Silent Hill 2 remake creative director, Mateusz Lenart, revealed during a panel at the Game Developer’s Conference (transcription via GamesRadar) that the studio believed that it wouldn’t be able to do a proper remake for Silent Hill 2 without using some of the original title’s more archaic mechanics and features.
Believing that there “might be no good way to create the remake for [Silent Hill 2],” Lenart spoke about developer Bloober Team’s perspective of trying to bring memories of the seminal horror title back to modern audiences. However, this didn’t mean making it a 1:1 remake, and the studio would go on to add modern features like an over-the-shoulder camera with a more modern control scheme.
“From the beginning, we knew that the story of this game is the most important aspect of it, and we didn’t want to change it too much,” said Lenart. “At the same time, it was clear that it would be hard to present this story in the modern era without changes in mechanics or combat.”
“One of our first decisions was to change the camera to a regular over-the-shoulder third-person perspective,” he continued, saying that “we knew that with that change, we would lose a certain style from the original game.”
Bloober Team worked on the remake of Silent Hill 2 alongside Konami. The game was released for PC and PS5 back in October 2024. Since then, the title has seen immense success both critically as well as commercially. It managed to sell more than 1 million copies in its first three days. As of January, Silent Hill 2‘s remake has sold more than 2 million copies.
On the critical side of things, our own review of Silent Hill 2‘s remake awarded the game with a score of 10 out of 10, praising the title for being one of the best survival horror games out there, and standing amongst games like Resident Evil 2 and Dead Space. The Silent Hill 2 remake even went on to become GamingBolt’s Game of the Year for 2024.
Konami has also praised the commercial performance of Silent Hill 2, reporting increased sales and operating profits thanks to the release of the horror game.
Silent Hill 2 remake producer Motoi Okamoto has also spoken about Konami’s decision to go with Bloober Team, which has previously worked on horror games like Layers of Fear and The Medium. He chalked up the decision to wanting a studio that is familiar with designing and developing horror games, since other studios would have likely needed some time to figure the genre out.
“No matter how broad a game design expert’s knowledge is, they won’t be hired to work on a fighting game if they have no experience developing fighting games,” said Okamoto. “The same goes for horror. But then, with companies requiring such genre-specific experience, you realize that everyone has to start out as a novice for the given genre at some point. Nowadays, indie development has become the way to overcome that.”
Check out our thoughts on which game did it better: Silent Hill 2 vs Resident Evil 2.
