Silent Hill 2

There’s a certain precision to the dialogue in Silent Hill 2’s remake. At one point, referring to the dead wife he’s attempting to find in the nightmarish town that serves as the game’s setting, protagonist James says he’s looking for “my Maria” and the possessive in this sentence isn’t just a linguistic quirk. Another character, Angela, centres in on that “my,” her own experiences with men leading her to point out that James believes his late wife really was his for a little while—someone he owned or possessed through marriage and, even more so, the terminal illness that left her bedbound.

Because it’s a remake, this kind of precision is expected of the game. When even the most otherworldly of buildings and monsters are rendered in modern high fidelity, the script and performances apparently have to be lifelike enough to match. There’s a basic problem inherent to this approach, and one that’s likely inescapable given the machinery of commerce to which mainstream, high-budget videogames—and the videogame remake in particular—are beholden. Along with the visuals and the sound, the acting and the interface, there's a move toward a sort of thematic fidelity as well. And it's an ethos that results in this remade Silent Hill 2 becoming far too legible.

The original Silent Hill 2 seems, initially, like it has bad dialogue. The characters speak in halting sentences, delivered as if the actors only have a single line’s context to inform their performance, and don’t understand the plot in full. With time, though, their unnatural phrasing and seemingly distracted subjects of conversation start to make a sort of nonsensical sense. The way they talk, past and beyond one another, becomes the language of dreams—or, more accurately, nightmares. It’s a kind of language that provides clarity only in glimpses, like the sudden appearance of bold font signage on the front of a store that emerges from the perpetual fog as a guidepost.

In an article on the tonal quality of Silent Hill 2’s cutscenes, Clayton Purdom writes that the cast’s particular mode of speaking—“patiently, in soft, unpracticed tones”—works “in service of the game’s tone, adding to the lost, dream-like feel.” These performances, along with the game’s grainy visuals, are “ … limitations [that] congeal into virtues, the stiltedness of the acting and blurriness of the textures becoming bedrock components of this particular vision of hell.”

The most obvious reference point here, helped along by the Blue Velvet nod in James’ first, closet-bound encounter with Pyramid Head, is David Lynch. This is accurate inasmuch as Lynch, too, often implies rather than dictates meaning by allowing images and concepts to float freely between one another, interacting wispily until they form a collage of meaning. Played now, Silent Hill 2 also calls to mind the childhood nightmares captured so expertly in 2022’s Skinamarink. The original version of the game, like that movie, looks and sounds “bad,” in the sense that it can be hard to tell exactly what’s being shown on screen. The movie and game are viewed, too, through faux-film grain shots of dimly lit rooms, all presented through a series of fixed camera angles that keep what’s most terrible to see lurking, very literally, in perpetual shadow. And, in both, it’s hard to understand the significance of dialogue delivered through snatches of abrupt, often detached conversation, either delivered by stilted PS2 models or in nasally kid-speak, nonsensical until the dream’s glimpses of meaning aggregate into horrifying clarity.

Silent Hill 2’s remake largely eradicates this effect and the lingering unease a dream-like approach creates. Though it maintains the original’s structure and aesthetic in the broad sense, it blunts their impact by blindly chasing fidelity in its recreation. None of this is necessarily “bad” either. On a technical level, the remake is very well made and, most noticeably, very well performed. James, for instance, is played with a kind of terminal resignation, his new actor Luke Roberts imparting a weariness beyond weariness to his portrayal that inflects the character’s near total psychological collapse with an immediate relatability.

The fight with “Abstract Daddy”—the avatar of Angela’s childhood torment—is one segment of the game that, though not necessarily improved, is successfully reimagined. As James fights off the monster, a house’s hallways loop and contort, revealing cracked doors and the splintered wooden frames of closets, narrow crevices of broken drywall and support beams forming small hiding places. Televisions scream static in otherwise pitch black rooms, the familial landscape tumbling apart as the avatar of abuse—a walking slab with two figures, one poised in the act of sexual violence above the other—slams through barriers in violent chase. There is no clear avenue of escape. The monster controls the home. This sequence, like Roberts’ portrayal of James, gets the point across in the moment. It elaborates and dramatizes, in the conventional sense of both terms.

What sticks out, though, when the credits roll, is that nothing new in the game actually enhances what came before (barring, charitably, the increased notes James now jots down on the maps and how quickly the game loads the action of him pulling up that map for reference in the game’s many labyrinths). When Angela’s story reaches its climax, she still says what she said before, climbing a staircase engulfed in flames and summarizing, with devastating impact, the paternal abuse that’s ruined her life with a flat comparison to living in a burning building: “For me, it’s always like this.”

The Abstract Daddy fight might support that moment with different buttressing, as Roberts’ performance supports the path toward discovering the source of James’ agony, but it doesn’t make their ultimate result any more meaningful. If anything, the game’s elongated runtime, now padded out to nearly double the original’s length, makes this moment suffer by adding extra distance between Angela’s scenes. And the ability to understand more fully what, exactly, Angela and James have suffered, strips a layer of discomfort from the original’s process of cumulative association.

Say what you will about the value of taking a game from two decades ago and rearranging its guts to look and feel more like everything else coming out these days—and, for our sins, we have definitely used up a lot of kilobytes on the deluge of modern videogame remakes—but these projects can crystallize the essential qualities of their source material. It’s a particularly bizarre facet of games (although perhaps not that bizarre within a landscape of technological power worship and ‘Ocarina of Time in Unreal Engine’ concept videos) that a drastic shift in style can be considered a simple “update,” as if art is software to be eternally optimized. The original Silent Hill 2 can live on alongside its remake, of course, but a celebration of its new version as anything other than an accompanying text—a bit of fan fiction or “what if?” theorizing made concrete through the spending of millions of dollars—feels a little like calling somebody’s high-def photos of water lilies an upgrade over the impressionist paintings.

The vision, ‘outdated’ or not, is the point. With Silent Hill 2’s new precision, it’s clearer than ever to see what the original’s vagueness accomplishes. The art is still there in the remake but, ironically enough, by refining its fine points, you have to squint harder to see it.

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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and tweets @reidmccarter.

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