t was like I closed my eyes for a second and I was back in that place. Back out on those pale misty streets, haunted by the menace of radio static. Back in those rusted, gore-smattered rooms, lit only by a flashlight’s ring. Back in those crumbling corridors full of clanking and scuttling and slithering things, out of sight in the dark but so goddamn close. Back in those toilets – sweet Christ, the toilets! – where such ungodly lavatorial acts had happened that we never dared give them a name.
I couldn’t remember much from before, from the last time – was it really 23 years ago? – or maybe something made me forget. For a decade now, since 2012’s disappointing Silent Hill: Downpour brought the game series to a lumbering halt, the entire Silent Hill franchise has felt like a fragment of a half-remembered nightmare, glimpsed briefly in terrifying flashes – on 2014’s P.T. teaser for Guillermo Del Torro’s later cancelled Silent Hills, or in this year’s 90-minute Germanic reimagining Silent Hill: The Short Message. We knew this iconic series had pioneered cinematic psychological survival horror long before The Last Of Us in some of gaming’s most atmospheric and disturbing titles, but how?
The moment I – or the grieving husband James Sunderland I was back then – stepped out of that first diabolically fouled lavatory into the cloying fogs of Blooper Team’s engrossing and compulsive Silent Hill 2 remake, though, it all came back. The mysterious letter from my wife Mary, dead for three years, urging me to come and find her in our “special place”. Arriving, with a filmic tenderness, in this now ruined lakeside town, deserted but for a few Lynchian inhabitants – more vivid now, better acted, but still bafflingly weird – and the other things…
After a gently ominous first half-hour, the nightmare flashbacks came thick and fast. The crackling radio alerting me to nearby dangers in the mist. The crawling, acid-spewing slug people, the limb-challenged ambush freaks and the least sexy nurses in pop culture history. And, venturing into rotting buildings and the hellish otherworld beyond, the torment of countless empty first aid boxes; the frustrated grunt of running into yet another locked door with a horde of hellspawn on your tail; the foolhardiness of desperately injecting yourself with any syringe you come across in this corroded hive of hepatitis. It felt, being here again, as dread-inducing as returning to your university town where only the people who remember your most humiliating student transgressions stayed on.
The street map is the same, yet the place is… different. More detailed now – swarms of insects scuttle creepily across metallic walls; posters in smashed shop windows advertise carnivals that long since left town. More intimate, more over-the-shoulder in the Dead Space style, allowing the atmosphere of menace and oppression to wrap itself tighter around your shoulders. Longer somehow too, as if time itself was warping in Silent Hill, the same story beats taking twice as long to play out, an original runtime of eight hours now stretching to 18.