By Golly, Blooper Team Did It – Silent Hill 2 Is Great

And that probably only has very little to do with the fact I've never played a Silent Hill game before

It would be a slight understatement to say that I was skeptical of Blooper Team when I heard that they’d be remaking a beloved classic like Silent Hill 2—not that I’ve played the original. But I’ve heard great things (and seen the 2006 movie with Sean Bean).

Up until this remake, Blooper Team hadn’t exactly hit it out of the park or anything, although I have heard great things about Observer—another one I haven’t played. The original Layers of Fear was solid, but not anything special. Both Blair Witch and The Medium were middling. They did remake Layers of Fear to mixed reviews.

All that taken and averaged out into some semblance of something akin to expectations would lead one to believe that maybe, best case scenario, their Silent Hill 2 remake would be middling. Few times have I been this happy to have been this wrong, because Silent Hill 2 is one of the best games of the year.

I can’t really speak for how fans of the series might view it—although even that seems overwhelmingly positive, too. But I couldn’t have been more happy with how this remake turned out.

Does it mean that the golden age of Blooper is here? They sure hope so, considering that they told Gamespot recently that they were “done making shitty games.”

While it might be a while until we see another Silent Hill game out of them, Blooper did announce Chronos: The New Dawn for 2025, so we’ll see if they can put their money—well, I guess my money—where their mouth is. Fingers crossed.

Oh Yeah, We’re Talking about Silent Hill 2

While Blooper’s apparent surprise ability to make great games is interesting in its own right, let’s dive into Silent Hill 2.

Recently, I played through Hollowbody, and although I knew that it was inspired by games like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, I wasn’t exactly sure how inspired it was until I actually played this new remake. It just reiterates how great of an homage Hollowbody is.

It’s pretty neat.

I Like It Hard – Mostly

Since I like to challenge myself—while at the same time not challenging myself (because I’m an enigma wrapped in mostly doofusness)—I chose to play the game with hard combat and light (easy) puzzles.

And let me tell you, it was a great time. Ammo and resources were scarce, and I think I went through most of the apartment building (the first big location) while being one band toe-stub away from death.

I don’t get scared in games, but being that pressured for resources made the game ten times more tense and enjoyable. I ended up not actually dying too much; I only felt like I was about to die practically all the time.

On a related note, I’ve more recently been playing through Last of Us Part 1 on Survivor difficulting, thinking it would be similar levels of fun. It is not. Don’t do that … unless you like to be constantly out of ammo while hoping someone—anyone—will drop a couple of hunting rifle rounds.

I guess it’s good that none of the enemies in Silent Hill 2 have guns, cause that probably would’ve made hard mode way harder. Fortunately, with the help of the melee weapons, even when you’re low on ammo, you can whip and weave and dodge and whack—and it usually works.

I did run out of ammo a few times and have to resort to these pro strategies—even on a few boss fights, where I was definitely thinking, “Oh god, I’m fucked. I better just whack it with this metal pipe a few times before it kills me.”

And lo and behold, somehow, those last few whacks did the trick, and I somehow killed the boss—at which point my next thought was, “Oh fuck, now I need to find some ammo.”

So yes, I didn’t find the game exceedingly scary—but the difficulty kept me on my toes.

If I had any criticism, it’s that maybe the game could’ve used a few more enemy varieties. Throughout Silent Hill 2, you’re primarily fighting the Lying Figures, Mannequins, and sexy, sexy nurses.

At night, you transition into the Otherworld, which offers slightly different versions of these enemies, but by and large, they’re your primary foe.

The Mannequins, especially, can go fuck themselves.

What You Do When You’re Not Shooting Sexy Nurses in the Head

Outside of the frequent encounters spent fighting tooth and nail with a slew of different enemies, there’s a ton of exploration, with plenty of nooks and crannies to explore. Silent Hill 2 isn’t completely open-world, but it’s open enough.

Your buddy James, when he’s not being utterly confounded by the things happening around him, will conveniently mark up his map, so it’s easy to tell where to go, and I rarely ever got lost, and it was pretty easy to keep track of your next objective.

Next to exploration is probably my favorite aspect of any game … puzzles—which is why I turned them down to easy.

Granted, I don’t mind puzzles, but a lot of the time in video games—Silent Hill 2 included—they err on the side of obnoxiously obtuse and illogical in a way that breaks immersion.

The good news is that because so much of this specific game takes place in James’s head (spoiler), the puzzles are basically a means of his mind trapping him in his little loop of guilt. This is way more acceptable than something like Resident Evil (a series I still love), where the puzzles really don’t make much logical sense except that someone in the mansion, police station, castle, whatever—was really an asshole.

However, even if the puzzles in Silent Hill 2 are all in James’s head—although I think some of them are probably in Silent Hill (the place) or a combination of the two—that doesn’t mean I want to spend more time than necessary trapped in a room with moths trying to figure out how many symbols to count and the math equation to give me the code for a lock.

If anything, I really appreciate when games have reduced difficulty for puzzles. I looked a few up, and Silent Hill 2 has different solutions depending on the difficulty, with hard puzzles taking a bit more brainwork.

Too bad I’m too lazy for difficult puzzles. On easy, for me at least, they provide a nice little break from the exploration and combat without being too much of a time consumer (time consuming, consume me — down and out, now; sorry sometimes I just go into random bouts of Coheed & Cambria).

A Guilty Conscious

I feel like the story of Silent Hill 2 (primarily the original) has been done to death at this point, so I won’t go into too much detail. One interesting idea that I read and agree with is that the Silent Hill 2 remake doesn’t really “replace” the original. In some ways, it’s like a complement to the first.

James has been living in this loop (or is a spiral?) for years now, stuck in his own guilty torment over killing his wife, reliving everything … over and over, since 2001.

In that sense, you could argue that this remake serves as a way of catching up with him and seeing what the old chap has been doing for the better part of the last 25 years. Silent Hill 2 (2001) is still canon, and so is this remake, and they all live in perpetuity as James continues beatin’ himself up.

Leaving Silent Hil

Ultimately, I think this remake is pretty fucking rad, from the graphics (minus a few stutters and framerate drops), to the story, to the way it sits in the Silent Hill mythos—of which I am only recently a newcomer.

I think, moving forward, the series is in good hands if Blooper gets to make another one—either a remake or something new. And this game definitely has given me renewed hope for what Blooper will do next—Chronos: The New Dawn. That game seems like it might be pretty dang rad. Here’s hoping the golden age of Blooper continues.