Take the Shadow of the Colossus remake, for example. There is purpose to the way it looks, and one that so called 'better' graphics won't be able to capture. Silent Hill 2 is an incredibly beautiful game. How can you recreate this vibe on modern hardware? Or, alternatively, just remove any clunkiness in the original work. Either one, do something like Final Fantasy 7 Remake and wrangle a very different set of events, acting as a kind of commentary on cyclical history. In my view, there should be two routes a remake should take. Sure, there are the slightly clunky controls, but the current leaks suggest that there will be new endings, which I honestly hate the sound of. So why remake it? Do we really need a full remake? ![]() The second game though? While I'm hesitant to dub anything as the best of something, I can see why people think Silent Hill 2 is the best Silent Hill. You could almost, maybe, just about justify a remake of the first Silent Hill there isn't much story in the first one, it's possibly even borderline too slim on details to the point a player might be left with a 'oh nothing really happened' feeling. That doesn't mean, from an artistic perspective, that they should exist. We're pretty much stuck with reboots, remakes, and remasters they sell, and they sell well, so I guess I can't blame corporations too much. Not that the Dog Ending is a revolutionary piece of storytelling, in fact it is wholly out of place compared to literally everything else in that game, but it has some incredible 'yeah f**k it, we've got some time, let's do it' energy.īut even more than that, this undying desire that so many seem to have to return to what was rather than look forward to what could be is a bit exhausting. Do we honestly think that a sequel to Silent Hill will do something as ridiculous as the second game's Dog Ending? Hell, even Silent Hill has its incredibly weird moments. What I mean is, I think video games used to be a bit like the Wild West: I think, at least in the AAA scene, there's much less of an 'anything goes' policy these days.Ī game like LSD: Dream Emulator could certainly exist on a site like itch.io, but I'm not sure if it could be released on a major console like the original PlayStation. And the fourth went off the rails and explored how far the reach of Silent Hill can actually extend.Īnd I just don't think, with the games industry being as it is, that a remake or sequel could capture any of that intrigue, any of that mysteriousness. The third game was able to expand the mostly limited storytelling of the first. Silent Hill 2's storytelling is so subtle and complex that even many games today can't mimic it. Silent Hill wouldn't be what it is without the thick, suffocating fog that mostly exists for rendering purposes. ![]() Only the game's composer, Akira Yamaoka, worked on all four of the first games.Īs a result, each game was somewhat a product of its time, the first four – the only games made by the amorphous Team Silent – each offering something special. Especially considering the various leads on the team changed over the various games, with creator Keiichiro Toyama – now working on Slitterhead – only having worked on the first game. ![]() Problem is though, as a friend recently put it to me, that first game was kind of like lightning in a bottle the game was iterated on in the subsequent sequels that came from Team Silent, but they certainly couldn't be described as consistent. Essentially, it was a last ditch effort from these developers, and one that obviously ended up succeeding. The game's development team, Team Silent, was made up of multiple staff members whose projects had all failed, and didn't really fit on any particular team at Konami. It was the year the first flip phone was released, the year Dolly the sheep was born, and also when the original Silent Hill's development began. Let's go back to 1996 for a little while. Because I honestly believe the series should just be left for dead. As it currently stands, it sounds like we're getting a remake of Silent Hill 2 – generally regarded as the best one – and something new from Annapurna, maybe somewhere else. As recent leaks have shown us, it's looking fairly likely that Konami is looking to bring us back to the world of Silent Hill.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |