Highlights
- Silent Hill 2's remake is a welcome addition to the beloved survival-horror franchise, known for its influential place in the genre.
- The announcement of new games like Silent Hill: Townfall and Silent Hill: Ascension shows that Konami is willing to take risks and create original content for the franchise.
- It is important for fans to support the new games, like Townfall and f, in addition to the Silent Hill 2 remake, to encourage the development of new, diverse content for the franchise's future.
Silent Hill is making its comeback fairly late, and yet late is better than never for a franchise that’s as beloved as Konami’s survival-horror series. Not every Silent Hill installment has been widely successful or agreeable, but the ones that players do enjoy are commonly pedestaled as some of the most influential works in the survival-horror genre to this day, particularly Silent Hill 2. Indeed, Silent Hill 2 will now be receiving its own remake treatment following the success of other classic games’ remakes, though that is thankfully not the only game Silent Hill can rely on.
Silent Hill 2’s remake was announced alongside the reveals of Silent Hill: Townfall, Silent Hill: Ascension, and Silent Hill f. It wouldn’t make sense for Konami to have exclusively announced a ton of remakes or remasters as a way to inorganically pepper the franchise with ‘new’ content, but it’s fantastic regardless that Konami is deciding to chiefly take risks with the franchise when it would’ve been expected for it to cash out on simpler choices. This way, while the quality of new Silent Hill games is uncertain, these games at least determine that the franchise won’t become stale anytime soon.
Townfall, Ascension, f, and Others Create Originality for Silent Hill
Silent Hill has been outside survival-horror community conversations for so long that remakes aren’t actually an egregious proposition, especially since it’s arguable that Silent Hill games would have the most to gain from remakes. Silent Hill 2 has an incredible and emotional narrative, for example, and current-gen performance technology will be able to better represent that. Likewise, while the narrative itself doesn’t need to be touched up in a remake, combat surely could due to how stagnant it was in the original with tank controls that made it so Silent Hill 2’s James Sunderland would have to either trade blows with enemies or run to a corner of the room and shoot as the enemy approached.
Still, Silent Hill crafting brand-new experiences with likely no tangible connection to previous Silent Hill games is a massive boon for the franchise. Resident Evil has somehow managed to continue its continuity, for example, but it’s hanging on by a thread of legacy characters it can’t seem to escape from. Silent Hill now has an opportunity to lean into its nature as an anthology and offer wholly diverse stories beneath the franchise’s world as an umbrella, which the town of Silent Hill already functionally behaves as.
Ascension is going to be the oddest installment of the new titles since it’s being billed as an interactive experience and might not be a game in the traditional sense. But Townfall and f being developed—even with as little information about them as there is—are terrific demonstrations of the franchise heading in a creatively open direction.
Silent Hill 2’s Remake Won’t Make or Break the Franchise Now
Because Silent Hill 2’s remake isn’t the only Silent Hill game in development, not as much actually rests on its shoulders for it being highly successful. It’d obviously help if fans’ nostalgia for the sequel led them to buy the game, but it would be great if Konami and associated developers wanted to make new games their priority.
If the remake does well then it would make sense for Konami to continue remaking Silent Hill games in the same vein as Resident Evil’s new remake continuity, for instance, though Konami would also need to follow Resident Evil’s pattern of developing new modern games in order to strike a satisfying balance. That’s hopefully where at least Townfall and f come in, and whether these games begin their own narratives or branch out again into unrelated anthology games it will be wonderful to see Silent Hill trying its hand at being more diverse with its content.
If this course of action is to be successful, fans will need to give as much attention to Townfall and f as they will to the Silent Hill 2 remake to show Konami that their interests aren’t solely on remakes. Otherwise, fewer new games might be developed while more remakes are considered instead, and that would set a potentially underwhelming precedent for the Silent Hill franchise’s future.