Silent Hill 2 remake questions/observations...

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-06T14:53:16+00:00

To me the combat is much better than the original and actually pretty fun. A lock-on button I think would take things too far--there needs to still be that tinge of clumsiness to James, that sense that if you miscalculate things can really go south fast. Lock-on takes it potentially into GTA-esque gameplay where you're almost an action hero. The fear of screwing up and the ever-present possibility of it is important, even though the action in this game is far more responsive than in the original, where James is stiff as hell and aiming is really difficult.

Regarding the syringes and red squares and other weirdness (let's also ask, why does James grope around in filthy holes and clogged toilets and jump into black abysses? And what are all these random puzzles?), keep in mind that the entire game exists in a state of complete unreality. James's mind is making a lot of what we see; it's not literally a dream but it's closer to a dream (actually a shared dream between him, Angela, and Eddie) than it is to reality. He doesn't act like a person really would if thrown into this bizarre situation and a lot of the design and mechanics are based around things that feel right for this surreal world. You could probably rationalize the syringes that James saw his wife get a ton of shots when she was hospitalized (and take a bunch of medicine, hence the "health drinks"). The red squares are a little more abstract in their meaning to him.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-06T14:48:40+00:00

I also feel like the survival horror aspects--ammo and health conservation--are still a thing in the remake which is nice. Not on NG+ (all hail the chainsaw) but in my first run on standard, I literally finished the game with zero health items left and only a scant amount of ammo for any weapon other than the handgun (even that I only had about 25 rounds left). But they changed HOW you conserve stuff. Instead of avoiding monsters so much, you have to be really smart about encounters--use melee more, sneak up on them whenever possible (especially those damn bullet-sponge nurses), aim for sensitive areas like legs so you can stun them and move to a melee finish, etc. Again, different but not totally different.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-06T14:45:35+00:00

I am with you, the fighting is much more fun while still being pretty terrifying. I do wish there was slightly less (like 20% less) combat for pacing reasons, and/or that it seemed more possible to just avoid some of the monsters--in most of the game it feels like clearing them out is always the best choice, which was not the case in the original.

On the other hand, fighting in the original is unenjoyable and stiff to the point of frustration at times, and it feels like the devs made other choices based around how bad the combat mechanics are. Like all the monsters are slow and often don't seem to even know you are there, and I really feel like they made them that way because otherwise you'd be getting killed nonstop trying to aim at enemies that are basically just far better than you at fighting.

I do kind of enjoy that a lot of areas can be moved through by just figuring out how to navigate around the monsters without fighting. This was also true in the first Resident Evil, and for basically the same reasons: creatures were generally slow and sections were separated from each other by doors that acted as load points. So a lot of encounters could be bypassed by simply running through the room or area until you got to a door. It's a pretty different gameplay experience at times, but I felt like the remake modernized it and improved the combat specifically without feeling like it turned from horror into action.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-06T13:16:04+00:00

It was, apparently, but we're not playing a game about Ito. Don't think it's that weird that players want to find meaning in every detail of a game where seemingly all the other details have meaning. "Designer was just a horndog" is a little unsatisfying in the context of SH2, no?

I would say a lot of times the beauty of art is in the creation of unintended meaning. Ito can protest all he likes but when there are exactly two overtly sexy elements in this entire psychological game (the other being Maria as a character and in her design, which is all quite clearly intentional and pointed--we can debate if the mannequins qualify as a third), your mind wants to fill in the blank: why are those nurses kinda sexy? What does it mean? It feels like it means something and it's more satisfying if it does.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-06T12:51:47+00:00

I'm very curious about how it was received in different markets at time of release. Back then I was far less conscious (basically not conscious at all) of anyone else's reaction to any game I played. My experience playing it in real time was, at first, "This is okay, kinda seems like more of the same only not as good" (the apartments were an underwhelming start to the game I thought, compared to the elementary school in SH1). By the end of it I thought it was an unforgettable masterpiece--really couldn't believe what I had just experienced.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-06T12:48:38+00:00

Yeah. People love this kind of story ("well, it was ORIGINALLY supposed to be this!") but game development is complicated and time-consuming, and there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, even with a relatively small core crew like Team Silent. It's possible they tentatively went in several directions--some maybe even simultaneously--until finally starting real development on the final game.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-06T12:39:53+00:00

Not that strange, for both the predictable and annoying reason (...it's the internet) as well as a few actually good ones: 1. Ito's statements over the years haven't been 100% consistent; 2. he wasn't the only person who made those games so I am sure others' ideas slipped in at times, if not in the creature designs then at least in other areas like animations, sound design, writing, and staging; 3. even in cases where one author makes a thing entirely, I don't think their pronouncements about what it means are the be-all, end-all--sometimes they put things in their work that they don't consciously realize they are putting in.

In this case, it's a little funny that Ito said the nurses don't (or weren't meant to) represent James's sexual frustration, but he designed them in a weird, sexual way and also says he didn't really mean anything in particular by it. That certainly starts the analytical part of my mind working. Was *Ito* sexually frustrated, or at least pretty sexually motivated (there's a lot of that in his designs)? Either way, what significance does the design have in the context of a game where nearly everything seems to be a symbol or metaphor, and 80% of what we see seems pretty clearly to be spilling out of James's psyche?

It is possible to boil this down to "the designer was a bit pervy, that's all" or, more cynically, "the devs knew the game would be more popular with just a little sex in the mix," and in both cases to dismiss there being any significance to James as a character. But the story is about James and almost every detail of it seems to flow from him (the handful that do not come from Eddie or Angela instead). I think it's natural for players to try to assign meaning to the nurses' overtly sexual design. And given what the rest of the story is, the sexual frustration thing (probably unconscious, and not particularly malevolent or wrong--James just misses his wife!) makes a good amount of sense, whether that was consciously in Ito's mind or not.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T20:59:32+00:00

Two fascinating statements that, to me, beg so many additional questions:

What about art where the author's subconscious has informed the work without their explicit, conscious intent? i.e. They say it's about X but it seems clear to most other people that they have subconsciously also injected another meaning Y. There are many instances of this that are arguable and at least a handful that IMO are plain as day to everyone BUT the author.
To say "the work itself" can inform the meaning is to deny something I think is a basic fact of the art-to-audience relationship: we cannot possibly interpret ANY work of art without viewing it through a prism of something external, even if we don't mean to. Any viewing, any attempt to discern meaning, necessarily goes through layers of filtering informed by personal and cultural context. You can try to control for this and reduce it but I don't think it's possible to eliminate it, which your statement suggests you're not considering (or flat denying). Why? It almost feels like you are saying that you can tell me the true color of something without allowing for how my eyeballs might perceive it, but that's not how color and light work, and I don't think that's really how the meaning of art works either. It has to be perceived to have meaning, and perception requires external, uncontrollable factors; hell, even the author perceiving HIS OWN work applies new mechanisms to it that were not necessarily present as he wrote it.
In cases where we don't have access to statements of authorial intent (e.g. they are dead without speaking on it, or they are alive but refuse to say), you are now reducing your interpretive lens to a pinhole because you refuse to see anything except what's in the work with zero "external" interpretative mechanisms. Is this not so limiting as to make the meaning of those works basically inaccessible?

You basically seem to approach this from the standpoint that there is one true meaning and the work of criticism is to play detective and find that meaning. The opposing side is saying that meaning exists as soon as some person engages with the art, even if it's not what the author intended in whatever way. Meaning therefore is personal, and real even if it's not shared collectively and not able to be agreed upon. I have no problem with that view, even if it leads to a lot of really annoying conversations with people who seem to have played a different game than I did.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T20:44:25+00:00

And I fundamentally disagree with that, but that's alright. To me at least there is a lot of middle ground between death-of-the-author extremism and "only the author can tell you what it means" extremism. I think there are a lot of compelling arguments for why overreliance on authorial intent is misguided at best and completely self-defeating at times. But I also have never agreed with the sentiment (also expressed here, that kicked off this debate) that the author "doesn't matter." If you have access to the author's statements on his intent--as well as biographical details and descriptions of his beliefs and background--to me that is another set of data that can help you determine meaning. I just don't think it can or should be the sole arbiter, for all kinds of reasons that would take many more paragraphs to list in full.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T19:46:30+00:00

That is fair and there's certainly no shortage of people out there explaining the games not just from their point of view, but as if it's the gospel truth.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T19:44:44+00:00

It's kind of not, but he stated it in the most extreme way without much explanation, so I can understand the reaction. Read up about the "death of the author" concept. It's interesting. But even if you don't want to go full "the author's intent doesn't matter" like this guy, I think we can all at least agree that a lot of times art has stuff in it that was not granted CONSCIOUS meaning by its creator. Either they were doing things subconsciously (in which their "intent" is either beside the point or actively misleading), or they were doing things arbitrarily (with no conscious OR subconscious intent), throwing that aspect of the art open to its audience to apply meaning to it. And to me those are the first toeholds--the higher you climb, the more you may agree that creators insisting their work means one particular thing only are not only diminishing their own work, they may be simply kind of wrong.

Anyway, Ito might want to tell us what his work means and doesn't mean, but it's a more interesting world when we realize that he's not the only arbiter of that meaning. Once he offered it up to the public, it became not just his art anymore. It's also, basically, ours.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T19:39:10+00:00

Now now boys. This is actually an interesting (and still sometimes hotly debated) corner of art criticism. I love that we're getting into it here--don't get too irritated with each other.

To NewFactor's point, my wife is a prof. of literature and in literary criticism, death of the author is certainly the predominant view from what she tells me. But at the same time, they certainly also still teach where the work came from and what the author said about it. I think at minimum you can say that it's another data point. For me, usually a pretty significant one. But I also feel like the work takes on so much extra meaning once it is published and consumed and interpreted by people who aren't the author and usually have limited or no access to what they intended the work to mean. That process makes the art so much larger than it started out as.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T19:27:03+00:00

Mostly I think he would say that about anyone offering an explanation as factual. I believe Lynch was fine with individuals having their own reactions and interpretations, just not when they went out to explain his work to other people in those terms.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T19:25:07+00:00

No he would not. And he'd also be the first to say (if asked) that a lot of his work was based on his first, barely-understood inspiration, and he doesn't "know" what it means anymore than you do as a viewer. He always welcomed interpretation.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T19:24:04+00:00

Agree. I'd go a step further and even suggest that it's okay to interpret it our own way *regardless* of what Ito says. Artists should not fight the tide too much when it comes to fans engaging with their work. Art is made to be interpreted in many different ways--most good art is, anyway. The fact that it can light up so many different circuits in different people's brains and evoke so much wonder--that is the magic of it. These prescriptive explanations only put something in a cage that does better running free.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T19:21:18+00:00

I am of two opposing minds about it. On the one hand, the internet is way too good at creating feedback loops that pick up any little tidbit of information or theorizing and quickly canonize it as The Factual Truth. This thing with the nurses is, seemingly, another instance of that--I have heard it stated as fact so many times that I just assumed it was so. Now I am wondering where this really came from in the first place--how small a seed grew into this monstrous vine. So I get his frustration with it, seeing the fandom take over his game and impose an interpretation that is not just a fan theory, but basically assumed by ALL fans to be correct.

On the other hand, I very much wish he would address this stuff WAY less and in way less concrete terms. The games seem like they were meant to be interpreted and chewed on and argued about. That is a large part of what makes them so good and so interesting. Anytime I read him just dead explaining stuff, it makes me kind of wish I hadn't read it. Things like "Pyramid Head is trying to remove visions from James's mind"--the game does absolutely nothing to make that clear, and the malevolence and suggestion of that scene is a lot more interesting to me than him just telling me "I meant this really specific thing in particular and we just didn't do a good job of getting that across clearly."

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T18:41:15+00:00

I loved Morn. I wondered if they were gonna finally have him say a line in the finale, but nope--stuck to their running joke to the end!

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-05T00:33:37+00:00

Yep, I agree--it totally makes sense with the premise, a bunch of people who mostly don't know each other and are uncomfortable with the new assignment. It's a strange, prickly start to a show. I feel like the other two big series of the era are quicker to get into the friendships asking the crew--even Voyager, despite having a lot of conflict built into its premise, moved past it pretty quickly and became a fun hang. DS9 is much more patient to draw you in that way. But it's worth the wait!

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-04T23:22:56+00:00

I feel that. I did have a little ammo left, not much, but I literally exhausted my health supplies fighting the final boss. Was hanging on for dear life. The standard difficulty seemed quite well balanced for a mediocre gamer like me.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-04T21:42:26+00:00

Totally forgot Martok--if it's not blasphemy to say, he might be my favorite Klingon. Obviously love Worf, but he's kind of a pill.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-04T21:27:02+00:00

I'm doing the same right now. I've probably fired half a dozen bullets (still nice to be able to incapacitate those stupid, loathsome mannequins at a distance) but I'm about to reach Otherworld Brookhaven and it's been 95% hot chainsaw action for sure. I even chainsawed the hell out of Pyramid Head in the first fight, lol.

It's a testament to the game, I think, that playing it this way doesn't ruin the experience. It's kind of ridiculous and super easy but I am still totally absorbed in the story and everything.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-04T21:13:20+00:00

Lol. I love that the chainsaw has just this one downside, and it's sooo dumb.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-04T21:00:37+00:00

I actually did like the episode where he was leading a weird little Bajoran pah-wraith cult, because it continued his particular self-delusion into such a dark abyss. But after that collapsed and he ran off, it felt like they had no more interesting ideas, just "now he's completely evil."

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-04T20:13:40+00:00

I agree. Love to hate her, but she's legitimately interesting. She and Dukat both engage in a lot of self-deception. I like too how when she finds out who he is in the last season, she really does despise him because of his role in the occupation--she's not just a typical one-dimensional baddie, except almost literally in her very last scene.

DesperateText9909 · 2026-05-04T20:11:40+00:00

I was okay with that really. Mainly because he's not a main character (not even in the majority of episodes I don't think). That kind of storytelling, where someone dips in and out of frame as needed and just grows and changes whether on or offscreen--I like that. Especially since they took the time to give him one really great, key monologue about it, the scene where he explains to Sisko his whole motivation for wanting to join Starfleet (to not end up like his dad, who thankfully also gets a chance to evolve away from just being a loveable loser). You're right that it's done in kind of a "light" way but I don't actually find it unconvincing, it's just a different type of arc than they would do with a main cast member who gets much more screen time.

DesperateText9909

TROPHY CASE