Silent Hill 2 PC Review—The definitive way to re-visit the foggiest town ever seen

Picture the scene: it's 2001, you've just picked up a copy of Silent Hill 2 and can't wait to get home from school to play. As night hits, it's time to get your spook-on. This was basically me back then, it was my first proper experience with Silent Hill. I also never played the PC version, nor the Director's Cut or fan-made Enhanced Edition of Silent Hill 2 that came in recent years.

"In my restless dreams, I see that town..." - Mary

So, for me, jumping into this remake was a real nostalgia fest, as core memories of playing it back on the PS2 were still fresh, but other memories were vacant enough that the remake would feel almost entirely new.

Bloober Team has updated various areas of the game to include new areas previously closed off in the fixed camera perspective from James Sunderland's on-screen movements. This time round, we see a fully 3D world fit for a modern audience, and it's all the better for it.

Within days of the launch of the Deluxe edition, which was three days prior to the standard edition launching on October 8th, I decided to play the PS2 version again, but this time via emulation. The native PS2 resolution is beyond showing its age, but emulation allows us to experience up to 12x native resolution, which results in much higher fidelity graphics than what was possible before.

I considered this a small memory refresher for some of the early sections of the game.

Months before the launch, though, Bloober Team faced some online backlash after videos were posted showing some of the combat and characters from the remake. These videos showcased the game in an earlier stage of development. Still, online communities didn't care; automatically, a movement had generated that seemingly had already cancelled the remake for being "woke" and suchlike, in a similar vein to how the same crowd tried to cancel Black Myth: Wukong, which then went on to be a global sensation. Today, here is what the review roundup for Silent Hill 2 looks like:

Even the original game's director prefers the remake:

I think that says it all, really; now, let's jump into the review.

System requirements / Tech

I am playing the game with an Intel i7 12700KF, 64GB of DDR4 3600MT/s with an RTX 4090 at 3840x2160 and a VRR QD-OLED monitor. All of the screenshots in this review were captured with everything set to max at 4K, chromatic aberration was disabled by adding the following line to the end of the game's Engine.ini file located in: \Users\USER\AppData\Local\SilentHill2\Saved\Config\Windows:

[SystemSettings]
r.SceneColorFringeQuality=0

Unreal Engine 5.1

The biggest feature of this remake is that it's one of the first Unreal Engine 5 games to come with hardware ray tracing. Bloober Team is using version 5.1 of the engine here, whereas Epic only just announced 5.5 at the recent Unreal Fest. UE5 uses Lumen for its real-time global illumination system. This can operate in hardware or software modes, with hardware being the most accurate but, of course, more costly on the GPU.

In effect, then, ray tracing is always on with UE5 games and cannot be turned off. Screen space effects still form the underlying layers of a game's render, though, and depending on how a developer chooses to implement it, may or may not rear its ugly head as you move about a game world and dare to move the camera when looking at a body of water.

Toggling Ray Tracing in the graphics settings enables the hardware route. There is a visible difference when using it; take a look below.

Hardware RT:

Software RT:

You can see that the software path is a lot noisier in shadow areas. This is also seen in reflection quality in many areas. The software path has become infamous because almost all other UE5 games only ship with software Lumen. As a result of this, it's obvious that a new game being shown is powered by UE5; the noise is its signature trait.

For those with RTX cards who like to tweak and tinker with modifying game files, you can also enable more precise RT denoising, which further enhances reflections and subtle details by calling Nvidia Ray Reconstruction, as the game does not ship with the dll file in the install folder, though the RTX tech can be called by adding a few more lines to the same .ini file mentioned earlier, so including the line to disable chromatic aberration, the text should look like this:

[SystemSettings]
r.NGX.DLSS.denoisermode=1
r.Lumen.Reflections.BilateralFilter=0
r.Lumen.Reflections.ScreenSpaceReconstruction=0
r.lumen.Reflections.Temporal=0
r.Shadow.Denoiser=0

Be sure to also copy over the latest Ray Reconstruction dll file into the following directory in the game's install location: \Steam\steamapps\common\SILENT HILL 2\SHProto\Plugins\DLSS\Binaries\ThirdParty\Win64.

The difference enabling this feature is quite apparent in reflections and RT denoising artefacts being cleaned up now:

As can be seen, because Ray Reconstruction has been forced in without being optimised for the game by the developer out of the box, there is a small framerate cost, which is generally not the case when a game ships with Ray Reconstruction implemented at launch.

Cyberpunk 2077 and Alan Wake 2 are two examples where RR has no fps impact. On the contrary, the framerate is higher by about 10fps on average in those games with RR enabled, as this is exactly what RR is supposed to be doing.

General performance

After 17 hours of playing and fully exploring wherever I can, performance, for me, has been mostly fine. Though the game clearly has the hallmarks of Unreal Engine problems, there are clear CPU optimisation issues whereby at least one of my Performance cores is idling in various areas of the game:

This results in the GPU not receiving much work from the CPU in a speedy fashion which then leads to frame drops and/or frametime stability issues. It's not majorly frequent, but enough to be a slight niggle, at least for me.

I kind of mitigated the situation by setting an acceptable framerate cap. For me, this is 75fps, which leads to a consistent frametime graph and the game running at a steady 74fps, which, for this sort of third-person game, is perfectly fast and smooth whether mouse and keyboard or via controller.

Here's a 17-minute video showing exactly what I experience with this in place:

There is also some traversal stutter, yes folks, #stutterstruggle once again is a feature not a bug in yet another Unreal Engine title. I wonder if Epic will ever get to the bottom of it.

In terms of optimised settings, my only recommendation if you are struggling to hit a consistent 60fps is to lower the shadow setting to medium and/or disable hardware ray tracing. Both of these have the biggest impact on framerates, though setting shadows to low instead of medium can result in foliage quality being reduced, as well as shadow casting sometimes appearing blocky or low complexity, which can be a bit jarring at times. Both of these settings can have up to 20-30% framerate cost, depending on your hardware configuration.

Whether a day 1 patch emerges after the official launch is unknown, though I will be back to provide an update here once we learn more.

Gameplay

Bloober Team has added some new mechanics to the gameplay. James can now dodge to evade attacks, and the fully 3D world affords a new dimension in exploring Silent Hill as well as navigating combat situations.

What really stands out is the motion capture quality. I slowed down the above clip by 50% to demonstrate how fluid and natural the movement animations are. The awesome level of detail in the atmosphere and musical ambiance, which once again is scored by the legend himself, Akira Yamaoka, fills your senses with high tension during scenes like these.

It is the kind of audio-visual immersion and cinematic horror experience that I have not felt since playing The Last of Us Part 1 on PC. I highly recommend playing on headphones because the audio direction is almost holographic this way, and the subtle nuances in random sounds heard in a dead town as wind blows and things rustle are rather eerie when they're almost kissing your ear lobes.

Another note to make is that OLED gamers can benefit from black-crush-free dark scenes. Black isn't pitch black; there's always some slight black lift, but it's done in such a way that you never feel like you've been robbed of clarity in pitch-black scenes. Again, it's nearly cinematic in the way the developer has done this.

Both HDR and SDR are well judged, and HDR offers plenty of options to tailor the output to your display's capabilities. The video above was recorded with the game's HDR settings calibrated to 450 nits for my monitor being in the DisplayHDR True Black 400 mode which is more accurate than the 1000 nits mode. Be sure to watch it in HDR if YouTube does not select it by default.

My recommendation here for the best game experience is to focus on the gamma slider if in SDR or the HDR brightness slider to control the contrast and gamma of overall black. Both HDR and SDR can represent a similar output once configured properly in the game, with HDR having an enhanced dynamic range between either extreme of the exposure scale.

In dark areas like the above, it really does wow you, although much of the lighting is ambient skylight that is coming in through glass windows or doorways, so there's only so much potential to be had compared to other games with lots of artificial lighting bathing a whole scene.

In terms of controls, I have been playing half the game with a wireless controller and the other half with a mouse and keyboard.

Both methods offer excellent responsiveness, whilst the controller provides the obvious benefit of being able to kick back and be treated to excellent haptic feedback. Even the menus dish out slow rolling rumbles as the selection on the screen is cycled around.

The one area I wish had been updated is the inventory system to better cater to keyboard and mouse navigation. It feels a little clunky if using a keyboard, and there's no real way to use it with a mouse at all, as it's designed around controllers. In fairness to Bloober Team, the game's Steam page does state the developer recommends playing on a controller for the best experience.

Only one thing stood out as completely odd: For some reason Bloober Team chose to make all cutscenes run at 30fps, even though this time round, they are all in-engine cinematics, not pre-rendered like in the original.

Thankfully, this is the PC gaming scene, so within hours, a mod was released to unlock cutscene framerate and also remove the forced letterboxes top and bottom if you're on a non-16:9 display.

Character dynamics

Bloober Team has applied some nice little touches to character dynamics. I especially like that people like Maria have a variation of responses to you shining the torch in her face, she reacts both physically and verbally, and so far I have counted four different responses to this:

James also undergoes progressive change as he unwraps his story, his face grows more tired, and his clothes get dirtier. Here is a comparison from 10-minutes into the game versus 8-hours:

Conclusion

A stunning step back into a game many thought would dirty the original's memory. I don't know of a simpler way to put it.

"He's gonna have a hard time playing football on what's left of that knee" - Eddie

There is a lot to like about the remake compared to the original version, and the PC release offers superior ray tracing quality with the option to (currently) manually enable Ray Reconstruction for those with RTX cards. The PS5 version does look great, too, but the definitive way to experience this is on PC.

Whether Bloober Team officially patch this in properly or not remains to be seen, but a patch is needed to remedy the CPU optimisation issues dotted around the game world in areas that should by any means have any CPU issues.

The voice acting and general presentation are superb, too, and dare I say it, James' acting is more convincing in the remake than the original, having recently just played the original, so that memory is still fresh.

I also like the humanisation of other characters: Eddie is convincing, Angela's initial angst is heartfelt, whilst Maria has a slew of quips and banter with James, as well as characters' facial expressions and things as basic as blinking in a non-robotic way are appreciated. They're not just NPCs you interact with; they sound and feel "human" in a town devoid of an active human population.

"Don't worry, I'm not crazy... at least, I don't think so" - James

The monsters are also just as convincing:. They aren't idling about like in the original, waiting for you to reach their boundary point; they look and behave in a more visceral manner, just like something out of a horror movie.

The Lying Figure monsters that crawl about like a fast-moving spider are unnerving and annoying at the same time because James swings his weapon a little slowly, so sometimes the first attack can miss as one scurries past quickly, whilst the mannequins pack a mean punch that the original game could not portray.

Unreal Engine 5 technical issues aside, the remake is highly polished and beautifully presented as a faith nod to an iconic original game that rings true in the minds of countless people born in the 80s and early 90s. And for those entering Silent Hill for the first time, you're in for a ride with a musical score that will forever be playing in your mind.

The developer says the game should take 16-18 hours to complete, which is longer than the original game's 8 or so hours of runtime. I am 17 hours in and far from finished, though I have spent a lot of time walking every corner of the map and replaying other areas.

A verdict score point has to be deducted for the technical issues at launch, even though they are nowhere near as bad as some other games, such as Star Wars: Outlaws, and we know that these issues can be addressed as other UE5 titles have launched this year without the same problems. Developers should listen to gamer feedback and reviews alike, striving to better their game launches to be in tip-top shape from a technical point of view.

Here is what needs to feature in a patch update in order to be a 9/10 or even a 10/10 game from my point of view as a PC gamer:

• Inventory can be navigated with the mouse.
• Ray Reconstruction is properly implemented.
• Frame Generation is available, both FSR3.1 FG and DLSS FG (which then adds Reflex).
• FOV slider.
• Photo mode (strange it does not feature right now since many of the locations are perfect for this).
• Optimisation of CPU utilisation as it is very much lacking right now requiring GPU brute force to get decent framerates. We've seen this before with other UE5 games which needed to be patched to resolve. This has been an issue since UE4 even, so it's bizarre that it is still happening in 2024, are developers even listening to feedback?
• The ability to delete save files as currently there is no delete option, only overwrite.
• Options for Native AA
• Cutscenes no longer being locked at 30fps or forcing letterboxing.