Silent Hill 2 remains one of the all time survival horror greats – and its story of grief, framed by fogged streets and flashlight lit corridors, remains as haunting today as on its initial release. All of which is to say, there’s a lot riding on developer Bloober Team to nail the details of its remake’s atmosphere when it arrives on 8th October. To be blunt, the team has had an uphill battle to inspire confidence in long-time Silent Hill fans, not helped by a poorly pitched ‘combat trailer‘ at Sony’s State of Play in January that completely
missed the brief. Since then, later gameplay showings have put the remake’s intentions in much better light. And thankfully, in playing its opening three hours at a recent Konami event – from the start right up to the first Pyramid Head boss – I am now much more positive about it. Despite my worries going in, I’m glad the remake does even dares to make key changes to the game, complete with new puzzles, updated combat, plus the promise of new, additional endings.
Before we get to that, a quick Digital Foundry-style aside. On booting the game there were two graphics modes on PS5: a 30fps quality mode, and a performance mode that targets 60fps. Dynamic resolution appears to be used more aggressively for the latter, but I happily stuck with the 60fps option, which ran Silent Hill’s south vale region and later Wood Side Apartment block smoothly. The only problem spot was an early graveyard area – with its obvious sub-60 drops in the build shown – but that might improve by release.
Speaking with the team at Bloober directly, it’s
also confirmed that both modes use Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen technology on PS5 – enhancing its reflections with a software-based approximation of ray tracing. The result being that the rain-slicked streets reflect every shop sign crisply, even if they’re out of your camera’s view (a problem for the SSR method, which is still used as a fallback behind Lumen here). Added to this the team confirms that Lumen is also used for ambient occlusion, albeit only on the 30fps quality mode. Also, for a bit of fun, an additional 90s filter toggle is included in the remake’s menus to change its colour grading to
more closely match the fade of the PS2 original’s – if you’re that way inclined.
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