Black Box

The Resurrection of Big-Brand Survival Horror

Over the next few months, we’re getting an expansion pack for the latest Resident Evil game, a new game from the makers of Dead Space, a remake of Dead Space, and a remake of Resident Evil 4. And the remake of Silent Hill 2 doesn’t look extremely far off (the system requirements are already out). It might be safe to say that AAA horror games are back.

Well, Resident Evil has been back since Resident Evil VII took the flagship franchise of horror video games back to its roots and reinvented it at the same time five years ago. But now Konami is trying to dust off Resident Evil’s main rival — Silent Hill, and then there are all those space horror games they showcased in the summer. The Halloween horror game previews are also sort of the first time we’ve had three of the genre’s pillar brands presented side-by-side.

Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Dead Space had different heydays, succeeding each other in that order. Resident Evil’s prime era was on the original PlayStation, while Silent Hill debuted immediately after with its most critically-acclaimed games on the PlayStation 2. This was the original “golden era” of console horror games before the interregnum when the costs and economic conditions in the PlayStation 3 era diminished almost every genre that wasn’t an action game. Thinking back now, Dead Space is probably what held the console horror gaming torch during that period.

Everything else horror-themed on the PS3 and Xbox 360 was really an action shooter: Resident Evil 5, Resident Evil 6, Resident Evil: Racoon City, Left 4 Dead, and so on. Even Dead Space is considerably more action-oriented than its predecessors, but it’s still a game about exploring, solving puzzles, and managing resources. That’s what’s coming back with these recently-revealed titles.

The Silent Hill presentation this week is the one that actually revealed new products (the other aforementioned new games already approaching final release), and also the one everybody seems the most cautious about. Out of all the classic horror games, Silent Hill is the one most known for its nuanced, psychological storytelling — the kind that gets it held up as a poster child for the potential of video games as a storytelling medium. Konami, on the other hand, has shown almost no interest in retail console games at all since kicking out Hideo Kojima and Silent Hills with him (even if you don’t think Kojima could’ve pulled off Silent Hill, I’m still mad we lost out on a game from Guillermo Del Toro and Junji Ito).

However, all this is why Konami was probably smart to farm Silent Hill out to a bunch of small independent teams that actually care about it. It’s fitting too since indie PC games like Amnesia and Outlast are what really kept horror alive during those PS3/360 dark ages. A new project from Annapurna and the team behind Observation is oddly on-brand for Silent Hill. And getting the writer of a critically acclaimed visual novel about trauma to helm what looks like the next “main” title in the series is one of Konami’s best moves of late.

People are just concerned about the Silent Hill 2 remake. When I said folks praise Silent Hill for deep psychological storytelling and hold it up as a champion of games as art, I was mostly talking about Silent Hill 2. The game is like a delicate crown jewel, and Konami just handed it to a developer that’s become infamous for its handling of the themes Silent Hill 2 deals with like trauma and mental illness.

I haven’t played any of Bloober Team’s games so I don’t have first-hand knowledge of any of this controversy. If you don’t care about spoiling the studio’s previous Silent Hill homage — The Medium — these threads seem to be a good summation of what the issue is. If I ever investigate the Silent Hill 2 remake, it’ll be out of curiosity for what might be one of the first commercial Unreal Engine 5 games, if not the first, showcasing the engine’s famous Lumen and Nanite technologies.

On the flip side, it also looks auspicious that a remake of Dead Space is dropping a couple months before a remake of Resident Evil 4 — one of its primary inspirations. They’re each taking a similar approach to their source material too.

We’ve seen a lot of remasters, remakes that put old games in modern coats of paint (like The Last of Us Part 1), and remakes that completely re-imagine old games (like Resident Evil 2), but not many that significantly build on top of an old game’s blueprint. That’s what the 2002 remake of the original Resident Evil did, and it seems to be what the Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 remakes are doing. Each one has maps you can recognize from its original, but they switched up the game mechanics or added something to spice things up. It just remains to be seen whether Capcom is really rebuilding all of Resident Evil 4. That’s not a small game (some people think it should be cut down, but I don’t know).

I’m still not even sure what happened to make all those game publishers say “yeah, let’s start making big-budget horror games again.” Did Resident Evil VII really start this the way the first game popularized survival horror?

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RedSwirl
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