Konami Should Sell the 'Silent Hill' Franchise to a Company That Knows What They're Doing

Content Warning: Mentions of games talking about trauma, sexual assault, and pedophilia, and one of them does it very badly. Also, spoilers for Silent Hill 2, The Medium, and Layers of Fear.

Konami as a video game company have not had a good track record when it comes to disappointment. In fact, if it weren't for Electronic Arts, they would be hovering at the number 1 spot of most awful video game companies in the world. Their downward spiral started during an over-ambitious year full of failure in March 2012.

Firstly, Silent Hill: Downpour hit the shelves and opinions were...polarizing to say the least. My personal opinion was that it was good for the first 3/4ths of the game and then just fell off a fucking cliff into a plot-hole ravine the size of Texas. It was already disadvantaged from the get-go, being the 8th official Silent Hill title, having to rival the ultimate big kahuna which was Silent Hill 2. Also, there was a pattern of repeating the same type of plot as Silent Hill 2, namely the protagonist having amnesia and not remembering the awful thing they did. The theme of punishment and a nightmare world born of someone's manifestations of guilt also heavily influenced Downpour's design, because the protagonist was literally a prisoner and all of his delusions have to do with aspects of incarceration and crime.

The second Silent Hill title to release was the absolutely astoundingly awful HD Collection. This was supposed to be an HD remaster of Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3, originally just for the PS3, but fan outcry eventually swayed Konami (or, let's be honest, the smell of fans willing to give money swayed Konami) to produce an Xbox360 version as well. Certain virulent and pretentious fans would blame director, Tomm Hulett, for the disastrous outcome of the HD Collection. However, he is a scapegoat who had to somehow make do with the fact that Konami hired a mobile game developer to port two of the most graphically-intricate games on the PS2 to PS3 and Xbox360. Sometimes, I don't think Konami realizes that code isn't universal between platforms. Asking a mobile game developer to port these games is like asking a fresh-out-of-school architect to build a life-size replica of the Taj Mahal.

That was not the only issue, however. Guy Cihi, the voice actor who portrays James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2, argued that Konami hadn't paid royalties for reuse of his voicework for the remake. So, Konami thought that they would avoid legal repercussions by recasting the characters. This was immediately lambasted by the Silent Hill fandom, arguing that the acting in the games was some of the best ever in video game history and replacing them with professional voice actors would take away from the heartwrenching, authentic performances. Cihi and fellow cast members along with a few actors from Silent Hill 3's cast agreed to set aside the lawsuit for the sake of keeping the original voicework. However, this decision would only affect Silent Hill 2, which included an option for old and new voices, but Silent Hill 3 used the new voices exclusively. While the new voice-acting wasn't necessarily bad, it was just...unwanted. I'm sorry, but nothing holds a candle to Monica Taylor Horgan's (actress for Mary Shepherd-Sunderland) tear-inducing performance reading the letter at the end of Silent Hill 2.

Konami's next stop on the ruination tour was the October releases of Silent Hill: Book of Memories and the second Silent Hill film, Silent Hill: Revelation 3D. Book of Memories was a Playstation: Vita (remember that?) game that fashioned a Silent Hill-esque story into a dungeon crawler. In the game, you'd create your character and you'd be sucked into an alternate dimension to fight Silent Hill creatures from past games. The premise is so exceedingly cliché and simple - you find a mystical book that has all your memories. Basically, it's bunch of stupid high school teenagers trying to solve their problems with an occult tome. I have a feeling this game wasn't a Silent Hill game until Konami got their hands on it, kind of like what happened with Silent Hill 4: The Room.

Now...the movie.

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D.

When a film's best jumpscare is a Poptart popping out of a toaster, you know you're in for a mediocre time.

That was literally the first time I actually jumped while watching that movie in the theater. Not the stupid bloody-mouthed bunny looking at me, not the cult bros in gas masks chasing Heather, not Sean Bean being dream-eviscerated by a sawblade, nope.

It was the fucking Poptart jumping out of the toaster.

That set the tone pretty well for what was a baffling film-viewing experience. The school went all dark and spooky with a monster charging toward Heather and then...something really scary happened.

Beardless Kit Harrington showed up, pretending to be a teenage boy and failing horrifically at an American accent.

This whole movie is a hodge-podge of horror film clichés. It's like Scary Movie, but not intentional as a satire. There's kids eating cake at a food court in the mall that all turn into Juggalo children with clown make-up on, eating bloody, greasy meat in the next shot. Douglas Cartland shows up for like one scene. Literally maybe three minutes and then he's just carved up by a knife-wielding cenobyte thing. And during that scene, if you have the 3D glasses, the chopped off fingers fly into your face.

Seriously, what is this? Go back to Hellraiser!

I have never seen such a trainwreck of a film as this. I was absolutely flabbergasted at the Pixar mannequin spider creature because...why????

But the most egregious part of the film was the ending...when this sawbladed cenobyte-wannabe had a Mortal Kombat cage match when Pyramid Head.

I think the film is up on YouTube for free if you want to watch it. That is how awful it is. It's so awful, it's worth a hate-watch at the very least. Apparently, there are rumors about a third Silent Hill film to be directed by Christophe Ganz, the director that made the first film and decided that Harry Mason cared too much about his daughter in the original game and his character was changed to a woman named Rose. So, if he's adapting Silent Hill 2 into a film, he'll probably make James Sunderland into a woman named Johanna looking for her dead husband in Silent Hill because men don't feel emotion for other people, ever. (That was satire. I'm still bitter about it, as you can tell.)

Overall, these entries into the franchise would forever sour Silent Hill fans about Konami's mishandling on the intellectual property. But two incidents would finally put the nail in the coffin of fan's optimism for the future of the series. PT, standing for Playable Teaser, lit the wildfire of hope in the fanbase that they would finally get their beloved franchise back, saving it from the threshing machine of cooperate greed. It was a first-person teaser in which you traverse through a house, looking for clues and interacting with objects to piece together the story. The scares were on-par with the early Silent Hill games and people were rejoicing, hoping that Silent Hills would be the revival they all craved.

Sadly, on one forlorn April morning, the news spread through the fandom that Silent Hills was dead. Kojima's departure from Konami would accompany the news and rumors still persist to this day that he's working on Silent Hills in secrecy. That's not the only slap to the face Konami was providing though. They released a trailer for a Pachinko machine using the Silent Hill 2 IP which came out in October 2015. It's a gambling machine. Apparently, those are big in Japan and Konami really just wanted to piss in our faces by making one of the most beloved horror games of all time into a literal money machine.

You see why I don't trust a single piece of news that comes out about that miserable company of blood-sucking parasites? The trust has not just been broken. It's been broken, ground up, fed to the public, shit out, and then smeared over our heads as they laugh mockingly at us. The alleged rumors about there being two Silent Hill games in production do not have me excited. It's because Bloober Team are doing those games. Apparently, they are considering a Silent Hill 2 remake. Bloober Team might have the graphical know-how, but they wouldn't know what good writing is if it spent 1991 words ripping into them in an article online.

I have never played Layers of Fear or The Medium but from gameplay footage, other critics' scathing reviews, and a Jimquisition video detailing their failures at writing and understanding mental illness, I don't want Bloober Team anywhere near Silent Hill. Layers of Fear was just a rip-off of PT, even down to the Lisa monster toward the end. The Medium was not only criticized for cliché horror tropes, but for frankly awful representation of psychological trauma, specifically concerning sexual assault.

This is especially troubling and I feel like I need to go over specifically why Bloober Team's The Medium is an omen for how badly they will fuck up the remake of Silent Hill 2. The Medium's premise is that the protagonist lives in an limbo between two worlds or whatever. Blah blah blah, alternate realities, Silent Hill otherworld rip-off shit. What you need to know is that there is a young girl who was raped and somehow manifested a creature of her trauma called The Maw. This creature cannot be killed unless the host is killed and that is the very choice you make at the end of the game - kill the little girl to kill her trauma monster or kill yourself. Which is a none-too-subtle suggestion that people who have had traumatic pasts will never have peace. Also, there's some very creepy undertones that the game wants you to feel sympathetic toward the girl's rapist. Uh, no. That's a fucking no. Hard pass.

You see why this team is an absolutely horrible choice to remake Silent Hill 2 yet?

Silent Hill 2 also has a character who suffered sexual abuse. But the way the game handles it is leagues better than what Bloober Team could ever hope to accomplish. James is simply not given the option to save Angela. That's not his choice to make. He is not the person to swoop in and save the damsel in distress. He doesn't beat up the representation of Angela's abuser in an epic boss-fight, have a heroic speech about chivalry, and completely end all of Angela's problems.

One of the main themes of Silent Hill 2 is how trauma affects the mind. James experiences a fugue state after suffering the loss of his terminally ill wife...whom he would find out he had euthanized with a pillow, thus triggering his dissociative amnesia. Eddie acted out violently as a result of being bullied. Angela also suffered dissociative episodes but is prone to outbursts of fear and defensive posturing, mirroring an entire childhood of deflecting her father's sexual and physical abuse.

Bloober Team, you need to take a psychology course and actually study Silent Hill 2 closely and introspectively to truly understanding its subtlety and mastering of horror. Just being a fan of something does not mean you're licensed to make it yourself. I'm a fan of Subway sandwiches, but that doesn't mean I want to or should make them myself. There'd be way too many pickles. Roasted chicken, pepperoni, and pickles. Any doctor reading this just clutched their pearls in horror right now.

Thanks for reading! I hope that Bloober Team doesn't remake the game. Or make any Silent Hill game. Please Konami, just let the franchise rest in peace. Quit digging the body up every couple of years and trying to Frankenstein the corpse back to life.