Silent Hill 2’s remake proves the doubters wrong

Regardless of how well the Silent Hill 2 remake does, you’ve got to hand it to Bloober Team for turning around a situation that killed so many other games.

Following the initial positive response to its announcement and its first trailer, subsequent gameplay footage was met with so much negativity that Bloober Team’s president actually had to come out and say it wasn’t responsible for the game’s marketing, and that it didn’t represent the game.

We’ve seen this story play out numerous times before, where the internet decides a game’s fate before it’s even released, the thumbs down icon on a YouTube trailer acting as the modern day equivalent of the same gesture that condemned Roman gladiators to death.

And yet, Silent Hill 2 hasn’t gone the way of Metroid Prime: Federation Force, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League and Concord, all of which were essentially destined to fail following online consensus. Instead, Bloober Team has managed to turn things around, via a combination of positive press preview coverage and a couple of genuinely brilliant trailers.

If the game ends up performing worse than Konami expected, then, it won’t be because of any ill-will among the gaming community. Where once there was concern about Silent Hill 2 – the combat, the character designs, the pedigree of the studio behind it – there’s now excitement. And for the most part, we can happily confirm that excitement is justified.

If you’ll forgive our immediate reference to Silent Hill’s long-time rival, this new take on Silent Hill 2 is more like the Resident Evil 4 remake than the Resident Evil 3 remake. Whereas the modern Resi 3 took the game in a wildly different direction to the original, the Resi 4 remake stuck a lot closer to its source material, and it’s this road that Silent Hill 2 also goes down.

While the puzzles are different, and there are extra scenes that aren’t found in the original – it’s not like you could bring up an old 2001 walkthrough from GameFAQs and use it here because it’s