Images that allegedly show a Silent Hill 2 remake have been doing the rounds online over the weekend, featuring creepy nurses and the very shadowy back of protagonist James Sunderland’s head. They’re appropriately blurry, considering the series’ penchant for mistiness, but still recognisably Silent Hill. Once again, it’s claimed that the game is being developed by Layers Of Fear studio Bloober Team.
Dusk Golem, who leaked images purporting to be of another Silent Hill project earlier this year, commented when the images were shared on ResetEra by another user. The new images are taken from an internal pitch demo produced by Bloober Team to land the project, Dusk Golem claims.
“I mentioned before Konami was looking for pitches in Summer of 2018,” Dusk Golem said, “this was one of the pitches that got greenlit, but take it for what it is; a proof of concept no budget demo to pitch a concept.” The images show an over the shoulder camera, more reminiscent of Capcom’s remakes of Resident Evil 2 and 3 than the glimpse of where a scrapped Silent Hill reboot could have gone that legendary PlayStation demo P.T. provided.
This isn’t the first rumbling we’ve heard of Bloober Team being involved in a Silent Hill project. Back in May, Graham and I both reported on rumours that The Medium and Blair Witch devs could be cooking something up. Bloober Team’s CEO said at the time that they couldn’t comment on whether they were working on Silent Hill because they appreciate their relationship with their partners. You can read into that for yourself.
The core Silent Hill series isn’t well served on PC presently. You can find Silent Hill 4: The Room on GOG but, unless you own a copy on disc or resort to other means, you can’t get hold of the first three games and haven’t been able to for years. Konami tweeted last month that they’ll be bringing Steam versions of “classic games you love” to their official shop soon, and while Silent Hill doesn’t make an appearance in their teaser video, their corresponding Instagram post does include the hashtag #silenthill, suggesting the original might be getting a Steam release in some form after all – although whether it will be a simple port or full-on remaster like the Bloober-rumoured one remains to be seen.
If you do own a copy of one of the older games then it’s a lot smoother to run them than it used to be though, thanks to community fiddling and mods. The first three Silent Hill games are the classic experience of foggy streets, psychological edginess and weird-faced monsters, so it’d be a pleasant change to at least have one of them back in some form, Konami.
Nothing’s been confirmed from Bloober Team or Konami yet, but I’ll let you know if things change. Rumours claim it’s coming to PC and will be a timed-exclusive on PlayStation. If it exists, of course.