Horror-Adjacent Double-Review ("Silent Hill 2" and "Lorn's Lure")

You know what's interesting? I in no way intended for this to be a Halloween thing, but it worked out, didn't it? Anyway, hello again, dear readers, and welcome to another one of my shorter-form multi-subject reviews for games that I don't have as much to say about...and I suspect that's going to be a damning mark on my gamer report card given what one of the subjects for today is. So, let's not dawdle!

Publisher: Konami

Developer: Bloober Team

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Microsoft Windows

Released all the way back in 2001, Silent Hill 2 is not just lauded as the best survival horror game of all time, but one of the best games of all time, period. So, with corporate cowardice being what it is, it was inevitable that a remake would eventually come out, and a matter of years ago, it was revealed that infamous horror developer Bloober Team was going to be taking the reins. Bloober Team, for their part, have a reputation for being a kind of horror Wizard of Oz: all smoke and mirrors with no substance. As for me, I've never played a Silent Hill game, and the only Bloober Team game I've played is Observer. So, in just about every respect, this remake was the perfect place for me to jump in! With reviews being as positive as they've been, it finally seemed like I could get the chance to experience the world-class masterpiece people have been talking about for the majority of my life...

Well, no use delaying the inevitable any longer: Silent Hill 2 is good, but I don't think it's fantastic. In a world where anybody who hasn't been living under a rock more or less knows the premise and how it ends, perhaps that isn't a surprise, given that only gameplay and little details remain to be newly experienced. I also don't know where the original ends and Bloober Team begins (other than obvious things like technical quality), so just keep that in mind. I'll say that between the time I got started on this blurb and when I hunkered down to get the rest of the review written, I softened on this remake a bit, but that doesn't mean that there aren't flaws.

Silent Hill 2, as you probably well know, follows a man named James Sunderland. At the start of the story, he has just arrived in the titular sleepy town of Silent Hill, having received a letter from his wife saying she's waiting for him there. The problem with this? His wife has been dead for years, having succumbed to a terrible illness. So, James is here for answers, but because this is a horror game, he's mainly just in for a bad time. Within a couple minutes of entering the city limits, he realizes that Silent Hill is occupied mainly by what can best be described as "entities": Walking body bags, people whose top halves are just a second upturned pair of legs, zombie-like nurses in skimpy dresses, indescribable horrors with female genitalia for hands, and of course, the ever-infamous Pyramid Head. If you noticed something of a pattern in that monster role call, good...that kind of attention to detail is key to getting the most out of this game as possible. But rather than, as the kids would say, "nope-ing the f*** out of there" like a normal person, James descends deeper and deeper into the madness of the town, the semblance of normalcy deteriorating more and more with every minute he stays there. The story is, of course, over 20 years old, so there's not much to say that hasn't already been said in that time...and this is kind of where I have a hard time figuring out where the original ends and Bloober begins. Without wishing to spoil anything for anyone who happens not to know, I'll say that going into this more-or-less knowing what everything *actually* is, I kind of got the sense that James was a very different person for most of the game than he seemed to be in the end...I mean, that's kind of the whole point, but I mean it in a different way than you're supposed to. Having had some more time to think things through, I think it's entirely possible that the discussions I've heard throughout the years rob the narrative of some much-needed nuance. Discussions have made things sound a bit more 1-to-1 than they seem to actually be..."this directly means x and that directly means y," when the truth is more complicated and richer in philosophical implication, in other words. It really stands as a testament to the immortal quality of this game's story that I want to get into what I mean by that and what my misconceptions were going in, but I'll save that for some blurbs in the 2024 end of year lists, I suppose!

Now, story is and has always been the main point of Silent Hill 2. Combat has always been an afterthought, so it may seem ridiculous to have too much of a point value riding on it...but there's a lot of combat in this remake. Combat is kind of front-and-center this time around, having been evidently re-worked. So...they kind of dug their own grave on this one. As you no-doubt gleaned from that, the non-puzzle gameplay is weak. But it's really worse than that: it's annoying. The first couple hours of this remake felt like a complete slog to me because it was basically just the fighting and the most vanilla iteration of the town. The town needs to take time to start having its facade peel away, I don't begrudge that aspect...but it did mean that the game's absolute weakest quality was in the spotlight when it shouldn't have been. There are so many enemies all over the place, and while the lack of enemy variety isn't necessarily an issue, the fact that they all seem to fight exactly the same way (with only one notable exception) is. If you don't have ammo for guns (and you don't even get a gun until after the first couple hours in the first place), you have to fight with a melee weapon. This ultimately works as follows: you swing your weapon and dodge attacks. It's really as simple as that, with the only real challenge being learning when enemies are going to attack and how quickly they do it. Once you figure that out, there isn't much of a legitimate challenge..."legitimate" being the key word there. The issue is that this is all extremely over-animated in a way that only modern games seem to be. So everything is sluggish and clunky, and your dodge feel wholly inadequate at the best of times. It wouldn't be nearly as big a problem if there just wasn't such a focus on it. It's not like this is a stealth game where failure is met with combat as a punishment, you ultimately have no choice but to fight in 99% of situations. And while I eventually just learned to take it as a necessary evil, I was tempted to put the game down for good in the first few hours because I would get so aggravated every time the radio would start making noises to signal an upcoming fight. Again, combat isn't the point...but in a world where the tourists (the new word for the "The Quartering"s of the world) throw temper tantrums on the ground and hold their breath and crap their pants because the childhood sexual assault victim character isn't sexy enough, there are dumber complaints to have!

Thankfully, it's not all bad on the gameplay front. For a lot of the time, the puzzle design is great. Sometimes it'll be as simple as a combination lock, but to get the numbers for it, you'll have to follow some kind of dream logic (one in which you have to take on the perspective of a prisoner watching the hallway through a hole in the wall and counting how many times the flickering light goes dark in a given cycle comes to mind). Sometimes that dream logic is really out there, but it's the kind of thing that, without exception, feels awesome to figure out. This is another thing that's kind of hard to tell who to give credit to without having played the original game...but there's one thing I do know to give Bloober credit for...and that's the bad puzzles....I assume. For every handful of great puzzles, there's at least one puzzle that isn't really a puzzle at all. It could be a combination lock just like I've already described, but instead of a trippy dream logic solution, you have to go on a wild goose chase through a hospital checking every single room to find a key to another room to find a hidden route to another room to find the code to a safe that you found in yet another room, and inside that safe the combination is just written down on a piece of paper. In total, this remake took me about 16 hours to beat, which I'm lead to understand is twice as long as the original....and that shows in puzzles like this. I think the goal was to give the player a sense of there being a better wealth of content, so I believe this was a well-meaning move, but the result is that (at least for me) it felt like certain sections took unreasonably longer than others. So, there's a major sense of bloat and combat sucks, but I want to be clear that the good puzzles truly carry this remake.

Another thing that carries this remake is its atmosphere. The graphics are as excellent as you'd expect from a big budget project like this, which naturally lends to an excellent atmosphere even with the Unreal Engine animation jank that nobody seems to want to acknowledge. But the art direction alongside the graphics is the real gem. The majority of the game actually takes place in broad daylight. You'd think that wouldn't lend itself well to horror, but the incomparable fog effects make things just as eerie as if these events took place at night...at least, until the events that actually do take place at night, where things get ten times better. So while it's true that you can only see so many decrepit, rusted, wallpaper-peeling buildings before it kind of stops being scary, I can say with certainty that the atmosphere never stops being top-notch.

The rest of the technical report card is mostly good. I mentioned Unreal Engine animation jank earlier, but there's only one game made in Unreal that doesn't have that (Lies of P), so I try not to hold it against a game. Really the only things I noticed were the occasional framerate drop, some enemy AI bugs, and some enemy animation jank that isn't part and parcel for Unreal Engine. Pretty good, all things considered. 

I hardly think there are many people out there who are on the fence about Silent Hill 2, but just in case there are some people, one question remains: do I recommend this remake? Even if you aren't a fan of horror, I think the answer is yes. This isn't a jumpscare or gore-heavy kind of horror experience, so I don't think it would give you nightmares or anything like that. Combat isn't great, but both that and the puzzles have difficulty sliders, so you'll likely find a difficulty setting that works for you. Ultimately, I believe this is a story that deserves to be experienced, and as I've already said, online discussions seem to take a lot of the nuance out of it. So, there you go!

Let us review:

Weak combat - 1.0

Bloated feeling - 0.5

Small tech woes - 0.3

The final score for Silent Hill 2 (the remake) is...

8.2/10 - Great

Way to meet the challenge, Bloober team, way to meet the challenge!

Publisher: N/A

Developer: Rubeki

Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed for),  MacOS,  Linux

This year has been frighteningly short on indie gems, I'm sad to say. I go back to steam every now and again to try to find the next Wife Quest or The Forgotten City or Neon White, but this year there just hasn't been anything that astounding. It seems like the influx of porn games isn't slowing down, and the roguelike plague just refuses to die no matter how many women, children, and puppies I sacrifice to Satan to try and make it happen...but recently I came across Lorn's Lure: an atmospheric climbing game set in a haunting, isolated, giant-wire ugly cyberpunk megastructure that seemed right up my alley. So, after loving the demo, I shelled out the clams to play the full thing....and though the game trips hard at the last minute, it's still great for the rest of the time, at least! As for why it's horror-adjacent, there are two levels that have blatant horror themes...so it's not totally random that I'm including this in the bundle!

In Lorn's Lure, you're a little android guy who is trying to escape the megastructure he calls home by following an owl-like glitch in the matrix and tackling progressively more and more life-threatening and seemingly impossible climbing feats. You start off accomplishing these feats with just your bare hands, but through your travels, you'll gain access to far more helpful tools such as climbing axes and special software that lets you "tic-tac" (run along a wall for a bit then leap from it). And while that's pretty much all there is to it, that doesn't mean the experience isn't worthwhile! This is probably the best climbing-centric game I've played in years, as a matter of fact.

Essentially, just about everything you'll find in the world is climbable no matter what your common sense tells you, so everything you can see is a potentially valid step in your route up or down a given path...and to be direct with you, I'm having an extremely hard time finding how to "objectively" describe the gameplay here. It really is just "you use whatever tools you have at your disposal to climb to wherever your next waypoint tells you to climb to," and so I find myself in a bit of an unusual situation. Normally I tend to just describe how a game plays from a mostly technical standpoint, but here I find myself falling back more on how it felt to play. So, bear with me here. 

I don't suffer from vertigo, but there were times during Lorn's Lure where I definitely felt it. This game will see you pinning all of your hopes of reaching your next waypoint on jumping to a toothpick-sized little outcropping in the distance where your timing and distance management will have to be perfect, and I found myself thinking "ohhhhhh no, I don't want to do that!" on more than one occasion. And if I had to pick one way of describing Lorn's Lure, I think I'd choose to say that it's a game where you'll constantly be presented with situations that seem either impossible or terrifying (or both), think up a way to progress, then think  "holy shit I can't believe that worked!" when your plan works out. Therein lies the inherent joy that I found. You'll see that toothpick-sized outcropping, fail at reaching it something like 10 times, then have some crazy idea that you decide to try out...and then, against all odds, somehow, someway, that crazy idea will get you where you needed to go, and as you pull yourself up after just barely sticking the landing, you'll think that thought I lined out a sentence or so ago. It's a constant cycle of "I can't do it" followed by "how on earth did I do it?" in other words. 

As for the line between success and failure, that's pretty straightforward, but not exactly in the way you might expect it to be. Clearly you fail if you fall into the abyss, sure...but it isn't the falling that does you in in real life, and it isn't the falling that constitutes a failure here either. Rather, preventing failure in Lorn's Lure is all about velocity management, not fall management. Your character wears a little meter that detects your velocity, and once you start moving too fast, a little alarm will sound that indicates you'll die the next time you touch something (whether it be the ground or a wall). This is a bit of a double-edged sword. On one hand, this plays a clear role into that "against all odds" sense of success, as you'll sometimes succeed simply by making snap decisions mid-jump that place you at just the right angle to leap without gaining too much velocity on the way down. On the other hand, the difference between success and failure can sometimes be as thin as whether or not you jump before you fall from one surface to another one below it. This means there are going to be many time where you'll die just because you chose to jump down rather than slide down, which can be eye-rollingly stupid-feeling. But failure is a near-instantaneous thing that allows you to reload near-instantaneously as well. So, the key is to use your brain, be methodical, and take those chances you feel in your gut. Checkpointing seems to happen every time you reach a new valid foothold, so playing smartly almost always rewards you with a permanent retention of your progress. I'm self-aware enough to know that my critical voice hasn't really been the same since I lost my dog around a month ago, dear reader, but I hope I've done a decent enough job of helping to convey how the moment-to-moment gameplay might be enjoyable. This game is a clear effort of love, and that love really pays off in a big way....mostly.

Sadly, there are some technical missteps as well as one gigantic blemish that, unfortunately, has rendered me unable to finish the game. Let's start off with the small things. Firstly, in the last couple of levels, some of the wall textures are put together in ways that are extremely unhelpful. For some reason, a lot of these wall textures towards the end are repeated with the borders showing....or at least, I think that's how I'd describe the issue. What this means is that there will appear to be little outcroppings, but in reality, it's just a slightly darker line where one tile of the wall texture meets another. Once you realize this, you aren't going to die too often reaching for them, but it's still a pretty consistent fakeout in the later hours. Then, there's the manual climb-up system. Essentially, when you land about eye-level with a surface, you'll automatically start climbing up it...sometimes. I couldn't for the life of me tell you what the secret to making that work is. The game just seems to decide on a whim what surfaces will let you auto-climb if you land close enough to the top of the surface...and like with the previous technical misstep, this doesn't rear its head too often, but when it does, it's not great. That's all I have for the small things, so you can rest assured that there aren't any noticeable framerate drops, crashes, texture pop-in, audio bugs, or any other small things you might associate with smaller releases like this one! 

However...the game makes one major mistake that, as I've already said, has ensured that I haven't finished it and don't intend to try. It's the last level. Not something in the last level. The entire last level. In this final level, the game succumbs to what I'd like to start calling "The Ghostrunner Problem." It's a phenomenon in insta-die/insta-respawn games like this where the developer decides to ramp the difficulty up to 11 with no warning, add a brand new time element (such as rising lava), and create a nightmare of sensory overload to boot. After about five minutes of using a brand new tool, Lorn's Lure decides to throw the entire gameplay model of careful planning, observation, and execution out the window in favor of a gauntlet of challenges relying on not just perfect execution of this new tool you've had for all of five minutes, but perfect execution of every other game system with no time to observe or plan. There's also a constantly progressing orange sludge substance that kills you and blocks off the next place you need to get to if you don't perform well enough in time. Checkpoints occur rarely, and the whole thing takes place with the most ear-gratingly annoying dubstep you can imagine and the screams of people falling into hell the whole time. And you know what? I did pretty damn well with it for a time. I believe (/hope) I got pretty far in this gauntlet, getting......five or six checkpoints deep, I think? I can't say for sure because each leg of the gauntlet is pretty nondescript, but my last checkpoint started in an area where I had to jump to a long platform on the left side of the screen, then jump through a gigantic stretch of empty air to grapple onto a small overhang and worm my way through some ruins. But it just kept going and going and going and the windows for success just kept getting more and more ridiculous, and I eventually just decided I was done. I'd come that far, I could likely get the rest of the way through given enough time...but the Ghostrunner problem is the only thing in the world that is legitimately controller-smashingly infuriating for me. The constant auditory overstimulation, the constant respawns within two seconds, the constant failure without even getting a chance to see what the next step ought to be, the throwing away of careful planning in favor of trial and error and dumb luck, all of it made me too angry and I didn't feel like reaching the end credits. It's such a shame, given how legitimately excellent the rest of the game was (and how not infuriating the one other time the game did the whole "perform well on a timer" thing was), but I have to call it like I see it.

That was a hell of a note to end on, but if there's one thing I don't want you to do, it's judge the whole game based on that. I'm the one who got that frustrated with it, and you know what? That's not ultimately what I remember. When I think about my time with Lorn's Lure, I remember that x-factor that made 99% of its runtime the constant dopamine hit that it is. I remember specific feats I performed, specific maneuvers I pulled where I thought "no waaaaaay!" when I succeeded! I think of the killer isolationist atmosphere that accompanied the experience, and the haunting ambiance that made up the soundscape. And if you feel like you might enjoy it as well, there's a free demo where you can give it a shot. If developer Rubeki can apply the same love they applied to this game to whatever they do next, I have no doubt they're going places, and I intend to be along for the ride.

Let us review:

Final level - 1.0

Smaller technical concerns - 0.3

The final score for Lorn's Lure is...

8.7/10 - Near Fantastic

Great work, Rubeki, great work!