Silent Hill 2 got an emergency patch after a 'huge translation mistake' spoiled the whole game for Italians

(Image credit: Konami)

Holy Roman Emperor Charles V used Spanish to speak to God, French to speak to men, and German to speak to his horse. Italian, however, he reserved for spoiling videogames, and it delights me to say that Bloober Team's quite good Silent Hill 2 remake keeps that tradition alive: The devs had to release an emergency patch to stop Italian-language players from having the entire game unveiled for them right at the start. Che brutta figura.

As spotted by eagle-eyed James Sunder-lovers over on Reddit (via PlayStation Lifestyle), the game's 1.003.000 day-one update contained one major fix: It adapted the Italian localisation for an early scene that had—in the game's advanced access, original incarnation—fully subtitled a voice line that was only meant to be understood as garbled fragments. "For Italians: download the patch because there is a huge translation mistake that spoil something of the game in the first minutes," reads the patch's top-rated comment on the Silent Hill subreddit.

I'll be circumspect about what, exactly, was spoiled until after the jump below, but in every other language the particular line is effectively inaudible and, in the subtitles, is rendered as a jumble of full stops and isolated letters. You're only meant to notice what it's gesturing at on a second playthrough, once you've got a full grasp on the story's twists and turns and you know exactly what's going on. Spoilers ahead for what the line in question says.

That's right folks: It's Mary's garbled voice lines over the radio right at the start. Although James says he's come to Silent Hill to find his wife, the man is not very well, and has blocked out that he actually killed her himself, which you find out towards the end. The garbled question she asks over the radio is "Why did you kill me?" which is quite the humdinger of a spoiler to be dropping on Italian-language players at the beginning.

One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.