How to Fix the Silent Hill 2 Remake

The Silent Hill 2 remake is a good horror game. Personally I don’t think it’s quite as good as the original, but I did end up liking it a lot more than I thought I would. But while it’s good, for me it doesn’t quite feel like a real Silent Hill game, mainly because of a number of unsubtle mistakes it makes. But if those mistakes were corrected then it would feel like a real Silent Hill game, and a really good one at that.

So this is basically an open letter to any modders interested in polishing this game up and taking it from a good horror game to a great horror game. I’ll start with the most crucial fixes, and then go into a comprehensive list of things that are less important but would still be nice if they were fixed.

The most important thing to fix is the horrible sound design. The old Silent Hill games would pick one music track or one set of ambient noises to play in the background at a time, and would somewhat regularly also have areas that had neither and were just quiet. The remake constantly plays multiple music tracks or sets of ambient noises all at the same time, and the moments of silence are extremely rare. So please go through and change it so that there is only ever one music track OR one set of ambient sounds playing at any given time, and make the moments of silence more frequent. This alone will do a lot to improve the game’s atmosphere and have it approximate the eerie quietness of Silent Hill instead of being overly noisy.

The second most important thing to fix is the overabundance of enemies. Having down time between monster encounters is key to building tension, and the game just has too many monsters with not enough breaks in between. So I would say that at least 50% of all the monsters in the game need to be removed, potentially more, and the ones that need to be removed completely are the mannequins that crawl along the walls and ground like a spider, because that was a stupid idea that ends up being more annoying than scary, and the monster that appears after you open the fireplace at the hotel, because that was so stupidly over the top. The monster encounters should be spaced out so that they appear often enough to be a threat, but not so often that the player gets sick of them. The amount of ammo and healing items might also need to be adjusted down a bit to balance out the lower amount of monsters.

The third most important thing to fix is the way James automatically holsters and brings out his weapons without being told to. Just make it so that he doesn’t do that. James is wandering around a haunted town so there’s really no good reason for him to be putting his weapons away at any time considering that danger is lurking around every corner.

Those are the most crucial things to fix. The following are things that it would be nice if they were fixed, but aren’t quite as crucial, and I don’t expect all of them to be addressed, though I would be highly interested in a mod that addressed most of them.

The straight jacket monsters are okay but significantly less grotesque and memorable than the original version. They also weirdly use a mixture of sounds, sometimes sounding like the old version and sometimes sounding different. Frankly the newer sounds are lame, so adjust the straight jacket monsters so that they only make the sounds from the original, with the obvious exception of the acid spraying sounds.

There are several obnoxiously dark rooms in the beginning part of the game before you get the flashlight, so fix it so that we can actually see what we’re doing.

In general there are a lot of obnoxiously loud musical stings, and most of the time they’re less effective then an eerie silence would have been. When in doubt, cut it out.

If a note or paper serves no purpose other than to just sound ominous, remove it.

The sections where there’s suddenly hurricane winds blowing through the foggy streets were stupid, so get rid of the winds altogether.

For the flesh lip boss fight please get rid of the final stage where it becomes a metal spider, that was dumb. Also, Laura’s appearances after the hospital but before the hotel were redundant, so removing them would be good.

Get rid of the bugs on the metal grate floors in the labyrinth, it’s just too much and comes across as over the top instead of scary. Also get rid of the stupid scream thing that the hanging monsters and Abstract Daddy did to stun James, it was just obnoxious.

I did like what they were trying to do with Angela’s extended section in the labyrinth, but I think it went on a bit too long. I would cut out one of the sections between the moments when you smash a tv. Also I would move this section up so that it replaces the part of the labyrinth that just consists of fighting enemies in a linear sequence of rooms with alarms, as that part was  just infuriating and should be removed altogether.

The confrontation with Pyramid Head where you have to flee through the meaty tendrils and the following puzzle where you have to use the great knife was a clever idea, but because of the narrative context it comes across as tone deaf. So I would remove that Pyramid Head bit completely and replace the meaty tendrils with just normal bars that are broken through at the right time.

For the Eddie boss fight, cut out the final part and just have it so that once you reach the end of the second stage it’s over and Eddie dies. This was a section I really liked, but it overstayed its welcome, so fixing it so that it doesn’t overstay its welcome would be nice.

Keep the monsters in the hotel to a minimum. The hotel is supposed to be quiet and subdued, the home stretch, so while it’s okay to have a few monsters here and there, the game overdoes it, so fixing that would be great.

For the final boss, replace the new music with the old, and please remove the second two stages, as they were so stupid and over the top. Just give the first stage more health or something, but make it so that the final fight is more or less the same as the original, not the ridiculousness it ended up being.

And that’s it for now. Like I said, I did like the Silent Hill 2 remake a lot more than I thought I would, but it always bugs me when I see something that was good but could have been even better. But if someone actually makes a mod that addresses all of these issues that would make me really happy.

This was the first Bloober team game I played, and I can see why some people think they are a great horror developer, while other people think they are hacks. In truth both groups are right. It's clear that there are a lot of people on the development team who are extremely talented and creative and who know how to make a good horror game. But it's also clear that there are some absolute chimps on the development team who don't understand subtlety or pacing, and think that jump scares and loud noises are the epitome of horror. So if Bloober team could figure out which people are which and either fire all the chimps or at least relegate them to the bottom of the ladder and not allow them to make any important decisions going forward, the hard work of the talented and creative team members could truly flourish and shine without being dragged down by the dumb ideas put in by the chimps, and their horror games would be truly great instead of a mixed bag.