Mr Viral
And are likely working with Konami again
Image credit: Konami
As I type these words, specialist wifeguy assessor Brendy is rambling through the fog of Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake. Knowing Brendy, he’ll be sauntering down Neely Street like a gentleman dandy from 1920s Oxford, throwing out his cuffs and elbows and winking merrily at all the shambling depression metaphors who are trying to chew his legs off. While we await his verdict, here’s another excerpt from a chat with Bloober earlier this summer, in which I pop the extremely imaginative question of what they’ll do after remaking Silent Hill 2. The answer, in brief, is more games with a manual third-person view that rely on ambience, suspense and the thrill of the unknown, rather than monsters going “boo!”
“Back in the day when we were working on the first Layers Of Fear, we were much more counting on jump scares and things that appear in a very sudden way,” lead producer Maciej Głomb told me. “And I think that with every game afterward and especially right now, with Silent Hill 2, we went much more in the direction of just creating this tense atmosphere – again, [this sense of] the unknown, you’re not sure what’s going to happen next. If you can actually deliver on this feeling, you don’t actually need to ‘make’ something happen because this is already working on players, they’re having that experience.”
These observations are “more on the creative side”. In more practical terms, Bloober haven’t spent years getting a manual third-person camera up and running only to plonk it on the shelf come 7th October.
“[The Silent Hill 2 remake] is also the first game where we’ve created a third person camera and going forward, I think this is also the direction that we want to keep exploring,” Głomb continued. “Because we feel that it actually helps you experience the story, and understand the emotions, the motivation of the characters, and keeps the overall experience much more personal. Because seeing the character, you identify with them, in my opinion, much more than, for example, when you play in first-person.”
The remake’s creative director Mateusz Lenart also told me that Bloober try to treat every project very deliberately as a foundation for the next.
“If you track our evolution over time, you can see that every single project was actually preparation to do that again, that kind of game,” he said. “We’re adding elements very slowly to grow as a company, to gain confidence, to gain experience, etcetera.
“And it was while we were doing The Medium, that we did this proposition – we felt we had the technology, the experience and knowledge to try and deal with Silent Hill, an iconic title. For us it was the cherry on the top, but we still want to progress, we’ve learned so much about technology, about combat systems, so many things that we can bring to new titles.”
A chaser: Bloober Team’s CEO Piotr Babieno recently hinted to Bankier.pl that we “can expect that [Silent Hill 2] is not the end of the adventure with Konami.” Will they be allowed to develop the next numbered sequel? Or will Konami hand them another elder Hill to revamp, perhaps even the original game?
As I explored rather showily in my preview, there’s a sense in which Bloober have been making Silent Hill games since their founding. While distinct productions that form a discreet connected universe, their projects have always been heavily indebted to Konami’s ashen psychodrama. This is especially true of The Medium, which puts a splitscreen spin on Silent Hill’s alternate-dimension premise.
While I can respect the logic of building directly on the design of the Silent Hill 2 remake, I’d personally love Bloober to swing for the fences a little, with their next horror game concept. It’s not like there’s any shortage of Silent Hill games or Silent Hill-inspired games in the offing.
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