The reason I bring it up and call it art is because I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a discrepancy between watching a game and playing it.

Obviously, I knew about Hollow Knight. I knew about the love players have for it. I knew about the critical and commercial success. I read about it, watched the trailers, watched some gameplay videos, learned about some of its mechanics -- but nothing prepared me for the feeling I had when I actually decided to play it.

You spend 5-10 minutes with this game and you already know it’s going to be something special. As with the best art, my soul felt elevated.

That feeling never faded. On the contrary: when the credits rolled and I sat with the game for a bit, and realized what the metaphor really is, my appreciation only grew stronger.

It’s really strange that I never got even a glimpse of the greatness of Hollow Knight by watching someone else play it. You could say that’s expected because, well, the difference between playing a game and watching a game is like the difference between reading a book and watching somebody read a book. But I’m an experienced game designer. I’ve played literally thousands of games. And yet somehow this never happened to me before.

Now, I’m not saying this is my perfect game. For example, I don’t care for its gameplay. That’s not Hollow Knight’s fault, though -- I’m just not into hardcore platformers. In general, I don’t enjoy games that require me to memorize patterns so I can execute them perfectly for minutes at a time. But of course, the fact that this gameplay isn’t something that appeals to me doesn’t mean it isn’t executed extremely well.

I do have some doubts -- for example, I miss a coyote time feature -- but overall the core gameplay loop is executed perfectly.

Everything else appeals to me:

• The visuals (especially in person) are just amazing.

• There are lots of little things that are very hard to notice in video, but make a huge impression when you play the game yourself.

• The sound design and the music are out of this world.

• The story is fantastic, and the metaphor is great.

• And most of all, the entire thing is extremely coherent.

Hollow Knight is clearly a product of love, but also of experience -- and of not rushing things. For designers, this is something you absolutely must play. If you know what to look for, you’ll see it’s basically a template for an incredible game.

And the first thing you’ll learn -- or reinforce, if you already knew it -- is how important the opening minutes are. In the case of Hollow Knight, they literally changed my entire opinion about the game for the better.

Next, Silksong.

The point of this exercise is not to pressure Bloober into considering my proposed solutions or to step on the developers’ toes. I don't even know if any team member has seen these posts. The goal is to explain why something is an issue by showing the benefits of a different approach.

My approach might be clearer if I start with an example issue found in the opening minute of the game. This is how I would discuss things with the team...

1. Leaving Silent Hill

Problem: When the player turns around and tries to leave the first area of the game, going back to where they came from, they are turned around at a trigger line.

Why it's an issue: Many players test a game in the opening minutes. Before we're engaged with the gameplay and story, we experiment with controls, try to understand core mechanics, and test the game's limits. Going back is a common thing to do... Many games know this and even give you an achievement for it. Actually, Silent Hill 2 Remake does that, too.

The problem is, when the game just slaps you so hard with its invisible hand that you're doing a 180, it feels bad. It's like trying to enter a place that's not for you, and the bouncer says, "No. Now fuck off." That's not the feeling you want to offer the player. You want the bouncer to be nice. Reasonable.

This is especially important in the opening minutes when the player is building a mental model of the game and its world. This is when they decide what they think of the game's quality and vibe. So you want the opening segment to be spotless. The game grabbing you by the neck and turning you around just doesn't feel great.

Solution: Usually, there are three decent, working solutions to choose from:

1. In the intro cinematic, show the protagonist pass a blockade or jump down from a higher area, and only then give control to the player. Now they simply cannot go back, because the road is blocked or they cannot jump high enough to reach the higher level. Cool, but that wouldn't work for Silent Hill 2. The road is open; we just arrived in a car.

2. Get creative. In The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, the hero arrives through a long dark train tunnel. If the player turns around and goes back through the tunnel, they ...arrive back at the starting point. We simply turn the player around the right way midway through the tunnel, but we do it in a perfectly symmetrical spot, so they cannot tell they've been touched. To them, they just kept pressing forward but arrived back where they started. Creepy and weird. This could work for Silent Hill 2, as we know of many horror movies where the protagonist cannot leave a town they arrive at. It's a known trope. But with the wide open road, it'd take a lot of manpower, time, and money to do it right, and maybe the team should focus on more important things.

3. Have the hero acknowledge the player's action and politely -- the key word: politely -- decline. Preferably in a way that doesn't break immersion. This is what the original does:

   

   It's not perfect. There's no voice-over, and you might ask yourself: who is he even talking to? It seems like he's talking to me, the player, which is weak and almost ruins the immersion. But what if we could do this without the downsides? Can we acknowledge the player's action, and decline politely in a way that feels right for the world?

Action item: Add a short cinematic showing James looking at the open road, then turning his head to look at the car, then looking at the road again. He sighs as if he'd love to leave but deep down knows it would be the wrong thing to do. He turns around, and we give control back to the player. If the player tries to exit again, display the same cinematic: it still makes sense the second time around and will discourage further trolling.

I hope this first example clarifies what I'm trying to achieve here: show how developers think about design.

1. Locate the issue. When something in your game feels wrong to you or the players, it's time to look at it.

2. Understand why it feels wrong. This is crucial and the most difficult part.

3. List solutions, discuss them with the team if you can (something I can't do here for obvious reasons).

4. Choose the best solution, turn it into an actual action item.

With this template in mind, let's look at other things I noted during my playthrough. Considering the size and scope of the game, I'm surprised there aren't that many, so hats off to the developers.

2. Watching Silent Hill

Problem: In the starting area, there are binoculars that players cannot interact with.

Why it's an issue: As I said earlier, in the opening minutes, players decide whether your game is good or not. This will affect their entire experience. They can and will change their mind if the game is better than its faulty opening segment, but good vibes are so much easier to achieve with that segment properly done.

Having a clear tease in the form of tourist binoculars pointed at a beautiful vista then not having any form of interaction with it is an immersion breaker and makes the player doubt you even care about the game or understand what you're doing.

Solution: This one is easy, and there's more than one good solution. Remove the binoculars. Partially destroy them so it's clear they're not functional anymore. Make it so the player actually can look through them at the town. Or have a short animation of James trying to look through them but saying that the fog is too thick.

Action item: I like the second one, with the partial destruction, or the last one. Both gel nicely with the theme of James currently not being able to see his issues.

3. Follow the white cloth

Problem: The interactive elements of the environment are often accompanied by a torn white cloth, to help the players along the way.

Why it's an issue: This is bad for two reasons. One, it's patronizing to the players. Everybody knows this is a gameplay feature, not a world feature. Two, anything that helps the players makes no sense in the world of Silent Hill 2. The entire game is about James refusing to acknowledge his sins. There is only one entity in the entire game that helps... no, forces him to face the truth, and that is Pyramid Head. James thinks Pyramid Head is a monster on a mission to kill him; that's how shielded he is from reality. To have the world be full of helping hands like the white cloth stands against everything the game is trying to say.

Side note: There is another entity helping James, a mysterious person leaving notes and items for him, but that's a whole different story on how universes interact, and the warnings that the person offers. Without going into details, this person has nothing to do with white clothes.

Solution: There are other ways to guide the player. Painting the hot spots red, using yellow tape or white cloth -- that's cheap and backwards.

To be clear, in my opinion, these things don't work even if they truly, deeply make sense for the world. Like, if you have graffiti left by a resistance movement around certain spots, that makes sense, right? To me, no. The players will always see through it; they know why you added this to the game. Just like movies changed and we no longer buy deus ex machina or clearly fake special effects that bothered no one in the 50s, we should just drop these artificial helpers.

Take a look at this video:

Is this how you want players to experience your game? See how she's not fooled? See how instead of being emotionally engaged in the exploration, she talks about how "they" (the developers) did this and that?

I get why the developers used the cloth. Some players truly need this help. And the symbolism of it fits the game thematically, even if it doesn’t quite make sense.

But there are a couple of better solutions to choose from here. One would be to remove the tutorial message about the white cloth and have the info about it sold to the player through diegetic means, e.g., a patient's note. Then, increase the amount of the pieces with the progress of the game, until it reaches grotesque numbers and culminates with some revelation of what the cloth truly is.

Another would be to remove the cloth and use light -- like all painters in the history of the world -- and maps and environmental storytelling to help the player in their journey.

Action item: Go back in time and kill the white cloth idea before it's implemented. If this turns out to be too difficult, double down on the white cloth but turn it into a story that develops rather than a marker that fools no one.

4. Make believe

Problem: Early in the game, a couple of events break the suspension of disbelief.

Why it's an issue: As soon as we put our foot inside Silent Hill, the game is hanging on a really thin thread. Imagine you go back to a town you visited years ago, and there's no one there except hellish monsters. You would certainly be questioning either reality or your sanity right away, right?

James doesn't do that. He does throw us a bone with "I guess I don't care if it's dangerous or not" when first meeting Angela, but that's not exactly solving the problem.

However, by the end of the game, when we understand what Silent Hill really is, it all makes sense. Throughout the entire journey, James' mind filters out the impossible ...because it's not impossible to him. After all, the world is his mind manifested.

But, as I said, the players don't know that until the end. So how do we make it all work, how do we make players reconcile the grotesque horrors of Silent Hill with an almost indifferent and unsurprised James?

You do two things. First, you make the world feel oneiric, hypnotic. And Team Silent did just that, with the weird sounds, the ever-present fog, and the long runs accompanied by haunting music. Second, contrast that with the mundane. Give the players some reality anchors.

You don't need to do that for long. An hour or even less into the game, you can start adding more and more weirdness. Five hours in, when James puts his hand into a toilet bowl full of crap or jumps into a giant dark hole, the player is already desensitized to actual reality and just rolls with James and the manifestations of his Jungian Shadow.

Until then, though, make sure that the game shares the player's doubts, and that weird shit doesn't happen out of the blue. You need to be really vigilant about things that players will question.

As an example, when James finds a matchbook near a corpse, he notices the name of the bar it came from ...and circles this location on the map.

But ...why? What is so special and significant about the matches that James treats it as a clue? Absolutely nothing. The event makes no sense.

It's not like that in the original, mind you. In the 2001 version, you find a note from someone saying they will be waiting at the bar. Considering the town seems empty, we can buy it that James holds on to the note and marks the place on the map.

Solution: Copy the idea featured in the original.

Action item: Add "I'll wait here" written on the matchbook. Review everything the player encounters during the first hour of the game and see if it's all logically sound — including dialogue and monologue.

5. Bodychecking doors

Problem: Players do not open doors like normal human beings. They try to open them by running into them.

Why it's an issue: For a game that wants to be an immersion sim, fighting doors is just plain silly. It's one of the most questionable design decisions in the remake.

Now, I don't want to second guess the developers here, but I'm quite sure they started with the regular old school door opening just like in the original. After all, it is simply how you interact with any other object in the game. But somehow they landed on bodychecking the doors and everyone involved agreed it's better. I wonder what the reason was, but nothing springs to mind, at least nothing that isn't easily solvable anyway.

Solution: The original wasn't perfect by any means in that regard but had some good pointers.

Action item: Divide doors into two categories: openable and not. Make it visually clear which is which, for example, remove the handles from unopenable doors, board them up, put black goo over the lock, etc. Have opening doors consistent with how the players interact with any other element of the environment.

6. The lack of super easy difficulty

Problem: The lack of a super easy difficulty setting.

Why it's an issue: The original had four difficulty modes for the action layer. One of these was Beginner difficulty, which made the game very easy. This was perfect for people who were only interested in the adventure side of the game: the puzzles and the story.

I would even argue that a godmode-like Action difficulty would work, too. SOMA is a horror game that added such an option, and the world still stands. I made a hardcore FPS called Painkiller, and we added a super easy mode that trimmed any enemy damage down to just 1 HP. It was basically a godmode. Nothing bad happened. There is no point in gatekeeping difficulty in games that have difficulty options.

Meanwhile, the lowest difficulty in the remake feels like at least Normal in the original. I was quite shocked to see that it takes three full swings to down the very first enemy, and that just one slap makes my health go into the red flash zone. As a test, I used external software to increase my damage to 300% of the nominal value, and only then did the easiest difficulty in the remake start to resemble the easiest difficulty in the original.

Solution: It's not Dark Souls. Let people tailor their experience more. Don't be afraid they'll finish the game too quickly; most people choosing the easiest difficulty play the game the longest.

Action item: Add Beginner difficulty resembling the original, or add a godmode-like difficulty where dying is almost impossible, or add both. If time allows, reduce the amount of trash mobs on these difficulties.

7. Pyramid Head is no longer scary

Problem: One of the most iconic characters in the history of video games doesn't invoke fear anymore. Instead of a monstrous executioner, he now looks like a malnourished puny dude with a small bathtub on his head. Also, the first scene in which we meet him is more funny than scary. See for yourself.

Compare this to the original.

Here, James stumbles upon Pyramid Head and quickly and quietly hides in the closet. When the monster approaches him, James panics but fires at his body. In the remake, James awkwardly and loudly hides in the closet. When the monster approaches him, James semi-calmly fires at the only part of the monster that is covered in an two inch-thick iron. Oh boy.

Why it's an issue: Come on.

Solution: Make Pyramid Head great again.

All right, let's get serious. The problem with Pyramid Head is that he is more or less the same in both the original and the remake. But while he works perfectly in the original, he doesn't in the remake. Why? Didn't I just say both versions were the same?

Well, in the original, the shape and size of Pyramid Head is distorted by the camera angles, strong noise, low poly count, and low resolution. Basically, he leaves a lot to the imagination.

In the remake, the hi-fi visuals expose the true Pyramid Head, and as it turns out, he's not that scary.

What the developers should have done was to copy the vibe of the monster, but not the monster. Let me explain using an idiom example. In Polish, when we want to say that something is easy, we say it is a "bułka z masłem". This literally means "a buttered bun". Which is confusing. But if I said it means "piece of cake", then suddenly you get what I'm saying.

And so it goes with Pyramid Head. For the remake, he should not have been "translated" literally, as this makes him lose his appeal and power. He should have been treated like an idiom that requires its own new thing for the remake.

Action item: Make Pyramid Head slightly taller, as with the camera that the remake uses, he looks smaller. This is a well-known side effect of TPP and FPS games with the player-controlled camera. So even though in theory he should be James’ height, as he’s based on him, we need to compensate for the perspective.

Also, increase his muscle and fat mass to make him more intimidating, like in the original. Or like in the remake’s very own key art…

…where he is not as malnourished and puny — on the contrary, he exudes power and intimidation.

8. Painful exploration

Problem: A marker showing that this or that element of the environment is interactable appears only when close to the element.

Why it's an issue: Wall hugging feels necessary for exploration, and it shouldn't be.

Solution: Here is the problem that Bloober faced: in the original, there were no markers. You had to guess which item or object you could interact with. That worked in 2001 because the graphics were simple and it was quite easy to understand which elements of the environment were important. With much more detailed and rich visuals in the remake, this is no longer the case, and so a much more modern solution was chosen: interactivity markers.

I think it was the right choice, and also you can turn it all off and go old school if you want. But the problem is that the markers appear only when very close to the object. Look how close I am to the map in the car, and the marker still did not appear. I would need another step forward for that to happen.

As a result, players feel like they need to hug every wall and every corner in order to make sure they did not miss anything.

Action item: All that is needed is an increase in the range of the interactivity markers.

9. Banal monster sounds

Problem: Monster sounds are forgettable, run-of-the-mill shrieks.

Why it's an issue: These are well-done, high-quality sound effects. But we've heard similar shrieks and growls thousands of times. There is nothing idiosyncratic about them, unlike the original that offered unforgettable, unique, "there's nothing like it" kind of sounds.

The banality of these sounds makes some sections of the game feel like a generic horror rather than Silent Hill 2. The eerie, unsettling atmosphere of the original is replaced with stock jump scare vibes. Just compare the sound of Creepers in both games.

Solution: Designing unique, intriguing sounds is a challenge. Doing that for monsters is even harder. I would basically ask Mr. Yamaoka for tips and tricks and a guide on how he went about creating the sounds for the game. Maybe there is a single, simple key that would open the door to greatness.

Action item: There is no easy and fast solution here ...except the game features a surprisingly low number of enemy types. It should not be too hard to focus on the select few that appear most often.

10. Stamina

Problem: The protagonist runs out of breath only sound-wise.

Why it's an issue: In the original, Stamina played a big role for both combat and immersion. Personally, I think it was overdone and it felt weird to start moving slowly only after running for a few seconds. So while I think it makes sense that this was removed in the remake, I'd love to see James get tired both visually and sonically. It would certainly add to the believability, and that in return helps immersion.

Solution: James already breathes heavily for a while after a lot of running. All that is needed are some extra animations.

Action item: Add a short, interruptible animation (plus variants) of James catching his breath after running for X seconds.

This is it, these are the top ten issues in my opinion. Some are big, some are tiny, but they're all something that bothered me personally. There are a couple more things I made some notes about, but nothing that I care that much about. Let me list these things here quickly, without the template I used for the top ten.

11. Not a fan of the TVs everywhere. I get the symbolism, but it starts to feel like Alan Wake rather than Silent Hill.

12. When I don't have a map of an area, the game should let me know that when I press the map button. Currently, nothing happens, and that feels like a bug. It was done right in the original.

13. That map is not still when I look at it. There is a suggestion in the game that James is an alcoholic, but that's not it. It feels like the map is moving around just so things do not feel artificial -- after all, no human would be able to keep it perfectly still. Cool, but the effect is overdone.

14. Sometimes Maria looks at James during gameplay, sometimes she doesn't and just stares into nothing. She should always look at James when free running.

15. I love Night Mode for sound in games. But the one in the remake just doesn't work or isn't set properly.

16. Since the prison, the pacing is all wrong. Until the end of the game, it feels like hours and hours of running through corridors.

17. Where is my grain? Either it's not there or it's too light. I know a lot of gamers hate grain, but when done right, it's a fantastic tool that makes the image feel more natural and less clinical and sterile. Witchfire has grain but no one complains because a) it's tweaked to have the effect but not be annoying, b) there's an option to turn it off.

18. Silent Hill is in Maine, but here it feels more like Copenhagen in Denmark. Same issue as with Alan Wake 2. This is supposed to be America, but it feels like Europe. Meanwhile, Team Silent delivered something that feels right despite making a game in a Tokyo skyscraper. I think that the reason is that the original game used a warmer, slightly more reddish palette. We associate this with movies, and most movies we watched in life came from the USA.

19. It's kind of crazy that I had to use an external hack in order to unlock the framerate during cinematics, and that the built-in framerate limiter only offers 30, 60 and unlimited to choose from. It's 2024, unlocked fps and fully customizable framerate are a standard.

20. Just so we end up on a nice round twenty, the final issue is that while I know the game is not an open-world extravaganza where any path is legit and possible, there are places where things are a bit silly.

    

There you go, twenty issues. I hope it's been fun to see the way a designer looks at a game. And so now for my final thoughts on the remake...

Here's a quick summary of pluses and minuses. Let's start with the goodies.

• State of the art visuals and audio. A benchmark. The environmental assets are some of the best I have ever seen, and the locations are skillfully crafted.

• Generally high production values. This is clearly an AAA production, achieved by Bloober with a team much smaller than you would expect.

• In my playthrough, I have not experienced a single glitch or crash and the few bugs I've encountered were nothing worth mentioning here. Fantastic job.

• Top-notch acting and voice acting.

• You can feel the developers' love for the game. Literally dozens and dozens of secrets and easter eggs.

• The puzzles are much, much better than in the original.

And now for things I wasn’t a fan of.

• The journeys of certain key characters, including the protagonist, are flatter.

• The symbolic layer is not as coherent as in the original.

• While technically amazing, audio is not as otherworldly unique as in the original.

• The optimization could have been better. I had to turn off some sexy options and turn on the DLSS to keep 100+ in 4K in what is a linear adventure game with a severely limited amount of enemies on the screen at the same time.

Silent Hill 2 was lightning in a bottle that happened because they didn't know they couldn't:

There was a feeling among the development team that we were going to challenge ourselves to make something never before seen in videogames. The team happened to contain a lot of members who approached things in ways you wouldn't expect from game developers, including the kind of movies and novels they'd experienced, Crime and Punishment included. We all loved works that you could consider literary, as you put it, or minor. When all of that energy was added and multiplied together, though, it turned into something major, resulting in the work it became.

— Akira Yamaoka

To see it alive and well two decades later, during the renaissance of survival horror, feels like a blessing.

Which version do I prefer personally? To be honest, I think the original Silent Hill 2 is a better experience...

...but the remake is a better game.

In other words, if you are interested in a masterful handling of a story, symbolism, and immersion, I would recommend the original Silent Hill 2 over the remake, especially with the fan-made Enhanced Edition mod that makes the visuals bearable and fixes a lot of issues.

But if this is not a priority, and you value gameplay, puzzles, visuals or survival horror vibes more, then the remake is the right choice.

Or, be like me, and consume it all. Finish the original first, then play the remake. This is the way.

Whether I have issues with the remake or not is irrelevant to the fact that gamers love it, and it sells well. Like Baron Münchhausen, Bloober managed to grab their own neck and pull themselves out of the AA limbo into the big leagues. I love almost all their projects since the first Layers of Fear (a reminder that Observer is one of the most underrated games ever), and their growth is exciting.

Here's hoping that we get Born from a Wish one day, and all that's left to say for now is the meme below. Thanks for reading!

…and Born from a Wish, of course.

P.S. Let’s not forget Born from a Wish.

Teaser spoiler: we will.

But let’s start with the character I think is undercooked—our hero…

James Sunderland

In the remake, James has a new look that works really well. I like both the original James and the new James. The voice acting is god-tier—no false notes whatsoever. The actor is neutral enough to leave space for the player’s interpretation but expressive enough to convey emotion. Fantastic job here.

There are two smaller technical issues I’ll mention just for the record. In some cutscenes, this next-gen quality model bends in weird, janky ways that are oddly reminiscent of the cutscenes from the ‘90s. Also, in the most important cinematic in the game—you know the one—both James and Laura have odd facial animations that lessen the impact of the scene. And …from a technical perspective, that’s more or less it.

The most important thing about James, though, is his journey. And this is where the game underdelivers.

It's worth noting that the remake is getting rave reviews from players. The initial dislike against Bloober has transformed into worship and apologies. It's hard not to love this story.

But… if people love the remake and I’m pointing out issues, does this mean one side is wrong? I genuinely don’t think so. I believe the power of Silent Hill 2's story is so great that even when it’s wounded or crippled, it’s still strong enough to move mountains. Deliver 50% of the original story—and to be clear, Bloober delivered way more than that—and it’s still head and shoulders above most modern games. Not because they are bad, but because Silent Hill 2 is just that good.

Back to James.

The biggest problem with his journey is that we're not experiencing a hopeful man on a mission to solve the mystery of receiving a letter from his dead wife. Instead, we're experiencing a quiet, broken man going through the motions. As I argued before, Remake James already begins guilty, and nothing changes for almost the entire game. Growth or change-wise, he's flat.

Ironically, the developers invested in changes to the character: physical ones. His nails get dirtier, and he becomes more tired.

To me, it's a nice feature but it has nothing to do with his journey. "A man doing a lot of tiring dirty work becomes tired and gets dirtier" is not exactly a metaphor for anything.

Someone could argue that the OG James doesn't go through some incredible metamorphosis throughout the game either, right? We have the incredible opening, but then until the final reveal, nothing really happens with him.

With him... no. With the player, yes.

The OG James leaves a lot of room for players to be him. Thus, players collect more and more disturbing information about the world that surrounds them and its purpose, and it's they who begin to look at it all differently. Recall the final long corridor, where we witness a memory moment in which Mary both pushes James away and begs him to stay and love her.

Of course, most players won't really understand what's happening. It's not like someone will stand up halfway through the game and announce, "Holy shit, he killed his wife." But it all keeps boiling inside the subconscious. So when the reveal happens, all that collected info not only boosts the surprise but also confirms it.

Think of it as the twist in The Sixth Sense. When we realize what's going on, many of us go, "Oooh, so that's why the kid was initially afraid of him" or "Oooh, so his wife never really saw him," and so on. Throughout the entire movie, we didn't know what we were looking at, but when the reveal happens, everything suddenly makes sense. And later on, we all asked ourselves how on Earth we missed all the clues.

Okay, so collecting clues about the truth doesn't result in some premature lightbulb moment but pays off later. Cool. So, what’s the problem with Remake James? He and the players are given the same info as OG James, aren’t they?

The difference is that from the beginning, we either know or heavily suspect that James is guilty of something. He’s passive, hunched, quiet, scared of Maria, his eyes full of pain, his expressions full of regret. So when we finally learn that he did something bad… it’s not a reveal. It’s a confirmation.

To add salt to the injury, the second half of the reveal scene is just plain bad. I'm sorry, it just is.

First, weird facial expressions. If he just closed his eyes, that's fine. But everything else looks like a glitch or bad animation. We are digesting the most important moment of the game, but instead of focusing on just that, James becomes weird. It's distracting.

Second, speaking of digestion, the scene is rushed. Instead of letting the player digest the reveal long enough to collect the pieces of their shattered soul, the game brutally cuts it short. To give you some numbers, you have sixty seconds in the original to look at James, listen to the song, and be in awe.

In the remake, you barely get half of that, thirty seconds.

To offer an idea of how a good movie does it, it takes ninety seconds for The Sixth Sense to pick up the action again once the reveal happens. It's not a direct comparison, as those 90 seconds are filled with flashbacks of scenes we've already seen but now look at differently. However, the top idea is the same: letting people digest the news for long enough, without any real distraction or new action.

And then, believe it or not, there's an issue with Laura. But I'll talk about it in her section.

To sum it up, the audiovisuals of Remake James are fantastic, but his journey is flattened compared to the original, and the videotape scene does him -- and the players -- dirty.

In a way, it feels like Remake James is written and acted for people who've already played the original twice and know how it all ends. Why do the journey or let the reveal cook when we all already know what he did anyway, right? Well, wrong, of course, but it's a decent enough way to describe the remake.

Mary/Maria

I think we had a bit more Mary in the original, but I might be wrong. Either way, I don't have any notes on Mary; she's great. It's hard to read the final letter with the same class as the original actress, but here the remake delivers in spades.

Maria, though, is a whole different story.

There are two problems with her: her outfit and her personality.

I'm sure the clothing issue might get some eye rolls, but hear me out first.

It's not about being sexy.

Remake Maria is sexy. She is one of the sexiest ladies in gaming. This is not an issue.

The issue is she's too sophisticated. Instead of being a trashy stripper, she's an elegant MILF. Her clothes, her demeanor -- she is classy, intelligent, full of personality.

And she should not be.

In the original, Silent Hill creates Maria for James out of:

• His desire for Mary to be simple, easy, healthy, open to sex 24/7. Feel free to judge, but that's what his subconscious wants.

• Mary's body and face.

• Clothes of the stripper he saw on a poster when vacationing with Mary in Silent Hill years ago.

Why is that last thing important? So the remake changed Maria a bit. But she's still sexy, sexier even, so what's the big deal?

As I said, it's not about sex. Okay, I lied. But it's not about just any sex. It's about fucking. It's about flesh and the primal need to fuse with it.

James is not interested in erotica. He is interested in fucking. For the entire duration of Mary's sickness, he was faithful to her but also extremely frustrated. As one can imagine, for Mary, sex was last on the list of her passions. But James is a healthy man, one with needs he can't satisfy.

And so he creates Maria out of his idea of what kind of woman is the easiest to have sex with. Someone who shows off her body for money, a stripper. Again, I'm not here to discuss if this is right or wrong. But that's what James' subconscious prompts him. People describe the original Maria as trashy but, here's a trivia bit, only technical issues stopped Team Silent from making her even more …explicit.

And — this is the important part — it's not just Maria that reflects James' desire. The monsters do it as well. Hence the sexy nurses, a porn archetype, and creatures that are just female legs.

All of that creates a consistent world in which Eros clashes with Thanatos. It's primal pleasures of the flesh but twisted by the guilt and regret of the murder. This is why the aforementioned nurse is both hot and a nightmare.

Here's what Sato Takayoshi had to say about this in the Making Of documentary:

"Everybody is thinking and concerning about sex and death every day. And if we want to scare or shake or touch the users or spectators, then we have to think about sex and death deeply. To make like a death scene, you know, somebody died or monsters died or... You know, if we make that kind of scene, we try to... we try to mix erotic essence. This is kind of a visual and, you know, core concept."

And the core concept it is, woven into the fabric of the world created by James' subconscious.

But the coherency of that universe is broken when Maria is suddenly almost a lady. Could James have invented her this way, inspired by his own Mrs. Robinson he met in the past? Sure. But then she just doesn't fit the rest of the world. Or the rest of the world doesn't fit her. It doesn't matter; either way, she feels disconnected from all the other things that James' mind materialized. Things simple, stripped of sophistication, primal. Fucking and dying.

Of course, it's nearly guaranteed that the change was Konami's request. The developers pay respects to the original clothing, and that's cool…

…but it doesn't save Maria's character. She's too fine for her own good.

Another thing that just doesn't ring true about her is her behavior in the first hour after meeting James. She's suffocating him with her constant talking, guilt trips, and seduction. She's a fantastic character in vacuo but she's not what James would have created, wishing to escape the suffocating clutches of his gravely sick wife and her mood swings.

This is why the OG Maria is so much simpler. She still does a little bit of guilt tripping and other things that Remake Maria does, but not in poisonous doses.

So while James feels flat, Maria feels false.

Let me give you one final example. At one point in the game, Maria dies, but then James finds her alive and well. However, initially she behaves as if she's Mary, not Maria. This is where she says the famous words:

"James honey, did something happen to you? After we got separated in that long hallway? Are you confusing me with someone else? You were always so forgetful, remember that time in the hotel? You said you took everything, but you forgot that video tape we made. I wonder if it's still there."

Compare these two stills from this cinematic where the above happens:

See how in the original, Maria channels Mary? The stripper we know is now a demure young lady. This change in behavior is purposeful, as she is now Mary. The game messes with the player's head because the woman looks like Maria but talks like Mary and -- I'm sure players notice this only subconsciously, but that doesn't change anything, on the contrary -- sits in a pose that Mary would sit in.

Soon enough, Maria becomes herself again. "Are you Maria?", "I am, if you want me to be" -- and her voice becomes, as the creators call it, "more carnal", and her body language is now "sensual".

Meanwhile, throughout the entire scene, Remake Maria is... Remake Maria. Words coming out of her mouth may sound like Mary's, but her clothing and body language are 100% Maria. This makes the whole thing feel as if she's mocking us rather than channeling Mary.

To sum up this character, she's a sexy, well-written character that would be a riot in a different game. For the world of Silent Hill 2, even partially reimagined, she feels wrong. She is overwritten and does not feel like a creation of James' mind. Great actress, though, and a great 3D model.

Eddie

Eddie is the final character that also doesn't ring true. In his case, I don't need to write a dissertation. It's very simple.

In the original, Eddie is a low IQ fat dude that basically seems harmless, and we wonder what he's even doing here. The fact that at one point we meet him eating pizza is a well-known meme. I mean, where did he get a freshly made pizza, right?

Then we learn he was abused and laughed at due to his weight and lack of cognitive skills, and we suspect he killed someone in retaliation, but we kind of root for him. Okay, so he is a murderer, but we get it, right? He just snapped at his bullies after years of humiliation; it's not a surprise. We’ve seen this movie before.

But then, he says some of the most chilling words in the history of games, and we realize he may be a man betrayed and hurt, but he is also a sadistic psychopath.

Actually, his entire arc is encapsulated in this one speech:

"Do you know what it does to you, James? When you're hated, picked on, spit on, just 'cause of the way you look? After you've been laughed at your whole friggin' life?! That's why I ran away after I killed the dog. Ran away like a scared little girl. Yeah, I killed that dog. It was fun! It tried to chew its own guts out! Finally died all curled up in a ball... Then he came after me! I shot him too! Right in the leg! He cried more than the dog! He's gonna have a hard time playing football on what's left of that knee."

Amazing writing. Note how it all starts with us pitying Eddie; we feel for him. But then, wait a second, what's that about the dog? Bringing in an innocent dog is a stroke of genius, not to mention killing animals is something a lot of serial killers share. Anyway, we still give Eddie a chance; maybe it was an accident? After all, he does mention he "ran away like a scared little girl."

But no, Eddie shocks us with his confession, talking about the joy of watching others suffer. But it's not just his tormentors who suffer; it's the dog as well. And this is where we understand we are in the presence of a truly sick mind, and it's one of the scariest moments in the history of interactive experiences.

In the remake, Eddie is an absolute creep almost from the start. Instead of a harmless fat guy eating pizza, we have a menacing, oddly shaped man sitting in darkness and licking his hand, which is covered in melted strawberry ice cream.

And thus, when the confession scene happens, there's no surprise, no shock, no chills. At least nothing of the level when the confession is unexpected.

To be clear, as was the case with James, it's not about the fact that the developers changed Eddie. Again, this is a Remake, not a Remaster. It's fine to give him a new story, a new angle. But he is just as flat as James. There is no journey for him and with him, and once again, instead of being a revelation, a confession is merely a confirmation.

EDIT: A Twitter/X user astutely pointed out, "I feel like you're ignoring the priming for his freezer plane, which contrasts with Angela's fire plane." They're absolutely right, and I need to address this silly, unnecessary, and damaging addition.

As we know, Silent Hill creates your own personal hell. For James, it's death, primal sexual urges, and corruption, hence all the sexy body horrors in decaying hotel rooms. For Angela, her private hell is literal hell. When she says, "For me, it's always like this," surrounded by fire, it's one of the game's most profound moments.

Eddie's private hell is mutilated flesh. This obsession fits someone bullied for being overweight. It's why, when Eddie kills the dog and wounds its owner, we hear bloody details about entrails and destroyed bones. It's why a heavily mutilated corpse is nearby whenever we meet Eddie. He's obsessed with flesh destruction, despising his own and wanting to destroy his tormentors'.

This is why the final fight occurs in a meat locker, one full of mutilated flesh of pigs. The metaphor speaks for itself.

Eddie's arc has absolutely nothing to do with ice, snow, freezers, ice cream, or any other form of solid water. The remake's addition of this layer – from Eddie eating ice cream instead of pizza, with visible breath mist, to frozen corpses – is nonsensical. It's just developers trying to be clever, but it muddles Eddie's state of mind and undermines Angela's story. "She is fire, so let’s make him ice" is a shallow interpretation of these characters' personal hells.

Speaking of Angela…

Angela

Luckily for us all, the last two characters are, in my opinion, done right.

Let's start with Angela, the most tragic of all characters in the game. There's really nothing to say here. She's perfect. Her story rings true, the reveals are gradual and brutally honest.

There is an issue I have with her, but it's just about the gameplay and the metaphor that is the boss fight. In the original, you fought the Abstract Daddy in a small room. Gameplay-wise, this sucked. But it did sell the feeling of helplessness and entrapment well. With the room being an amalgam of flesh and rhythmically pounding machinery, the entire thing was appropriately disturbing and mentally taxing.

In the remake, the boss fight is a spectacular extravaganza of escaping from one closet to another while the walls crumble around you and giant machinery does its thing. It has the same goal as the original, but to me personally, it's all just too cool for its own good. You kind of admire the incredible work done on the fight instead of suffering with Angela.

Sometimes, less is more. To me, part of Angela's horror is the intimacy, and it's hard to sell intimacy in something that looks straight from a summer blockbuster movie.

Still, if it were up to me, I would keep the new version but tweak some dials.

Overall Angela is done incredibly well, and I would say her cinematics are much better in the remake. Her tragedy resonates with us even stronger than in the original, and she adds a lot to the Silent Hill’s mythos of horror.

Laura

Finally, we have Laura.

Man, that kid can act. Holy shit. W.C. Fields warned us to "never work with children or animals," and I can confirm this to be true. But here we have an exception.

I mentioned earlier that there is an issue with her in the videotape cinematic, and yeah, basically when she lashes out at James, her mouth barely moves. Here we have her screaming at the hero, but her face is almost motionless. This only further diminishes the effect of what is easily the most important scene of the game.

Other than this, perfection. In every aspect she's even better than the OG Laura. For one, it is clearer she is not some wicked bully running around kicking keys, but that she specifically has something against James.

So that's it, this is my take on the five main characters in the game. We do need to talk about Pyramid Head, too, but I'll keep it for the next installment.

The final part:

It pains me to write these words for two reasons.

One, I'm the guy who always cringes when I open IMDB and read user reviews stating "the original is better". This is often not true. For example, The Thing, The Fly, or The Crazies are remakes vastly superior to the original movies. But today, I am someone who writes exactly that, "the original is better". Oh, the irony.

Two, the Silent Hill 2 Remake was incredibly close to getting it right. It's frustrating how close it was. With some effort, the game could be fixed in a month or two. No one is going to do it, of course. I'm just saying it to emphasize how close it was to being the definitive version.

It's still a worthy purchase, to be clear. If you can afford it, buy it for the full price. So many great survival horrors await their reincarnation, including other parts of the Silent Hill franchise. And Silent Hill 2 Remake is worth playing for the new puzzles and flow alone, but you also get mind-blowing audio-visuals and -- I know this sounds weird but hear me out -- the opportunity to learn a lot about storytelling.

In my first essay -- yes, there will be more -- about the remake, I want to show how the first sixty seconds of the game differ from the original and why it's a problem bigger than one might think.

Silent Hill 2: More Than Just a Game

To understand the impact of the changes, we need to establish one crucial thing. Silent Hill 2 is not like other games.

I know you know. This is why you're reading this, after all. We all feel it, we all know it: Silent Hill 2 is a masterpiece. Not only a game that so many people enjoyed but also an incredibly influential one.

But why?

I think it's because in addition to the great visuals (at the time, of course) and music and sounds and story and twists and turns and tons of other things, it's one of the few games that invested so much in symbolism and thematic design discipline.

The interesting thing about symbolism is that the viewer (movies), reader (books) or player (games) does not need to understand it to feel its power. In The Godfather movie, oranges foreshadow a tragedy. Most people would never catch on it and halfway through the movie scream "Oh my God, an orange, someone is going to die!". But the subconscious gets it, and we become more engaged and aware whenever they're present.

As for the thematic design discipline, nearly everything that exists in the game was deeply thought through. I'm sure some things are accidental, that's just how it is when you make a video game, but most of it exists for a reason. Just take a look at these two quotes from the Making Of DVD, released only in Europe:

And this one is from Hiroyuki Owaku, the programmer and script writer:

I want the consumer to not look at Silent Hill 2 on the surface... Rather I want them to look a little deeper... It's easy to say that this is a story with certain facts. I want the player to question "Why did the creators do this or that? Or why did James or Maria react this way?.." This is a game where the questioning needs to be deeper to appreciate the real underlying story.

Whenever I watch any documentary on Silent Hill games, or read interviews or even tweets from Team Silent members, it's clear the creators were impressively purposeful in the design. They had a story to tell, and nearly everything that exists in the game was made with one goal only: to make it ring true.

And this is why the game resonates with us, over two decades after the release.

So if you change anything, you'd better have a damn good reason. Structurally, Silent Hill 2 is almost a perfect game, with all of its elements having a purpose. You don't mess with that unless you can make things even better.

Now, let's take a deep dive into the first sixty seconds of the game. Here are the most important elements of the intro cut-scene in the original…

A mysterious man stares into a mirror. We cannot see his eyes. This is the same trick that Coppola used in The Godfather (1972). Eyes are windows to the soul, and these windows are closed. We cannot say if the man is good or evil.

We don't know it yet, but we now witness the duality of James. There's his true face, true self, and the fake persona he invented, one who is not a murderer. Note that we only see the latter, the reflection in the mirror: it is him but it's also not.

The man does a weird gesture. This is not bad motion capture or anything; on the Making Of DVD, you can see the artist doing the exact same gesture for the camera. It's a bit surreal, but if it resembles anything concrete, it's like an act of putting on a virtual mask over his face, creating a shield. We know why he does it. He is going to wear that mask for quite a while.

The game now shows the man to us. It's okay, he is safe from our suspicion, shielded, wearing the mask. We are tricked into thinking this is just a guy. Possibly resting after a long trip or something. A nice man, nothing more.

But then we see he is inside an absolutely horrendous restroom. Note how the color tint has changed to infernal red. The restroom symbolizes his internal struggle. His mind is corrupted by the lie, and the lie is his personal hell. He may be wearing the mask, but the environment betrays him.

Of course, the players do not know that yet. What they subconsciously notice, though, is that the man does not seem bothered by the restroom. They will associate this James with rot, but that will only make sense to them a dozen hours later.

And now, the player is in control. It's nice because you can learn the basic controls in a small confined area. Also, giving the player control this quickly lets the mind rest from all the symbolism and messages the odd opening has conveyed.

But ...in reality, the player is still being fed the hidden truths. There is a door on one of the walls. But this is not the exit; this is literally just a door someone ripped out of the frame somewhere else. It takes a moment to understand that. This is where the player subconsciously learns that things are not what they seem.

Leaving the doorless restroom shows us a healthy, refreshed James just taking in the nice atmosphere. He's just chilling now, recalling the letter from Mary. We are ready to begin our adventure.

In the player's mind, we're a cool dude who got a mysterious letter from his dead wife and arrived at this place to look for answers. We wish him the best, that his wife is somehow alive. The other James -- the shed skin of the outside James -- was left behind in the restroom. Our adventure begins.

Now let's see how the remake does it and where I disagree with it.

We start with shaking hands. A man is trying to regain control over his body; he is clearly upset.

He touches his face to check if he's fine or real at all.

He leaves the dark restroom, taking one last look in the mirror, eyes full of pain and regret.

He opens the door and we go outside, admiring the next-gen visuals. James walks towards the edge as if he's catatonic. He rests upon the railing, lost in his thoughts.

That's it, that's the scene.

There's no gameplay break to distinguish between the "death" of old Murderer James in the bathroom and the "birth" of the Cool Guy James on the outside. There's no symbolism either. Nothing. Almost everything is literal.

I say "almost" because one could argue that James leaves the darkness (the restroom, which, unlike in the original, is just a dark dump) for the light. But even that tiny trace of symbolism is undermined by James clearly behaving like a guilty person: shaking hands, the painful stare, the catatonic walk. We no longer have a nice dude on a mission to solve the mystery of his wife. We have a broken man who just did something bad and looks like he just wants to off himself.

Watch that cut-scene again, please. Does this look like a nice guy who just created a fake persona for himself to disassociate his mind from the murder he just committed, or does he simply look like a person feeling guilty?

On the surface level, it's two similar scenes. A man stares into the mirror then leaves the restroom. But the details are all different, and so are the vibe and the message. The original is a masterpiece of planting symbols and themes inside the viewer's head; the remake is a visually stunning fact sheet.

The Why Behind the Changes

Now, why was the game changed this way? What was the reason?

Here is my theory. In a now-deleted tweet, Konami once said the game was remade for "modern audiences". Judging by some other elements of the game, it's clear to me that the publisher wanted the edge slightly blunted.

Been there, done that. When I was making Come Midnight, we made a scene where the hero emerges from an old house holding a child he just saved. This being a 1940s game, the man was also smoking a cigarette. And the child coughed because of the smoke. I thought it was hilarious because it's exactly what happened in the movies of the era, where you could literally see surgeons smoking during open heart operations, and yet today we know better. But the publisher said absolutely fucking not, no, you cannot have a cigarette and a child in the same frame.

With reports of publishers requesting changes to even the most innocent of games, it's very likely the changes to the opening were demanded by Konami (the publisher) and there was nothing Bloober (the developer) could do about it. I do not know for sure. I could ask, obviously I know a lot of Bloober developers, but I don't want to put them in this position. So it is speculation, but I can easily imagine Konami not wanting to start a game in a dirty toilet stinking of piss and shit, and explaining to the developer that "once we got them hooked, you can descend into madness and grit, but for the opening, keep it nice and clean". Hence only a moment in the restroom, hence its darkness.

But again, I do not know for sure, and even with the publisher's interference, the opening should have been better. So for now and for the future, I am going to write these analyses regardless of the reason for all these changes.

Let's go back to the opening segment. Compare these images from the original with the images from the remake. What do you notice that is different?

In the original, the lake sign is nice and clean, and the Welcome sign is not accompanied by any negative messages. In the remake, the lake sign is rusty and broken, and there is a Stop word written in giant letters on the ground.

It's almost like a way to describe the difference between the two openings. In the original, a dark man transformed into a Nice Guy James, and the world of that person is relatively clean and positive for now. In the remake, a dark man remains a dark man the entire time and his world is slightly oppressive and corrupted.

This means there is a much bigger dynamic range in the original because we go on a journey from Nice Guy James to holy fuck I murdered my wife. In the remake, we already start as Dark Broken James, and that removes an entire octave.

Believe it or not, there is one more thing that affects the player's vibe in the opening area, but I'm going to leave it for one of the next installments of this series. No, it’s not this…

For now, try comparing what happens in the original versus the remake when you try to leave the area the way you arrived.

Is It Really Such a Big Deal?

One final question for today is: okay, but is it all really such a big deal?

To me, yes. Not because I want the original untouched, and any alteration is a heresy. Nah, that's not it. The Remake is a Remake, not a Remaster. It’s fine to change things. But when you turn the complex melody of the opening, clearly a thoughtfully crafted scene, into a flat one-note song, then I cry.

But the thing is, even if it's not such a big deal I make it out to be, there is a process in psychology called death by a thousand cuts. Wikipedia defines it as "the way a major negative change which happens slowly in many unnoticed increments is not perceived as objectionable".

And there are quite a few of these cuts in the remake. Not a thousand, but enough to make an impression.

Each small change, like the altered opening sequence, the rusty lake sign, or the added "Stop" message, contributes to a subtly different atmosphere and narrative experience. While any one of these changes might seem insignificant on its own, their cumulative effect can and does substantially alter the game's impact and the player's journey.

But there are fantastic things, too, exceeding the original.

More about it soon.

Part 2: