Written in a frantic haze at 3:23 A.M. on October 20th, 2022.

REMAKING Silent Hill 2 has to be one of the worst ideas I’ve ever seen put to paper. How do you remake a masterpiece? More than that, how do you remake a piece of art so perfect in its minute details that anything other than an exact replica will be seen as inferior? I would wager that it’s pretty much impossible, and even if it were possible, to attempt is itself folly.

Comparisons will of course be made with the fantastic Capcom remake of Resident Evil 2 in 2019. “MATEO,” they’ll cry, “if Capcom can remake survival horror classic Resident Evil 2, then CERTAINLY Konami can let Bloober remake survival horror classic Silent Hill 2!” Unfortunately this misses the numerous differences between these two games and, more broadly, these two franchises.

Resident Evil is, at its heart, a B movie in game form. It’s schlocky, action survival horror that is trying to be two things: 1) scary and 2) entertaining. It succeeds at both of these things beyond anyone’s wildest dreams- you will never hear me slander those great games. HOWEVER (Stephen A. voice) Silent Hill 2 is much less B movie schlock and more like an artistic expression of the depths of an individual’s psyche. It was made by people who had a love of literature, a love of film, and a clear vision for how to put these things together.

If you haven’t, it’s imperative that you watching the Making of Silent Hill 2 documentary which gives you a sense of what the creators actually thought through when making the game. Every aspect of it was planned with intention and purpose. Everything from the lines on a character’s face, to a character’s slightly deeper voice, to the frames and editing of the shots — it was all to serve a clear artistic purpose- a purpose that you shit on by attempting to recreate it with your own vision of what the game should be or should look like. Silent Hill 2 is the game that Team Silent made, it is not anything else, even if other things carry its name. Anything less than a pixel for pixel remake is not just unwanted, but disrespectful to the original vision.

And so let’s also talk about the elephant in the room: Bloober Team themselves. It seems to be widely believed that being a fan of something gives you license to fuck it. The presentation yesterday said as much not just in the remake section, but also in the film section with director Gans stating he was giving his doomed RETURN TO SILENT HILL project the MAXIMUM RESPECT. Yet there hasn’t been a good Silent Hill game since the original team disbanded 15 years ago. Are you telling me that the numerous teams that tried to make a good Silent Hill game WEREN’T fans? Of course they were! The problem is that they and many others misconstrued what made the Silent Hill games great (hint: it wasn’t fog, nurses and Pyramid Head).

Being a fan may be a prerequisite at SOME level to making a good remake of something, but it’s clearly not all that’s required. Bloober make cool environments but shitty games. Layers of Fear? Cool environments and atmosphere- shitty game. Observer? Really fantastic environments, cool atmosphere, interesting story- pretty okay game. Layers of Fear 2? Just a shitty game. The Medium blatantly showed off their Silent Hill influence with Akira Yamaoka and ash and fog and that was, yes, a shitty game. They have cool ideas I suppose, but why on earth would I or anyone else trust them to remake one of the best games ever made? The only argument I can see for it is the fact that there’s a ready-made blueprint already laid out and they don’t have to remake the wheel.

More than anything, I really don’t understand the mindset of a fan who thinks they can even take on a project like this. I would expect any real fan of this game, when approached with the prospect of remaking it to outright reject such a proposal. How do you improve perfection? How do you even attempt such a project when it will always be compared to the original? How do you even get in the MINDSET to spend years working on something that WILL, inevitably, be considered worse than the thing its remaking? It seems mental to me to go into that process knowing these things which makes me trust them EVEN LESS. Best case scenario, you make an amazing game that eclipses the thing you love. More likely though, you make a shitty game that eclipses the thing you love by being more convenient and having higher fidelity. It’s a lose-lose for real fans of the art.

We’ve had this debacle before with the creation of the Silent Hill HD Collection which, rather than just being a straight high definition port, re-cast the voice actors and, in the process, changed the games from the vision of the original creators. That collection was ALSO made by ‘true fans’ and its changes go down in history as some of the worst sins committed against this series. Who wades into those waters? I wouldn’t!

Now of course, yes, I’m a maniac fanboy weeaboo and all that, and YET. And yet I think the involvement of Masahiro Ito and Akira Yamaoka do not fix anything for me. Firstly, Ito’s creature design work in SH2 is iconic to this day, to the point that if someone describes themselves as a horror fan, they’ll probably know who Pyramid Head is. And yet the designs for the game are already done. They were done 21 years ago. Is there a plan to add more monsters? In a remake? I don’t know…

And Akira Yamaoka is a composer. One of the greatest composers sure, but he hardly had much of a say in the creation of these games, even as a producer. If they brought back one of the Team Silent directors or one of their auteurs like the great Takayoshi Sato, MAYBE I could see it. But as it is, they brought back two people whose best work is already done and left out some of the game’s most ingenious contributors.

I don’t WANT Silent Hill 2 REMAKE to suck, but it almost certainly will. The team is wack, the idea ITSELF to remake the game is wack, and there don’t seem to be any real redeeming qualities to look out for. Silent Hill 2 is a timeless masterpiece made all the more better by time and the great work of the Enhanced Edition team, whose goal has always been to ENHANCE the art that was already in the game, NOT change it. To take on the project of remaking this game from scratch is just plain mental. You have to either not really care about author intent or care, but not so much that you’d pass up the check.