Bloober Team’s recreation of a horror masterpiece trades subtlety for high fidelity, and loses its ugly humanity in the process.

By most established metrics, Bloober Team’s remake of Konami’s 2002 horror game classic Silent Hill 2 is a success. It holds an “overwhelmingly positive” rating on Steam and a solid 86 out of 100 on Metacritic. It is a critical and commercial win. It has catapulted the sometimes-maligned Bloober Team—previously responsible for the Layers Of Fear games, and the much-derided Blair Witch video game—into development stardom. It’s also bad, a meager approximation of the 2002 classic’s startling power. 

The original (hereafter referred to as Silent Hill 2) has much that is of its time: the often-stilted performances, the tank controls, its distant camera which cuts to new angles with every room you enter. Bloober’s recreation of Silent Hill 2 (hereafter referred to as Remake) removes these elements and replaces them with slickness and sterility. Remake is exactly what I feared it would be when it was first announced back in 2022: a reverent recreation that nevertheless rubs all of the original’s unique texture away.