As recent leaks have shown us, there’s a good chance Konami wants to bring us back silent HillAs things stand, it sounds like we’re remastering Silent Hill 2 – generally considered the best – and something new from Annapurna, maybe elsewhere. Remake, new game, it doesn’t matter. Because I truly believe that this series should be put on hold.
Let’s go back to 1996 for a moment. That was the year the first flip phone was released, the year Dolly the Sheep was born, and the year that the original Silent Hill development began. The game’s development team, Team Silent, is made up of multiple staff members whose projects have all failed and don’t really fit into any particular team at Konami. Essentially, it was a last-ditch effort by these developers, and it apparently ended up being a success.
But the thing is, as a friend told me recently, the first game was kind of like lightning in a bottle. The game has iterations in subsequent sequels from Team Silent, but they certainly can’t be described as consistent. Especially considering that the various leaders on the team have changed across the various games, creator Keiichiro Toyama – who is now working on Slitterhead – only worked on the first game. Only the game’s composer, Akira Yamaoka, was involved in the production of the first four games.
As a result, each game is in some way a product of its era, and the first four — the only ones made by Amorphous Team Silent — each offer something special.
Silent Hill wouldn’t be what it is today without the dense fog that is primarily used for rendering purposes. Silent Hill 2’s storyline is so nuanced and complex that many games today can’t emulate it. The third game was able to expand the largely limited storyline of the first. And the fourth derails, exploring how far Silent Hill’s actual reach can stretch.
And I just don’t think a remake or a sequel can capture any of that intrigue, any of that mystery, with the status quo in the gaming industry. I mean, I think video games used to be a bit of the Wild West: I think, at least in the AAA scene, there’s far less of a “do whatever you want” policy these days.
A game like LSD: Dream Emulator could certainly exist on a site like itch.io, but I’m not sure it could be released on a major console like the original PlayStation. Hell, even Silent Hill has incredibly weird moments. Honestly, do we really think a Silent Hill sequel is going to be as ridiculous as Game 2’s dog ending?
Not that Dog Ending is a revolutionary way of storytelling, in fact it’s completely out of place compared to everything else in this game, but it has some incredible “yeah, f**k it, We have time, let’s do it with energy.
But more than that, the perpetual desire that many seem to have to go back in time instead of looking forward to what was possible is a bit exhausting. We’re pretty much stuck with reboots, remakes, and remakes. They sell, and they sell well, so I guess I can’t blame the company too much. From an artistic standpoint, that doesn’t mean they should exist.
You can almost, maybe, almost justify a remake of the first Silent Hill; the first story isn’t much, maybe even a fringe too slim In the details, the player may have an “oh, nothing happened” feeling. What about the second game? While I hate to call anything the best, I can understand why people think Silent Hill 2 is the best of Silent Hill. So why remake it?
Granted, there are some somewhat clunky controls, but the current leak suggests there will be a new ending, and I really hate the sound. In my opinion, there should be two routes for a remake. Whichever it is, do something like Final Fantasy VII Remake and then deal with a very different set of events as a sort of commentary on cyclical history. Or, alternatively, just remove any clumsiness from the original.
Silent Hill 2 is a very beautiful game. Its appearance is on purpose, so-called “better” graphics will fail to capture. Take Shadow of the Colossus, for example. Critic Amr Al-Aaser talked about the remake in a great video a few years ago, pointing out how the original had such harsh lighting that the world felt hostile, but the remake attempts to “fix” this alleged bug.
That’s exactly what I feared in Silent Hill 2 Remake.If Bloober Team is the team working on this project, it needs to no Think of fundamental aspects of the game as problems that need to be solved. When I talk about how video game development used to be like the Wild West, I mean it produces rough, textured, complex pieces that aren’t necessarily as fluid as the latest open-world Ubisoft games. This makes the game more fun!
I want games that will spit in my face and call me an idiot. I also want easy games – but I think the continued success of FromSoftware’s Souls games is enough to prove that not everything has to be a smooth experience, and it can even be done better.
FromSoftware could also easily make another Dark Souls game, Elden Ring is pretty much that, but it’s also farther from it. That’s what makes it so special, just like there’s a good chance any developer’s Silent Hill game doesn’t exist.
Even PT is only interesting because of how it was released to the world and eventually cancelled. We hardly know what the Silent Hill story is about, but everything hinted at in that playable trailer has such a strong appeal to us that, honestly, the final game might not even be as good as the demo.
Beauty comes from restraint, and the original games of PT, Shadow of the Colossus, and Silent Hill are all full of restraint. There must be so much going on in games these days, there’s no such thing as a limited sense of scope anymore. Silent Hill was born from limitations, and without them, it would have died horribly. I am not interested in attending funerals.
