Bloober's remake of Konami's Silent Hill 2 is shaping up to an excellent horror game, not least for how it forms a dialogue with the 2001 original..
From the article:
On the whole, Bloober's Silent Hill 2 sometimes seems more... visually led than it should. There's an innocent airiness and spaciousness to it, for all the shadows and grime, with puddles that grandly reflect the clouds and sumptuously imagined interiors that speak to an antiquated fixation with extravagant lighting effects and photorealistic fine-detailing for its own sake.
Did an AI write this? Completely mixing up history and the present in the same sentence
Developed well over two decades ago, the original Silent Hill 2 is the magnum opus of Polish horror stalwarts Bloober Team. Running on then-innovative "Unreal Engine 5" technology created by Jazz Jackrabbit publishers Epic MegaGames, it's a wonderful abyss of a game that remains perfectly playable today,
I'm writing about the Silent Hill 2 Remake in this scrambled, back-to-front, obnoxious way partly to piss off whoever edits this (to be 100% clear, Team Silent are the creators of the original Silent Hill 2, which Bloober are remaking), and partly to make a point about remakes: that they tacitly or openly position the original game as an "obsolete" museum piece in need of replacement, dismissing the old artistic choices as primitive and incomplete, re-defining the old creative parameters as constraints that need to be lifted. It's all in the service of the market's cannibalistic mania for the new, its structural need to ceaselessly bury "the past", often by directly obstructing non-commercial preservation efforts, and sell you Progress that starts to wither and fade the second you peel away the cellophane.
I was super excited for this game until I heard about the free cam... Really hoping it's something that can be turned off. A core piece of the original horror was hearing something coming but not being able to see it.
I don’t know if I can agree - there’s enough friction just in being able to explore the world from workings like that, I don’t blame them for changing it. At best it can feel cheap. There’s still plenty of ways to apply vulnerability of the unseen.