While playing through theSilent Hill 2remake, I’m often having the same thought that many people familiar with modern horror games are: wow, I can’t believeBloober Teammade this.
This isn’t coming from a Bloober Team hater. I’ve written before that I think Bloober made good games before Silent Hill 2. I’ll go to bat forLayers of Fear 2and I’m a big fan ofObserver, the studio’s 2017 cyberpunk game, especially in its upgraded form, 2020’sSystem Redux.
Silent Hill 2 Leans Into Player Agency
But even the games I liked by Bloober didn’t indicate that the studio was capable of something like Silent Hill 2. That’s because, until now, even Bloober’s best games tended to be light on mechanics. When its games asked you to do something other than walk around and look at stuff, they tended to fall flat or become outright annoying.
This was the biggest problem System Redux addressed in its reworking of Observer. The original game became pretty frustrating in its second half, as you worked through seemingly endless insta-fail stealth sections and boring cyber-dream sequences.
Layers of Fear 2, similarly, was great when it was allowing you to take in its atmosphere, but that series has an irritating dependence on ‘you walk into a room then turn around and the door is gone’-type scares. The constantly shifting architecture makes it impossible to feel like you have any real relationship to the level’s design because the design can change at any time.
Blair Witchcombined the worst of both of these traits, adding flaccid flashlight ‘combat’ sections where you needed to shine your light at an enemy a set number of times to make them run away. It was also set in the woods, so it was easy to get lost, which made Bloober’s environment-shifting tendencies even more grating.
Silent 2 Leaves Bloober’s Old Design Tricks Behind
Silent Hill 2 just… doesn’t do any of that. The environments are carefully built and solving the game’s puzzles by exploring its levels is some of the most fun I’ve had in a game this year. The game does close off routes behind you, but the level architecture remains consistent. It lets you make mental maps and gain a sense of comfort that is then quickly disrupted when an enemy shows up somewhere you didn’t expect.
Unlike Blair Witch, Silent Hill 2 feels like it was built with combat in mind, not like it was tacked on as a way to spice up Bloober’s usual shtick. Bashing enemies heads in with James' trusty nail bat feels satisfyingly heavy. It isn’t complex, but it is difficult enough that it captures the survival element of survival horror. I’m often searching high and low for juice and needles to get my silky-banged boy back up to full health, praying that the elixirs I need aren’t squirreled away in the room I can hear glitchy enemy noises emanating from.
Bloober’s previous games didn’t scare me much because they mostly didn’t have combat. Combat — or other, similarly deep mechanics, likeAmnesia: The Dark Descent’s light management — is crucial to players feeling a sense of agency. When a horror game doesn’t have a robust set of mechanics that players can engage with successfully or unsuccessfully, the player is less likely to feel responsible for their successes or failures. Feeling like you could change the outcome is essential to video game horror. If I know Mr. X will always catch me inResident Evil 2, the tension is released. It’s the uncertainty, the not knowing whether you’ll pull something off, that causes you to hold your breath.
Layers of Fear 2 has chase scenes, sure, and you can fail and get caught. But chase scenes are usually only scary the first time before becoming a matter of rote memorization. Combat, which is more fluid and improvisational, can still be frightening the fifth time through if your opponent unexpectedly gets a hit in.
All of this feels so new and fresh for Bloober and I hope that it carries these lessons forward to its future projects. I don’t believe that the only reason Silent Hill 2 is good is because it’s building on Team Silent’s 23-year-old foundation. But I hope Bloober Team proves that with its next at (nail) bat.
