With the Silent Hill 2 Remake announced, developer Bloober Team has shared small hints about what can be expected from the remake.
Chief Marketing Officer Anna Jasińska talked up the developers two games currently in the works: Layers of Fear and the Silent Hill 2 Remake. She was asked about how the team came to be the ones taking on the mantle of remaking such an influential game.
“The fact that we’re developing a Silent Hill game is an honor and a dream come true. Silent Hill 2 is a classic that shaped how our studio works on psychological horrors,” Jasińska said to Dread XP.
She added, “The idea of working on this project stalked us for many years, and in 2019, we received an invitation from Konami to participate in the Tokyo Games Show. To our delight, Konami asked us to prepare a concept for a remake of the original game’s second installment in exchange for the opportunity of bringing the concept to life.”
While she couldn’t give more details due to the game still being in the middle of development, Jasińska did talk up their approach to recreating the classic horror game.
“Longtime fans shouldn’t worry about us ‘missing the point’ while we’re livening up the title. We faithfully stick to the traditional story canon while remaking the gameplay and updating the graphics from the ground up,” she said.
“As you see, we are not straying away from the original concept of making this cult classic; we just have some ideas on how to make the peculiar scare factors more appealing to the contemporary audience.”
So far, the changes made for the “contemporary audience” primarily seem to be targeted towards gameplay.
Instead of the fixed camera angles seen in the original Silent Hill 2, the game will be more akin to the Resident Evil Remakes with an over-the-shoulder view instead.
Combat is also overhauled, which could be a concern as there was a reason for the jankiness in the original beyond just “hardware limitations”.
When it comes to story elements, Jasińska wouldn’t say as they still remain secret details, like the famous Pyramid Head kitchen scene. Though she does say Bloober Team are taking a “safe approach to any changes” and that they’ll apply adjustments to certain areas that “need modernizing due to the passage of time”.
Silent Hill 2 Remake is coming to Windows PC (via Steam) and PlayStation 5 (as a console exclusive, for a year).
