Maria race through a narrow switchback corridor to flee from Pyramid Head—if the remake does adapt it, anyway.
Silent Hill 2’s Hospital Basement Chase Only Truly Works Because of Fixed Camera Angles
The trickiness here is twofold: players need to be swift enough to reach the corridor divider and begin firing at Pyramid Head to stall him and give Maria precious time to catch up to James, and in doing so they need totraverseSilent Hill 2’s classic fixed camera angleswhile turning tight corners and not being able to see how close Maria is to them, much less how close Pyramid Head is to Maria. Plus, there are stipulations to concern oneself with if players are going for a particular ending, such as how often they should check on Maria while she’s sick and how players need to protect her from monsters.
Nothing prevents Maria from getting killed by Pyramid Head in the hospital basement as the elevator doors shut her out, but Maria dying before then is certainly possible, too, if players aren’t agile or meticulous enough. Likewise, for anyone playingSilent Hill 2for the first time without any knowledge of the game they obviously won’t know they need to apply a specific strategy if theydon’t wish forSilent Hill 2’s Maria to die prematurely.
A Faithful Adaptation in Silent Hill 2’s Remake Might Make for an Underwhelming Chase
The revelation here is that perhaps the remake’s third-person perspective will make it easier for players to notice Pyramid Head before he’s suddenly upon them if they’re able to swivel the camera and look behind them at any given moment. This would be advantageous if players could exploit the camera and maybe even fire the handgun while aiming down sights to avoid Maria and hit Pyramid Head squarely over her shoulder, but it’s yet to be seen if and how this scene is adapted.
One wall players pass in the originalSilent Hill 2has a chain-link opening that players can finally see Maria and Pyramid Head through, and this is where players can strategically shoot Pyramid Head to successfully and temporarily stall him.
The chase is quite abrupt and short, basically amounting to a single corridor with many corners players run into that block their line of sight behind James so it’s difficult to supervise Maria. Meanwhile, the need for this chain-link opening would seemingly be redundant in the case of a third-person remake since players may not need to employ it as a solitary means of getting clean shots on Pyramid Head. Only time will tell now if Bloober has taken it upon itself to tackle this scene from itsover-the-shoulder POVbut, as a faithful remake, it would surely need one of the most memorable and pivotal scenes from the original.
