The Silent Hill franchise just released trailers for several new projects recently, and fans are cautiously optimistic. While there’s been a lot of excitement over a seemingly different direction with games like Silent Hill f, there’s concern over the Silent Hill 2 remake. Not only is it skipping over the first game, but it also has the controversial Bloober Team behind the wheel.
Considering Konami’s disrespect for the franchise until this year, it’s only natural for fans to be wary. Ever since 2010s, Silent Hill has been making mistakes that cost the franchise dearly, and fans sincerely hope they don’t make the mistakes once again.
Stepping On Team Silent's Legacy
After the original Team Silent left the franchise, that’s when the troubles truly started. Team Silent was a group of people who had initially failed in other Konami projects. In essence, Konami had no faith in Silent Hill from the beginning. However, they would create one of the most iconic horror games of all time, and it was all thanks to their ambition and talent.
Since all of them had planned on leaving anyway, they used their limited budget and lack of executive oversight to create a truly unique and genre-defining experience. While there’s nothing bad about trying new ideas, the Silent Hill franchise has core themes and motifs that just weren’t present after Konami let other studios take the reins for the iconic franchise.
Canceling Unceremoniously
One of the biggest gripes fans have had with Konami in the past decade is their tendency to cancel or cut budgeting on beloved franchises. The canceled Silent Hills had everything going for it on paper. It had the much beloved Hideo Kojima running the project and scary monster designs from horror icons such as Junji Ito and Guillermo Del Toro.
Now, whether the game would have been true to the franchise is pointless, because gamers never got the chance to play it. While fans may never know the full story behind the cancelation, it’s not exactly inspiring Silent Hill fans to rally behind all these creative projects when Konami canceled its most hyped project in a long time without warning, even removing the demo entirely.
Remaking The Games Carelessly
For some fans, Silent Hill is not a franchise that really needs remakes. It was a perfect snapshot of its era, all the jankiness, voice acting, and graphics fitting the unsettling experience.
There’s a reason why the HD remasters of the Silent Hill games are so looked down on by fans. All the “polish” only served to smooth the edges that made the original games so beloved, not to mention it was still incredibly buggy. The remake of Silent Hill 2 needs to understand that they need to do something new, otherwise, it’s just a pale imitation.
Straying From Psychological Horror
After Team Silent left, the games took on a decidedly different take on its horror. While psychological horror elements do remain, there was now a more avid focus on shocking imagery such as gore, monsters, and jumpscares. While these elements were present in the Team Silent games, they were incidental to the emotional gut punch of the game’s story.
Homecoming in particular was an egregious offender, having conventional jump scares that just did not fit the series. While Silent Hill 4 moved in a different direction, it still felt like Silent Hill because it had fantastic psychological horror. The post-Team Silent games did not capture that same feeling of going mad from tragedy.
Streamlining The Visuals To Look “Conventional”
An unfortunate side effect of moving the Silent Hill franchise to western game developers is the sudden shift in aesthetic to more “conventional” by the era’s standards. Perhaps the biggest detriment to the franchise was the shift from fixed angles to an over-the-shoulder perspective reminiscent of games like Resident Evil 4.
This does not work for Silent Hill, because it was never an action-packed franchise. The only time it did work was in Shattered Memories, and that’s only because the game did not allow combat. The loss of those cinematic angles and liminal horror really affected the aesthetic of the franchise in a way it still hasn’t recovered from.
Focusing On Combat
The shift to over-the-shoulder meant that the post-Team Silent games had a lot more focus on combat. Of course, the combat was still terrible, but there was a clear direction to make the horror games feel more action-packed, which was a mistake. Even if the combat was good, this would still be a horrible thing. Silent Hill’s horror relies on the player’s feelings of helplessness and despair.
That means dragging the player through a slow-burn horror experience, where combat is a last resort, not a constant mechanic to worry about. Games like Origins, Downpour, and especially Homecoming fundamentally misunderstood this, giving the player strength that should never be present.
Oversaturating Pyramid Head
Pyramid Head is Silent Hill’s scariest monster, but it should not appear in any Silent Hill games that don’t involve James Sunderland. There is no good narrative reason for Pyramid Head to appear in other people’s personal hells because Pyramid Head is James’ monster. It is James’ personal manifestation of guilt and punishment. It’s why Silent Hill, Silent Hill 3, and Silent Hill 4: The Room don’t feature the monster at all.
Yet, for some reason, he appears in all the western Silent Hill titles as a “boogeyman”. It was most likely done as a marketing gimmick, and thus it dilutes the effectiveness of the creature. Not only that, each of these games makes Pyramid Head function more like a Resident Evil mini boss than anything else.
Taking Notes From The Movie, Not The Game
One of the “inspirations” for Silent Hill: Homecoming was the polarizing movie adaptation in 2006, Silent Hill. To latch onto the popularity of the movie (despite negative critical reception), they blended elements of the movie’s aesthetic into Homecoming. Not because it symbolizes the protagonist’s inner guilt, but because it was a marketable thing to do. Even the in-universe reason is handwaved, implying this was a “different” Pyramid Head who just happened to be similar to James’ version.
It comes off as an incredibly cynical way of building a game’s aesthetic. Furthermore, a movie that only focuses on the visual aspect of the franchise it’s based on but doesn’t pay its dues to the beautifully dark narrative that reinforces it. With the tease of a Silent Hill 2 movie adaptation by that movie’s original writer, fans worry that Konami will repeat these mistakes.
Move Forward, Not Backwards
Konami’s mainline Silent Hill games after the dissolution of Team Silent had an unfortunate habit of “trying to catch lightning in a bottle”. Despite saying they want to move in a “new direction” with the franchise by hiring new developers, Konami would still encourage constant callbacks to the original trilogy. Even when the franchise has new ideas, they keep looping back into the same old formula.
Team Silent always mixed things up with the games they developed. Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 are all subtly different in both tone, messaging and even monsters from the original game. Silent Hill 4 and Shattered Memories went in completely different directions but maintained a strong commitment to the psychological aspects of the franchise. They didn’t revel in the mold, they constantly broke it.
Let New Ideas Grow
In addition to moving forward from the past, new ideas need to be encouraged and rewarded. The reason why Team Silent was so good at what they do was that they were left to their own devices. They were allowed to try things that no other game developers were even thinking of at the time, and they had a strong studio backing them up financially, if not verbally.
Modern Silent Hill games were happy to just bank on the nostalgia because executives were too scared of the fan reaction. No matter what the franchise may be, sometimes it is best to either leave it in the hands of the creators and what they want to make, just like how Team Silent did in years past or to leave it be and let it end on a high.
