Silent Hill 2 Early Access Exceeds Expectations

Since Konami announced at the end of 2022 that they were working on a remake of Silent Hill 2, the excitement among survival horror fans has only grown. Right after the announcement, the community became divided—many worried that Bloober Team wouldn’t be up to the task, while another group (myself included) believed that the Polish studio’s prior experience was enough to trust them with the project. They had already developed games like Layers of Fear and its sequel, >observer_, and The Medium, titles where psychological horror and environmental manipulation to build tension were executed exceptionally well, with little room for debate.

As the months passed, various news updates, interviews, announcements, and trailers were released. It’s fair to say that as time went on, the audience grew more impatient—and worse, the sense that the project might fail began to spread. In January 2024, during the year’s first State of Play, Konami shared a trailer just over a minute and a half long, showing gameplay footage of James Sunderland fighting some enemies. This set off alarm bells—after watching the video, many players criticized the poor appearance of the protagonist and enemies due to low-quality models, along with stiff animations and underwhelming fluid effects. At the time, I agreed with some of these criticisms, though I also argued that it could still be a work in progress and would likely be polished before release. Still, I couldn’t deny that I was worried too. Some even claimed the lighting effects weren’t good, but I never agreed with that—the light, shadow, and fog effects seen in the trailer were very well done. They weren’t revolutionary, but they were up to par with what’s expected from a current-gen game.