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I’ll acknowledge up front, I was really, really sceptical ahead of the release of Silent Hill 2’s PS5 and PC remake. The studio behind the remake, Bloober Team, has an eye for interesting third person survival horror puzzle design, but has in the past majorly mishandled mental health themes in horror games such as The Medium. Without delving into spoilers for that title, their handling of The Medium in particular had me concerned that they would not be the right team to handle remaking Silent Hill 2, a game whose story would require sensitive handling of complex real world topics.
When reviews for the Silent Hill 2 Remake initially started appearing online, the thing that reassured me that the remake would be worth my time to check out was that reviewers who I knew shared my scepticism for Bloober Team’s work weren’t faulting its adaptation of the narrative of the original 2001 PS2 title. Add onto that seeing confirmation that Bloober had sought out sensitivity consulting by a company called Hit Detection, and I came in with hope that Bloober Team may have actually managed to avoid “Bloobering” things up too badly.
Having now put a significant number of hours into playing Silent Hill 2 Remake on PS5 this past week, I can say that I’m honestly pretty impressed overall with this remake, both in terms of how it manages to not mishandle the themes of the original, but also in terms of the accessibility accommodations that are present. I may not personally love every change made to the game’s combat system, but I do think on balance there’s a lot here worthy of praise.
Upon first boot, Silent Hill 2 remake shows a warning screen advising players with photosensitive epilepsy to be cautious about playing the game. This unfortunately isn’t paired with much in the way of settings options for improving the playability of the game for those players, but I guess I’m glad that the warning is at least present.
Then, Silent Hill 2 Remake brings up a content warnings screen, detailing that the game contains themes of domestic violence, emotional abuse, sexual assault, mental illness, child abuse, and other “mature themes”, before linking to mental health resources. These content warnings are all pretty accurate, covering the major themes of the game, and are a dramatic improvement compared to Bloober Team’s prior output. Previously, their games have featured “content warnings” that basically amounted to saying their games contain “intense themes”, rather than delving into any kind of useful specifics. By comparison, this is definitely a move in the right direction.
Then Silent Hill 2 Remake moves onto a first boot accessibility settings menu, broken down into Gameplay, Graphics, Audio, Controls, and Text subcategories.
In gameplay, players can alter when their aiming reticle is visible and what form it takes, how thick the reticle lines are, and the colour of their reticle. They can also select whether interactable points of interest and traversal points feature an icon, whether that icon displays the needed interaction button prompt, and how large that icon appears in game.
Similarly, for Quick Time Events, players can select whether to show a button prompt icon, and how large that icon should be.
In graphics, players can turn on visual filters for the three most common forms of colourblindness, switch on a persistent centre screen dot for motion sickness reduction, and turn off distortion visual effects in the in-game inventory.
Silent Hill 2 also features support for High Contrast Mode, a visual setting which changes the game world to greyscale and highlights important elements in bright and easy to differentiate colours, at least in theory when it’s done well.
It is great to see yet another game developer and publisher take a swing at implementing High Contrast Mode into their games. I’ve long said the feature needs to become an industry standard, and I believe this is both the first Konami and Bloober Team title to support the feature which is progress. However, it must be said, the execution of the setting in this game is inconsistent.
While there are some positives to be highlighted, such as the option to customise colours for each high contrast element separately, and the ability to choose whether to greyscale the world or simply add high contrast elements into the base coloured world design, the weakness of the implementation boils down to the high contrast elements simply not being high contrast enough in certain scenes, for certain contrast colours.
Some of the colours chosen for high contrast mode in certain scenes appear washed out and low saturation, making them at times hard to immediately pick out. If you’re going to implement a high contrast mode, you need to give the player the option to make these high contrast colours garishly visible for them to be as effective as possible, and some of the colours simply struggle in this regard. It’s not a persistent issue, but a great example of this is seen in the settings menu examples of blue or cyan colours when used for environmental interactables and save points.
Additionally, in certain scenes, high contrast mode turns off automatically, without clear reason, such as during one segment reaching into a hole in a wall to reach a jukebox key. No idea why, it typically persists between gameplay and cutscenes, so it disabling itself at seemingly random moments is confusing.
But I want to be clear, this is an inconsistent issue. Often the high contrast mode support is perfectly adequate, and its presence in game is hugely appreciated, particularly for combat sequences in particularly dark locations, such as the interior of some buildings.
I’m glad high contrast mode support is here, the groundwork is done. My hope is that we could either see the execution improved in this game via a post launch patch, or see a better implementation in a future title from the studio.
In the Audio menu players can switch on a Radio State Indicator, making the in-game radio which crackles more intensely as you approach a monster accessible visually. While I have no issues with the execution of this visual indicator itself, there are certain enemy types which don’t set off the radio with audio or visual indicator feedback, and I wish there was a setting to make all enemies set off the radio during play instead of certain enemies evading the feature.
In controls, players can set sprint to be a toggle rather than hold input, increase aim assist magnetism, and turn Quick Time Events into button holds rather than mashing sequences. I would love to see an option added to do a single button press rather than a hold or mash for QTEs, but I’m glad at least this one alternative is present.
Lastly, in the Texts submenu, players can turn on subtitles and non verbal captions, alter subtitle size, add speaker names, add backgrounds to subtitles, and alter subtitle colours.
Silent Hill 2 Remake offers players three choices of subtitle and caption font – Standard, Bold, and Open Dyslexic. All three of these are provided with dropshadow as default to make them more legible if you’re playing without a background present behind subtitles.
Tips, tutorials, and transcriptions can also have their text size and font customised separately.
Beyond the dedicated accessibility settings menu, there are a few other settings options to be found in other menus, alongside accessibility settings being mirrored in other menu locations.
Ammo can be set to be permanently displayed on screen rather than dynamically displayed, the low health screen vignette effect can be disabled, volume sliders are available, and “Night Mode” audio reduces dynamic range, making louder sounds quieter and quieter sounds louder for a more consistent volume experience.
Compared to the original Silent Hill 2, the remake places a heavier emphasis on combat, with enemies dealing high damage at close range, consistent attacks from monsters, and a focus on balancing limited healing resources and low ammo offerings. If you struggle with this gameplay balance, Silent Hill 2 allows for both combat and puzzle difficulty to be customised independently of each other. You can, for example, reduce combat difficulty to take less damage and receive more supplies to tackle challenges, without impacting the complexity of puzzles found throughout the world.
Lastly, much like the original game, Silent Hill 2 Remake features a map system that automatically annotates your map as you explore, marking dead ends, accessible doorways, and the locations of puzzles, as well as whether or not you’ve completed certain puzzles yet. This system really helps to mitigate frustration, particularly given that the game features numerous locations containing lengthy puzzle sequences often spread across multiple floors of a single building. Additionally, I appreciate that in spite of the map being a physical paper map in universe, there is a degree of suspension of disbelief afforded, in order to have a real time icon display your location and orientation during exploration.
Having put a good number of hours into the game, I’m honestly surprised by how positively I feel about Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 Remake. Largely dialogue from the original game is unchanged, albeit more impressively performed. Places where narrative changes have been made, they largely feel handled with subtlety and nuance benefitting the storytelling. Bloober Team have navigated a complex set of themes with careful hands, and managed to not leave their usual brand of thoughtless insensitivity on it. That much surprised me.
I had not considered that this remake of Silent Hill 2 would feature as robust a series of accessibility support features as it does. I was so focused on whether Bloober would “Bloober up” the narrative, the thought that they would make large strides forward in mechanical accessibility simply didn’t occur to me.
While there are some areas where improvement could be made, notably with regards to the consistency of visual saturation in the game’s high contrast mode, I feel confident in saying that Silent Hill 2 Remake does a lot to show that Bloober Team has put the work in on this remake, and proved my fears and scepticism wrong with the end product.
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