Silent Hill 2 Remake: We Need to Talk About the Combat

My initial review of the remake was positive, only because I hadn't yet played the game for myself, living vicariously through Let's Plays and streams of the game. I still love the remake, but my God, does the combat drag on. Yeah, yeah, you can tell me it's just a "skill issue", but you need to understand: Silent Hill is not Dark Souls.

The original game had bad combat, too, but it was thematic, symbolic of James' character arc as an anti-hero everyman. But the OG's combat also didn't make me want to chew my hands off at the wrists like the remake does. The monsters, for the most part, ignored you unless you got too close. The remake's monsters have a lot of awareness for creatures with no eyes. There are also way too many of them. The game is oversaturated with these monsters and they become less frightening and more annoying as you progress. Ammo is also ridiculously scarce for so much combat.

In the OG, you could run past the monsters with no repercussions. In the remake, these monsters hone in on you like you have a tracker in your ass. Ignoring them will only get you ganked by an entire mob of monsters. This is not the fear I want to experience in this game, the fear of dying without saving.

This is a problem Bloober Team has exhibited before with The Medium. The Maw was not scary because it wasn't at all subtle, its design looking like more of a parody of Silent Hill monsters. The chase sequences dragged on and became arduous, with the Maw having some super cheesy dialogue. It also didn't make sense for the Maw to have trouble finding Marianne since he's 9 feet tall. They went way too far in the design and the gameplay and the whole game suffered for it.

The last thing I want to do is discourage Bloober Team from further Silent Hill projects, but I implore them to please consider adding a Story Mode. SOMA had this option so players could focus on, well, the story rather than the enemies. Silent Hill 2 is meant to be an atmospheric horror game with an intriguing narrative. It's not a Resident Evil game where the protagonists are professional marksmen. James is an anti-hero everyman who has never fired a gun before coming to Silent Hill. And you can tell he hasn't had any marksman training, because he keeps his finger on the trigger, a big no-no.

To players who enjoy the combat, good for you. You are having a much better experience and I hope you continue to. I just don't like that there are SO. MANY. MONSTERS. The game becomes more about killing monsters than finding our dead wife. I wish the difficulty controlled the amount of monsters, but even playing on Combat Light has them show up out of the fucking woodwork. If there's a symbolic point to pissing me off like this, I think you're overachieving your goal.

I think anyone, OG veteran or new player alike, will agree with me that the Mannequins have become the scourge of this game. It has become memetic of how they unsuccessfully hide like a dim-witted five-year-old and pounce on you like they actually scared you. And that's just their bipedal counterparts. I guess they're technically...quad-pedal? Whatever. The variant you'll see in the prison are the Spider Mannequins who are somewhat more successful at scaring you because they drop from the fucking ceiling.

Silent Hill isn't about monsters. Most of the games aren't even about Pyramid Head, though his appearance in everything begs to differ. Silent Hill 2 is about how James is desperate to see his dead wife again and the town that won't let him go until he's learned his lesson. The monsters are supposed to represent his fears and torture him psychologically - except the remake's monsters seem to have missed that memo or read it as physiologically.

In the OG, the monsters were minor annoyances, appearing in only two or three at a time. Their appearance was just sporadic enough that the tension never lifted. But in the remake, that tension doesn't get time to build because you begin to expect the monsters and it isn't scary anymore. When it comes to making horror games, less is more. You don't have to drown an area in creatures to make it scary. I think randomizing enemy placement would be much more effective in this regard.

I would like to have a last paragraph or two talking about a change I do like about certain monsters in the remake. I like how the Mandarins haunt the hotel, especially when James has to find those puzzle items without his gear. I thought that built the tension quite well because you can't fight the Mandarins in that area. They make really disturbing noises and it's greatly unsettling.

In summary, Silent Hill 2 Remake should be experienced, not endured. I don't want to be angry and pissed off by the combat, I want to be depressed and exhausted from the emotionally heavy story and atmosphere. By all means, call me a scrub all you want and tell me to "git gud." You think I like having a derisive opinion about a universally praised game? Bloober Team, if you're reading this, please don't take my criticism too harshly. I want more remakes. You did an amazing job on everything else.