The Silent Hill 2 remake is great because it’s actually scary. That might seem like an obvious reason to praise a horror game but given how dull some games in this genre can be, it’s worth zeroing in on how Bloober Team managed to make a game that has players white-knuckling their controllers. Especially given that, though I’ve liked some of Bloober‘s previous work, its games have rarely scared me.
I’m a broken record on this, but I have to repeat myself for this article to make sense: games without combat (or similarly complex mechanics, like Amnesia: The Dark Descent‘s light system) can almost never be scary.
Fear Of Failure Is Still Fear
Many things come together to make a gaming experience frightening. Lighting, sound, walk speed, monster design, level art, and more all play a role. The thing is: all of those are less impactful if there’s no fear of failure. Combat-less horror games tend to use chase scenes to drum up scares. But by and large, they don’t effectively conjure this fear because chases play out in the same way every time.
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If you’re focusing on memorizing a route so you don’t run into a pesky piece of furniture, you’re not afraid anymore. Your game-playing brain is going to the same place it does when attempting one of those ‘run toward the camera’ levels in Crash Bandicoot.
Combat, with its potential for surprise, allows for real fear to seep into the experience. Fights in Silent Hill 2 can go multiple directions, and that variability ups the unknowns. You might make it through unscathed, which we could call 100 percent success. Or you might make it through with the blood border around the screen and that blinking red cross in the bottom-right corner. We could consider that 10 percent success. Or, you might get knocked down to that low health threshold then rebound to full health thanks to one of James’ handy dandy needles. Would that be 50 percent success?
The potential for all those outcomes is part of what makes Silent Hill 2 scary. When you’ve gone a long way since the last save point and an enemy comes out of nowhere to land an attack on you, you’re suddenly extremely worried that you won’t make it to the next one. That rush of uncertainty is where horror lives and dies.
No Lock-On Makes You Scared Of The Dark
Which is why it rules that, at times, Silent Hill 2’s controls kinda suck. In most games, an enemy surprise attacking you isn’t that big of a deal because you can quickly click the right stick to lock onto their position. I do this in Bloodborne all the time, watching as the camera dizzily spins around my Hunter to find the little goblin who dared lay a hand on me. It’s not like FromSoft’s design is un-hardcore, but this makes it easier to regain your footing.
Silent Hill 2 doesn’t do that. It doesn’t have a lock-on option at all. So, when an enemy comes out of nowhere, you’re left rotating the camera, searching the darkness for movement. A lock-on option would immediately show you where your attacker is and if there’s more than one. In Silent Hill 2, I’m often surprised that I’ve stumbled into an apartment with multiple vomit vandals and finger fighters waiting to jump me. The music gives you the anxiety-inducing cue that something is nearby, but it doesn’t give you details. It’s up to you to find your foe. Lock-on isn’t there to help.
In that way, Silent Hill 2 has stripped away a security blanket that I tend to cling to when a game gets tough. If I can see my enemy, I can avoid them. If I don’t know where they are, they could be anywhere. By taking away lock-on, which most players would see as a quality-of-life feature more than an actual mechanic, Silent Hill 2 deepens its horror. It has you jumping at shadows, instead of lackadaisically clicking the right stick.
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