Bloober on Silent Hill 2 remake: 'We want to stick close to the original'

When Konami announced a Silent Hill 2 remake by Bloober Team last year, there was some concern about whether a studio that made its name with streamer-friendly scares in the Layers of Fear series was a good fit for such a beloved survival horror game. Especially when it was revealed that the remake wouldn't have the original's fixed-camera perspective, and was rebuilding the combat.

In a recent interview with DreadXP, Bloober's chief marketing officer Anna Jasińska tried to assuage these concerns, saying that, "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. These are the reasons why Konami entrusted us with the remake in the first place."

As Jasińska tells it, remaking the beloved game was something Bloober has been wanting to do for a long time. "Silent Hill 2 is a classic that shaped how our studio works on psychological horrors. The idea of working on this project stalked us for many years," she said.

Bloober seems to understand that Silent Hill fans are a demanding bunch, with high expectations for a game that was infamously ill-served by its HD remastering in 2012. "As for apprehension," Jasińska said, "yes, the pressure is high since we're dealing with one of the best psychological horror games ever made. We want to stick close to the original, and we will put it in the spotlight for years to come."

The trailer for Silent Hill 2's remake went out of its way to show off familiar locations like Brookhaven Hospital and to recreate specific story beats like James reaching through bars to grab a key. There may have been some real high-res cockroaches and cigarette butts in that dingy bathroom, but it was still recognizably Silent Hill 2's dingy bathroom.

These statements by Bloober's chief marketing officer line up with that to depict a developer being cautious in its approach to remaking a cult classic, and presumably anticipating more of a backlash. That said, there are suggestions that a few tweaks may have been made to the remake beyond just making the fight scenes and camera angles more dramatic. "We remain faithful to the original title," Jasińska emphasized. "Nonetheless, we are applying adjustments to certain areas where things need modernizing due to the passage of time."

The Silent Hill 2 remake is just one of many revivals of the Silent Hill series currently in the works. No Code, the studio behind Stories Untold, is working on Silent Hill: Townfall, while NeoBards develops a prequel set in 1960s Japan called Silent Hill F, and Bad Robot Games Studio plans some kind of "massively interactive live event" called Silent Hill Ascension.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.