An Italian-language only quirk with Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 Remake almost spoiled the entire plot for fans playing in that language, but was fortunately caught in time for the day one patch to make changes. As spotted by PC Gamer, some garbled lines the player hears upon first picking up the game’s radio weren’t quite garbled enough in the Italian subtitles, accidentally dropping a massive plot spoiler in the first half hour. Stop reading now if you’re still playing, obviously. Here’s a video of a cat that sounds like he’s saying “bongiorno” you can watch instead.
]]>No game protagonist is more willing to stick his hand down a toilet than James Sunderland. Why is he doing this? You would have to ask him or the psychiatrist he badly requires. And it's unlikely he'd explain himself. This isn't the type of story in which the protagonist has difficulty accepting the existence of horrors, nor struggles with the surreality of what he needs to do to get through a locked door. In the opening minutes, James finds a well with a glowing red square floating inside, stares into it (it saves your game), then makes a calm remark about the odd sensation he feels, and moves on. The human corpses that pepper the town of Silent Hill are noticeably that of James himself, his head bludgeoned and bloodied beyond recognition but his jacket and boots unmistakable. He makes no remark on this. It's probably nothing.
]]>The Silent Hill 2 remake is only out today, but it’s been nearly two years since the first system requirements appeared, immediately distressing our PCs so badly that they started having their own nightmares of fog-smothered towns and James Sunderland in an uncomfortably high-poly nurse outfit. Those requirements have since lowered and risen, and now we know for sure that nu-Silent Hill 2 is one tough customer for performance – albeit one that benefits greatly from just one or two key settings tweaks.
]]>If you’ve been keeping up with the positive review scores for the Silent Hill 2 Remake, you may have been surprised to read the Wikipedia page over the weekend, only to learn that the horror game had "received the worst reviews imaginable." As spotted by Eurogamer, the page has now been locked following some deranged edits that altered review scores to appear much lower than they actually were.
]]>As I type these words, specialist wifeguy assessor Brendy is rambling through the fog of Bloober's Silent Hill 2 remake. Knowing Brendy, he'll be sauntering down Neely Street like a gentleman dandy from 1920s Oxford, throwing out his cuffs and elbows and winking merrily at all the shambling depression metaphors who are trying to chew his legs off. While we await his verdict, here's another excerpt from a chat with Bloober earlier this summer, in which I pop the extremely imaginative question of what they'll do after remaking Silent Hill 2. The answer, in brief, is more games with a manual third-person view that rely on ambience, suspense and the thrill of the unknown, rather than monsters going "boo!"
]]>Silent Hill has a messy, up-is-down relationship with time and history, so let's go about this hands-on with the Silent Hill 2 Remake in a messy, up-is-down way. Developed well over two decades ago, the original Silent Hill 2 is the magnum opus of Polish horror stalwarts Bloober Team. Running on then-innovative "Unreal Engine 5" technology created by Jazz Jackrabbit publishers Epic MegaGames, it's a wonderful abyss of a game that remains perfectly playable today, given a certain amount of tolerance for the quirks of the era.
It begins with your character, James Sunderland, descending from the road towards the eponymous Midwestern nowhere-town. Like many games of the period, Silent Hill 2 uses a third-person, over-the-shoulder manual camera, which allows you to glance fearfully up at the monstrous pine trees that fringe the path - each rising from a bulging tide of fog that menaces with the suggestion of approaching figures. There is moisture everywhere, gushing from drain pipes and dribbling down concrete barriers. As you amble into the murk, deathly chords and groaning, unmechanical motifs reverberate from somewhere deep underground.
]]>When Bloober and Konami announced that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 as part of a comprehensive series reboot, it made immediate if slightly deflating sense to me. Silent Hill 2 is the more feted of the Hills - if I were a calculating franchise custodian tasked with 'bringing back' one of the acclaimed original trilogy, that's probably the instalment I and my spreadsheets would fix upon. I mean, it's the game with Pyramid Head in it - the nearest thing Silent Hill has to a mascot, and it's not like there's an issue of cutting out plot material: each game in the Silent Hill series is, on some level, a distinct story with a distinct protagonist.
Still, the decision to 'skip' the first game in the series, whose world, narrative themes, music and art direction set the parameters for all the rest, made my brain itch a bit, and when I ran into Bloober's creative director Mateusz Lenart and lead producer Maciej Głomb at a Konami event, I had to ask about it.
]]>Twitter user pl_evil has helpfully translated a recent letter to shareholders from Bloober Team, showing that their new game "Project C" will be revealed later this year. This will be the studio's next original game, after they wrapped up Layers Of Fear last year with, confusingly, Layers Of Fear (the natural progression for a series: Layers Of Fear, Layers Of Fear 2, and then Layers Of Fear again, although it was going to be called Layers Of Fears at one point).
Bloober Team are currently doing a lot of IP work for other people, with the Silent Hill 2 remake due out later this year, and a game codenamed "Project R" in concert with Skybound Entertainment. Skybound are The Walking Dead company, so I wouldn't give you long odds for a bet on what Project R is about. Neither would I be surprised if Project C is unveiled this summer by a man named Geoff with shiny shiny trainers. I'm interested to see what it is, and honestly I'm hoping it's a brand new standalone thing, rather than a forced sequel to Observer or 2021's The Medium (where I got the header).
]]>The Silent Hill 2 remake's State of Play trailer doesn't give a full and proper representation of the game, Bloober Team's president Piotr Babieno has observed in an apparent swipe at publisher Konami, who Babieno portrays as responsible for the upcoming horror game's marketing. If you missed it, the trailer in question focuses on the "modernised" combat. It shows alleged "everyman" protagonist James Sunderland getting all Gears of Warry with some maggoty marionettes and rancid demon nurses.
]]>PlayStation's January State Of Play stream was chock full of big game announcements, including deep dives on Death Stranding 2, two Silent Hill games, Rise Of The Ronin and loads more stuff that will almost certainly be heading to PC at some point down the line. Because let's face it. Everything PlayStation comes to PC eventually. We just have a wait a couple of years for it. Just look at former exclusive Horizon Forbidden West, which is hitting PC on March 21st. That wasn't in tonight's showcase, of course, so let's take a look at everything that was. Start those PC countdown timers now, folks, because it's only a matter of time.
]]>Did we put the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater and Silent Hill 2 remakes on that list of our most anticipated games of 2024? The article is so voluminous I’m not sure I have the energy to check. I get halfway down the page and feel like I need to pitch camp below one of the paragraph breaks, like a mountaineer sleeping beneath a crag in one of those dangling tents. Assuming we didn’t, both have been slated for 2024 release by the PlayStation blog.
]]>Bloober Team, developers of Layers of Fear, The Medium and the upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake, have added another notable name to their plans for the next few years. The horror-focused studio is working with the creators of zombie comic book-turned-TV show The Walking Dead on a new video game adaptation.
]]>Bloober Team and Konami's forthcoming Silent Hill 2 remake will feature a playable origin story for Pyramid Head, according to a Best Buy listing. Specifically it says "fan favourite character, Pyramid Head, makes a return along with a special origin story for fans to play through." That's pretty much all she wrote, where the much vaunted "news-reporting" aspect of this news article is concerned. Now to spend several hundred words whining about why this is probably a terrible idea.
]]>Bloober Team have issued a statement about their upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake, clarifying rumours about the project’s release schedule and sales expectations. Last week, Polish site Bankier spoke with Bloober Team’s CEO Pitor Babieno in an interview that was mistranslated and began to circulate online. The mistranslations mentioned the remake was “technically ready” for launch, but Bloober Team have clarified these “statements have been taken out of context, due to inaccurate translations.”
]]>Happy New Year, folks! Crikey, there are a lot of games coming out this year, aren't there? When I first asked the team to put together their most anticipated games for 2023, I was thinking we'd have a reasonably sensible number of things we were all looking forward to, you know, somewhere in the region of the 43 games we highlighted at the start of 2022. Very quickly, though, it became apparent that, actually, there are simply loads of games the RPS Treehouse is personally excited about this year, and cor, it would be rude not to include every last one of them. I'll be upfront: there are a fair number of TBA games on here that probably aren't going to come out in 2023, but as ever, we remain hopeful and optimistic all the same. So let's dive in.
]]>Bloober Team's Silent Hill 2 remake will "stick close to the original" while applying adjustments like an over-the-shoulder camera. In an interview with DreadXP, Anna Jasińska from Bloober Team spoke about their approach to the remake.
]]>As a James who’s always forgetting things, I’m probably the main target audience of the Silent Hill 2 remake – one of yesterday’s many Silent Hill game and film announcements. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have expected such high demands from its PC system requirements, which have appeared on Steam.
Highlights include the AMD Radeon RX 5700 and Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 – a former flagship! – listed among the minimum specs, alongside a 12GB RAM requirement, and Windows 11 as the recommended OS. Those with a GeForce RTX graphics card could get some performance help, though, as the requirements’ notes say that meeting the recommended spec will allow for 4K resolution “using DLSS or similar technology”. That’s not quite a formal confirmation of Nvidia DLSS support, but strongly indicates it, maybe along with similar upscaling systems like AMD FSR or Intel XeSS.
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