This feature was originally written a few months beforeBloober Team was confirmed as the developer of the Silent Hill 2 remake. Now that our speculation on the studio and the fact that it will be using an over-the-shoulder camera perspective proved to be correct, it feels like a more relevant discussion than ever, so we’ve decided to give it another run.
Of the many unconfirmed things that pour out from leakers, coy comments from developers, and rumours coming from apparent industry ‘insiders,’ few seem as certain as the likelihood that Polish developer Bloober Team is indeed working on the next Silent Hill game. It’s arumour that’s been swirling for months, years even, and has recently been stoked by the claim that some (conveniently blurry)Silent Hill 2 remake images have leaked online.
The legitimacy of these images has seemingly been bolstered by a response copied into that thread from someone claiming to be from Bloober Team, who said that while the images are indeed real, they’re from an extremely early “internal pitch demo” from 2018 and shouldn’t be used to indicate the final quality of the game.
Ok, so the message is ‘Don’t read anything into the images.’ Got it…
However, as someone who’s seen countless early proof-of-concept footage from games that wouldn’t get made until years later - fromGod of WartoHorizon Zero Dawn- something I’ve learned is that you can read a little something into them. One of those things is the fundamental camera perspective of the game. So if those murky images are anything to go by, it looks like the Silent Hill 2 remake will adopt an over-the-shoulder camera perspective - a departure from the original game’s camera which adopted an artful mix of trailing and fixed angles.
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On the one hand, this would seem like a bit of a missed opportunity to bring back the wonderful camerawork of Silent Hill 2. When the camera was in a fixed position, it would often be at an uncomfortably high angle, looking down at James Sutherland like a spider from the corner of the room. Sometimes it would pull back to quite a distant third-person perspective that would place James at the centre of the screen, but the over-the-shoulder perspective (or the ‘Resident Evil 4 camera’) wasn’t really done in the series until the much-maligned later entries. It was a clever mix of player-controlled camera with fixed camera angles, creating the feeling that you weren’t ever fully in control.
There are definite horror benefits to this. It can set you up for scares by sudden camera shifts that reveal previously unseen monsters, or build up dread by letting you hear things lurking in the darkness but not see them. Where a fully controlled third-person camera can let you sneak-peak around corners, when it’s not in your control the game can actually reveal the threat to the playerafterthe in-game character would see it. There are countless moments in the rotting corridors of Silent Hill 2 where those familiar garbled radio noises anticipate the monster around the corner, and the camera perspective takes a second to catch up with James before we can see what we’re shooting at.
It simultaneously creates a distance from and connection with the character. Unlike in a first-person game where we’re made to embody and really feel like we are the character we’re playing, here we’re effectively watching over James, with the game messing around with us via camera movements and perspectives that make it feel like he’s running away from us into the darkness, and towards danger.
Even though the non-controlled camera is seen as a bit dated, it’s had a bit of a resurgence in recent years through games like Tormented Souls and Bloober Team’s own horror game The Medium. People may have justifiable reservations about the developer of relatively simplistic games like Layers of Fear and Blair Witch being tasked with one of the most nuanced and elegant horror games of all time, but it has to be said that they’ve shown a lot of love for Silent Hill over the years; their use of non-player controlled camera and light-world/dark-world motifs in The Medium showing that they at least have a grasp of the fundamentals that made Silent Hill 2 great.
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Given Bloober’s recent experience with the retro-style ‘Silent Hill 2 perspective,’ that makes it all the more surprising that the remake would use an over-the-shoulder camera, but there’s a case to be made that that’s the right move too.
For a start, trying to recreate all the camera angles of Silent Hill 2 would be seen as creatively bereft in a similar way to which The Last of Us Part 1 has been criticised. It’s hard to justify the ‘Remake’ label when you’re moving the game to a new engine but leaving key things as they were. In Silent Hill 2’s case, retaining the same perspective as the original would also restrict the overall design of the game to being largely like the original, and does anyone actually want that? On the other hand, using the game-controlled camera but doing itdifferentlyfrom the original game - with Bloober coming up with their own framing and angles - risks it simply paling in comparison to a game that’s widely seen as the perfect horror game.
The over-the-shoulder perspective solves that by moving the remake away from pure imitation. By quite literally offering a new perspective, it can pull us in a little more into the world - let us sift through the clutter in the abandoned schools and residences of Silent Hill, and see those nurses, mannequins and other horrors with a degree of closeness and detail that we’ve never previously experienced. Besides, there’s no question that the over-the-shoulder camera works for horror - just look at the Resident Evil 2 Remake, Evil Within, or any number of modern horror games.
The differences between those games and Silent Hill 2 is that they’re more action-oriented (which an over-the-shoulder camera helps with in the way of aiming and so on), while Silent Hill 2 is much more of a ‘mood piece,’ putting you in a hazy realm that’s constantly pulling control away from you. Perhaps the answer would be to find some fusion of the over-the-shoulder and fixed perspective, giving players periods of full camera control before depriving them of it again when they least expect it. It would be jarring, sure, but it would be in keeping with the spirit of the original game, while also offering something meaningfully different.
