After the unbelievably good Silent Hill 2 remake that came out in 2024, I had high hopes for this one. It’s been 13 years since the series had an original entry and this one was coming from a Konami that’s been surprisingly competent recently. While there’s a lot to like about this game, I think there are a ton of things that hold it back from truly making a name for itself.

I’m a big fan of the setting they chose to go with. The rural 1960s Japanese town had a ton of creepy locations (schoolhouses, fields, traditional homes), which lent itself to cool dark world locations following a similar aesthetic. I also liked that they didn’t shy away from gore. There are some pretty gnarly scenes revolving around self-mutilation that were hard to watch but were super memorable.

The characters were pretty solid across the board, but nobody really stole the show. The protagonist is pretty reserved most of the time and only really starts to show some fire once you get into the end game.

The combat system in play is definitely the biggest thing working against it. I was down for their decision to stick with strictly melee combat going in, but god damn, this game needs some ranged options because the systems they developed were just jank and unfun. It would be one thing if you could traverse the world in a way that let you avoid combat as much as possible, but you’re constantly getting dropped into enemy arenas that you need to fight through. I definitely could have been better about using the charm system more effectively along with the dodge and parry mechanics, but it wouldn’t change the fact that the base combat just felt so bad to engage with. It’s a real shame because I thought how they handled it in the Silent Hill 2 remake felt great and this game definitely needed some of that polish. I thought that the wolf arm you get halfway through the game was really going to make combat more manageable, but it was just about as clunky as every other weapon you end up using.

The bosses at least had solid designs and were much more manageable than the regular enemy waves, but the stiff melee combat ultimately led to some pretty meh encounters that didn’t really leave that great of a final impression.

The puzzles, which definitely fit in with staples of the series, range from middling to annoying in most cases. Even the scarecrow sequence, which I’m sure a lot of people would chalk up as one of the most memorable in the game, got to a point where the hints weren’t clear enough to figure out the solutions in a satisfying way. The back half of this game straight up just drops puzzles completely and becomes even more combat-focused than the first half.

The game definitely had some scares, but it didn’t even come close to replicating the dread that I felt going into each new location in Silent Hill 2.

The leveling system was pretty annoying since you could be sitting on a ton of points, but if you didn’t happen to pick up one of the scarce upgrade charms hidden throughout the game, you were kind of shit out of luck.

You roll credits around the 11 to 12 hour mark, but that’s really only the start of what this game expects out of you. There are 4 different endings to this game and you need to complete the game at least 3 times if you want to see all of the cutscenes along with the true ending. From what I’ve seen, it does seem like there is a lot of new content to work through in each subsequent playthrough, but it doesn’t change the fact that you need to play through every main story beat and go through the same areas and puzzles over and over again if you want to make any meaningful progression. That also means suffering through the terrible enemy gauntlets that the game throws at you, especially near the end of each playthrough.

I’m pretty confident that if I took the time to keep playing to see the additional story, uncover the hidden collectibles, and see this one to the true ending, I’d probably at least bump this up to a 7, but it’s just too much to ask for, especially in a horror game that really gets off on trying to get you with jump scares around every corner. Silent Hill 2 had multiple endings, but they were all things you could easily look up and see online. Sure they give you the option to do another full playthrough, but there was no way in hell I was putting myself through that super stressful experience more than once.

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