Silent Hill 2 is one of the greatest horror games of all time. It's kind of incredible that a game so old remains a high watermark of horror after over 20 years. It has an atmosphere as heavy as morning mist in Maine, it's full of endlessly analysable symbolism for us pop psychologists, and its monsters unsettle us with macabre designs instead of jumping out and going 'Oogedy-Boogedy!'
You know what else Silent Hill 2 has? Tons and tons of locked doors.
Yep, I do love Silent Hill 2, but even I can't deny that a disproportionate amount of game time is spent tugging at every single door in the hope that it's the right one to progress the story-or even that it may unveil an optional room yielding precious ammo or lore tidbits. It's pretty much a locked-door simulator (though sometimes I do wonder if there's a wealth of content on Silent Hill 2 that could be discovered if James just tried pushing instead of pulling the doors each time).
Now, to an old-timer like me, those doors were part of the game's charm. James Sunderland doesn't really have a clue where he's going in the game, other than by vague hints and drifty dream logic, so it kinda makes sense that if he's in an apartment complex scrounging for survival supplies, he may as well just try all the doors, right? Besides, I quite liked checking off each door I tried on the map with a squiggly line if it was completely inaccessible, a straight red line for a locked but openable door, and a two-way arrow indicating that I've tested it and yep, it is indeed a fully functioning honest-to-god door. I enjoyed the tactility of a map filling up with markings dynamically as you explored the environment that map pertained to.
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But maybe it's archaic design in this day and age to force the player to test every single door in an apartment complex or hospital and have 80% of them be locked. So the remake's developers Bloober Team have a design predicament on their hands: how do they solve the problem of Silent Hill 2's million locked doors? Do they hang onto this core if outdated part of the Silent Hill 2 gameplay loop, or do they (whisper it) change something?
The classic thing to do, and the approach used by most games today, is the ol' 'door that's actually a piece of wall' trick. Older games would have certain doors just be glorified wall textures, while real doors would be 3D objects, so our eyes would quickly learn to distinguish between them. You'll always know a real door from a fake door in Half-Life 2, because the fake ones look like murky-textured ass while the real ones have door handles, fancy frosted glass, and everything.
More modern games usually have the resources to make even fake doors more detailed, with proper 3D handles and everything, so in those cases you create other ways of distinguishing the no-doors from the go-doors. In Dishonored, inaccessible doors would have iron grates over them, in Ghostwire: Tokyo, inaccessible doors tend to look grey and unappealing while openable ones 'pop' a bit more. So that's one way to go about things, preserving the broad architecture of Silent Hill 2 while creating a clear distinction between the doors you can go through and the ones you can't. But would that ruin the immersion a bit? And what of those precious map markings?
Another option is to create more environmental cues to guide the player (and Lord no, I'm not talking about map icons or lights on the ground showing you the way at the press of a button). Part of Silent Hill 2's power derives from the sense that you're lost in these dark labyrinthine environments, but even the original game created hints that abided by a kind of dream logic to show you the way.
Case in point: in the Wood Side Apartments in OG Silent Hill 2, you go into Apartment 208, where there's nothing of note for you, you then leave the room, go find some other items, then when you're at a bit of a loose end, you loop back to Floor 2 and have your first sighting of Pyramid Head on the other side of some bars at the end of a long corridor, right next to 208. Pyramid Head disappears, and yet the fact that he was right next to Apartment 208 nudges you back towards that room where, lo and behold, there's now a dead body and a key for you to collect.
It's just awesome design-an almost subliminal hint that's totally integrated into the game world. One of the few criticisms I have of Silent Hill 2 is that this kind of doesn't happen enough, and most of the time you just need to trial-and-error every single door in a building. Bloober Team could really build on that classic moment in Silent Hill 2 by creating more of these eerie horror moments that just push you along in the right direction and keep your momentum going.
It's no secret that fans have for a long time been skeptical of Bloober Team working on Silent Hill 2 (though I'm comforted when I hear Bloober Team say that they will 'play it safe,' even if they've doofed up James' face). Silent Hill 2 is such a sacred sheep of gaming that people overlook the things that by today's standards just don't hold up, like the combat or the 'door simulator' problem I chatted about above.
There are other options too: do what Resident Evil 2 Remake with its police station and flesh out the maps a bit, making more rooms accessible and redesigning things to have fewer dud doors; or keep things super old-school by simply retaining the endless unopenable doors. I for one wouldn't mind the latter but hey, I'm the only person in the world who likes Redfall, so what do I know.
NEXT: 10 Best PS2 Horror Games, Ranked