The original Silent Hill 2 is effectively an amusement park game; a haunted house attraction that ushers the player through its various setpieces from start to end. The entire game is littered with bespoke interactables, notes, threats, images, gore, etc. all laid out in sequence for the player to wade through. Truly whisking the player along would leave them with next-to-no control (i.e. the literal haunted house attraction in Silent Hill 3), so the game is structured in explorable segments. The virtual guide lets you loose through hallways upon hallways of simulacra of regular places, each linked to rooms with their own personal setpiece attached to them. The player can then poke through each of the setpieces in an area at will, pushing past some monsters wandering within them and collecting items until they can assemble a key (or set of keys) to pass through a chokepoint into the next area. This is certainly Resident Evil-inspired, but whereas that series places more control over the sequencing by setting up sets of rooms in an area to open up in chunks (ignoring Code Veronica, which lets you go nuts across multiple areas), Silent Hill games are more than content to let you move at your own pace and enjoy the sights, as long as you’re willing to move on when you’ve exhausted all of the fun in a particular area.
Silent Hill 2’s remake doesn’t always shy away from this structure (i.e. the beginning crawl through the town, the fog world hospital after Maria initially exits, the otherworld, the still intact hotel), but more often than not it wrests control over the pace. Unlike the Resident Evil games, the remake instead resembles an unlikely contemporary: Metroid Dread. In both of these games, a larger world map obfuscates a linear progression where the player moves into a segment of the map, a “door” is locked behind them, and they must find a way out back into the larger world. In Dread this is done more artfully: your moments in the larger world may actually feature backtracking to solve optional puzzles/execution challenges before locking in for the next room chunk and power-up unlock. Silent Hill 2 Remake has none of that, and there’s not really an interconnected map in the original to work off of (it is, even in that one, highly constrained), so you end up often locked into a chunk of rooms to find a key to get out directly into the next chunk of rooms.
In an attempt to cover this up, the game instead sets up rule of three puzzles for you to solve. Near the start of any given area, the game corrals you to a puzzle missing three objects, usually with a save point tucked away right next to it. Bring the three keys back, solve the puzzle, and the key to the next area is yours. The original used this structure as well, but it never explicitly oriented its areas around it. In the prison, for instance, the cavernous gallows area in the back of the prison requires three tablets, but when provided, it only plays a screaming sound and doesn’t yield a new item or entryway. It’s only upon leaving the area that one will find an odd horseshoe attached to the exit door handle, which is needed for a different, much less parallel (the motely crew of the horseshoe, the wax doll, and the lighter) three-item puzzle needed to open a nondescript hatch near the prison bathrooms. Likewise, in one of the many instances of the developers smirking at the player with their setpieces, a box in the hospital covered with a ridiculous amount of locks and keypads offers nothing but a strand of hair when opened, which James doesn’t notice until staring at it for a bit. This strand is, again, needed for a different puzzle to retrieve a key out of a shower drain that will actually take the player to the boss for the area.
In the remake, these puzzles (or what replaces them) dictate the pace of the entire area. While keys and combinations are still required to get into the locked box (although it’s three instead of four this time), they each have been placed in one section that loops back to the main puzzle at the center hub instead of being scattered around the hospital. When one of the locks is opened, it closes off the section attached to it, funneling the player into another section in the process. In the prison, there are four different doors that will open when the player weighs a set of scales in the gallows area towards a corresponding symbol. One door will open at once, leading the player to run through the area, grab a new weight, and return to reset the scales towards a different area, with only one order of doors possible given the sequence of scales acquired. The game uses the keys less as organic pick-ups which the player must intuit belong to a particular puzzle and more as specific goals for a cluster of rooms. When the game deviates from this model, such as in the aforementioned post-Maria hospital or the hotel, it still hews to the three-key model without subversion. Even when James opens the locked box in the hospital and reveals that it’s empty, his strained expression of desperation melts away when a curtain behind him falls and the path to the Pyramid Head chase appears.
Repetitive structural models provide orientation for the player: they set precedent for how the player should approach an area and how they’ll exit it. In the dream logic of Silent Hill, this is a poor fit. As soon as the player can orient themselves to how a new area should work by observing previous areas, they can map out the progression and lose the suspense that comes with not knowing what trials may come next. Game developer and survival horror expert Chris Pruett identifies a similar structural issue in his review of Outlast, which he explains as follows:
“Comfort is the antithesis of horror. When the player feels comfortable, they aren’t feeling scared. In a game like Outlast, one of the primary ways that a player comforts himself is by anticipating what will come next. This is a mode of thinking that treats the game we are playing like a system. Every time you think, ‘oh, the obvious flashing light is to the left, so I’ll go right first,’ or ’this would be a good spot for a hidden item,’ or ‘it’s been a while since the last pop-out scare, I bet one’s coming up,’ you’re thinking about the game as a system that you are trying to solve. You’re not navigating the dark hallways of a corrupt insane asylum that’s been experimenting on its patients, you’re solving a Rubix[sic] Cube. Guess which one of those types of play is scarier.”
The more that the remake form-fits its level design into this particular chokepoint model, the less capability it has to push the player out of their comfort zone. Building off the Rubik’s Cube comparison in the quote, the original labyrinth had a well-known cube puzzle that involved lining up a smaller cube model in such a way that a perforated metal room it controlled created openings on each end. This one puzzle now scaffolds the entirety of the new labyrinth section: the player enters the area to find a much larger version of the cube structure, they manipulate it to create a path, they navigate through whatever puzzles the path leads to, and then they are dumped back at the cube in order to open a new path. The original labyrinth was built to disorient players by not providing a full map, and it led right out of the prison without giving a player a (relative) respite on the streets of Silent Hill as both the apartments and the hospital do. A rearrangement of segments in the remake now puts the Abstract Daddy boss fight and the hangman’s puzzle right at the end of the prison in order to create an area->chokepoint puzzle->boss loop for the prison and labyrinth to follow, making the labyrinth opening now a respite of its own rather than a furtherance of the nightmare. From the extrapolation of the cube puzzle and the three-floor layout of the labyrinth (one of which is just three combat rooms) to the new boss ordering, the remake cannot help but sacrifice the idiosyncratic structure of the original in favor of a comforting, repetitive area loop.