Silent Hill 2 shouldn't have been Konami's first call for a remake

I’ve been absolutely enamoured with Silent Hill 2 (2024), as it’s been my first dive into the horrific world of Silent Hill - and thankfully, I’ve remained mostly spoiler-free despite the game essentially being over 20 years old.

James’ story and connections to the mysterious town of Silent Hill, as well as the demons that reside there, have had me hooked from start to finish, but there is one question that has been lingering in the back of my mind throughout the whole playthrough. Why start here?

Check out the trailer for Silent Hill 2 below.

Silent Hill 2 first launched in 2001 for the PlayStation 2 and is by far the most successful game in the series. As I alluded to before, the story is a top-notch psychological horror, and it’s no wonder monsters like Pyramid Head have lived on to become gaming horror icons. But despite its popularity, it perplexes me that Konami remade this game rather than the original. After all, surely it makes sense to go in chronological order?

I’ve pitched this to friends and largely get the same response. They often say something along the lines of, “But the Resident Evil remakes started with Resident Evil 2?” and it’s a fair response, but it’s important to remember the original Resident Evil was remade for the Nintendo GameCube and is largely considered the definitive version with no hopes of improvement. The artstyle holds up, it’s faithful to the gameplay of the original PlayStation version while modernising the controls, and it’s available on modern platforms. Resident Evil 2, on the other hand, never made the jump to modern Xbox or PlayStation consoles, so it makes sense why you’d start there.

Jumping back to Silent Hill, there are no ports of the original games. You can’t even play them as ‘classics’ through PlayStation Plus Premium. If this is the case, why jump straight to Silent Hill 2 when you could have started from the beginning?

Konami

It’s a popularity contest, I get it. Konami knows Silent Hill 2 is big and is more likely to get the sales, but it’s not like the first Silent Hill was a bad game. In fact, the first game and its sequel received largely the same review scores. Silent Hill 2 just came out at a better time as everyone was blown away by what the PlayStation 2 hardware could do. It comes across as an attempt at an easy win - which is a shame because there could have been an even greater surge of new fans if the remakes started from the top rather than two games in.

Konami is doing something similar with the Metal Gear series, remaking Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater rather than starting with the original MGS game. That said, many are speculating the remakes for those games will follow the in-game history, and with Snake Eater taking place at the beginning of the timeline, it makes sense why it would be treated as the starting point.

This isn’t the case for Silent Hill, as while the timeline is a little skewed and most games are standalone, they do tend to go in order, despite never really confirming the date of in-game events outright. That just makes it weirder that they did Silent Hill 2 first, in my opinion.

The only reason I can come up with, aside from its popularity, is because Silent Hill and Silent Hill 3 are directly connected. Perhaps Konami is thinking it’d make more sense to release them together for a more coherent story, but if Resident Evil can get away with its remakes taking place at different times and locations, surely Silent Hill can as well.

Konami

The Silent Hill 2 remake is fantastic. I’ve loved every minute of it, and it’s been a pleasure to finally immerse myself in its horror. That said, I’d have loved to start my adventures in Silent Hill with the game that actually started it all, rather than one of the series’ best hits. If Silent Hill wasn’t such a success on the PlayStation, we wouldn’t have gotten Silent Hill 2 as a result, so surely it deserves more respect and is worthy of a remake to capture a brand-new audience?

If Konami does decide to revisit Silent Hill though through more remakes, I’m hoping Bloober are given the opportunity to bring them back to life. They did a fantastic job here, and I’m excited to see more from the team that resurrected such a horror icon.