Silent Hill 2 is absolutely terrible (and therefore great)

Warning: This article contains mild thematic and environmental spoilers for Silent Hill 2.

The Silent Hill 2 remake is the worst experience I've had with a game in recent memory.

With an opening sentence like that, you're probably expecting a very negative review of developer Bloober Team's remake of Konami and Team Silent's survival horror classic. But in this very rare case, complete and unrelenting misery is actually a positive thing. The original Silent Hill 2 is perhaps the darkest and darkest game ever made, and Bloober Team has successfully retained its miserable magic, ensuring this remake is a deeply effective descent into truly unpleasant horror.

This journey begins with sound and images. The thick, opaque fog that hides the city of Silent Hill is part of the story's instantly recognizable iconography, and the remake's stunning modern volumetric effects make it feel denser and more isolating than ever before. Getting away from the monster-infested streets should feel like an escape, but instead you're forced to find shelter in some of the most hideous and depressing apartment buildings you've ever seen. A large part of Silent Hill 2 revolves around descent, and there is a clear gradient in the visual structure of each area that communicates this downward spiral. Places initially appear unkempt and abandoned, such as apartment blocks with peeling wallpaper and empty cupboards. But as you progress further, the architecture becomes more and more depressing. Recognizable shapes and textures are replaced with rougher, broken alternatives, and eventually the entire area becomes a rusty, dilapidated shell. What starts out as annoying turns into a real nightmare the further you dare to move on.

Contributing to all this, as horror tradition demands, is minimal lighting. For most of the long game time (between 12 and 18 hours depending on your playstyle) you are locked in dark buildings. This becomes increasingly unsettling, particularly as you explore Toluca Prison – the facility's lights can only be turned on for a few seconds at a time, leaving you to run back and forth between circuit breakers in a largely doomed attempt to hold back the darkness . When you've been deprived of the sun for so long, the mere sight of daylight makes you feel like you're gasping for air after spending what feels like days underwater. It is deeply unpleasantly effective.

This visual palette is accompanied not so much by music, but by the most oppressive collection of sounds your ears have ever experienced, once again from Silent Hill 2's original composer, Akira Yamaoka. It's particularly effective in the late game, when what sounds like an approaching animal is dynamically woven into the orchestration during times of high tension. It makes you question every sound you hear, and over time it weakens your sense of reality. It's not easy to simulate madness, but this soundscape is as close as you can (un)comfortably get.

Effective art and sound design has been the hallmark of many horror games, but these disciplines are the surface of the experience. I don't mean that in a derogatory way – the surface is what matters – but it's what's underneath that really cements the horror. Games like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space are actually action games with horror masks and are therefore rarely truly scary. Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, is a horror game right down to the nerve endings and bone marrow. Its environment and objective design draw on similar threads as the art and sound, constantly looking for new ways to unsettle you. Each location visited is a complicated puzzle to solve. You're forced to go around each floor, going back and forth to find keys or hidden entrances to rooms that send you back to progress. This almost spiral path through apartments, hospital, hotel and more forces you to endure increasing mental exhaustion.

This fatigue, coupled with the seemingly relentless length of each section, robs you of hope. It's particularly terrible in the last third, when you're forced to move back to back through the prison and the subsequent labyrinth without taking a break. These locations feature vast stretches of near-impenetrable darkness, thematically dark puzzle work, and the most aggressive, grotesque enemies in the entire game. The resulting emotional toll effectively communicates the mental space in which protagonist James Sunderland finds himself. And that is Bloober's, and by extension Team Silent's, most impressive and disturbing achievement: the ability to evoke empathy through gameplay design.

Silent Hill 2's miserable tone is maintained through a number of other gameplay tricks. As previously mentioned, the story revolves around James' descent into horror, and this is represented both metaphorically through the visuals and literally through the frequent need to jump into pitch-black holes. Each jump requires you to press the action button a few times, reflecting his hesitation and reluctance to jump into the unknown.

As the atmosphere becomes increasingly unbearable, there is nothing in the campaign that can provide any lightheartedness or security. In the Resident Evil series, for example, you gradually accumulate an increasingly powerful arsenal, turning the late game into a thrilling, explosive romp through blood and guts. It also plays with its dialogue and monster design, often opting for silly characterization that ensures the series its popular reputation as “cheesy horror.” Last year's Alan Wake 2, while clearly inspired by the work of Team Silent, features absurdist humor and Lynchian direction that focuses on the strange rather than the terrible, allowing laughs to cut through the tension. Silent Hill 2, however, has none of that. Your weapons mostly consist of a broken barrel and a pistol, and even if you have access to something more powerful, it's nothing more than a simple shotgun or rifle with a long reload time and limited ammo. Along with a difficulty curve that turns familiar enemies into unpredictable, wall-crawling freaks, Silent Hill 2's atmosphere continually finds ways to suffocate you.

It's not common to see terms like “suffocating,” “oppressive,” and “miserable” used positively in a review, but horror is not a common genre. It is one of only two entertainment categories that rely on eliciting an uncontrollable reaction from the audience (the other being comedy). Horror is a machine that manipulates emotions, and the genre's most effective stories can force us to experience feelings we don't typically encounter in our everyday lives. Horror films apply varying degrees of pressure throughout their running time to achieve this manipulation, and the images that are most effectively imprinted on our brains are those that appear again and again when the lights go out.

However, video games are a completely different medium and their experiential nature allows them to manipulate us in more intense ways. Instead of asking us to watch, they ask us to interact, usually four, five, sometimes even ten times longer than your average scary movie. This can force us to experience a completely different reality. While some parts of the gaming community often insist that games are just about fun or escapist entertainment, this is often not the goal of many developers. Sometimes that goal is to communicate unpleasant ideas, and the way to get there is to expose ourselves to a reality that is deeply unpleasant. Silent Hill 2 isn't about having fun, it's about exploring grief and guilt – parts of the human experience we traditionally avoid. Oddly enough, there's an unpleasant thrill in actively trying out these ideas in a video game.

The technical limitations of the 2001 original helped add a few thorns to this painful experience; The semi-fixed camera made the environments feel cramped and claustrophobic, and the awkward aiming created a sense of desperation with every encounter. The Bloober Team remake trims these thorns and replaces them with modern third-person controls that make the gaming experience a little more user-friendly. But those are the only significant concessions. While the fight sequences are perhaps a little less panicky than before, Team Silent's nightmarish vision remains intact. That means the remake is not only a modern reminder of an era in which Konami was a master of survival horror, but also the significant power of Silent Hill 2's unrelenting misery.

Matt Purslow is a senior features editor at IGN.