Conclusion

Silent Hill 2 is one of the most atmospheric and chilling horror games I've ever played. It's easily up there among the best survival horror titles of all time. The game does an incredible job of drawing you into its unsettling, oppressive world with a masterful balance of exploration, puzzle-solving, and psychological horror. Originally released in 2001 for the PlayStation 2, Silent Hill 2 has become a timeless classic, and its influence on the horror genre is undeniable. You follow James Sunderland as he navigates the eerie, fog-covered town of Silent Hill, searching for his deceased wife after receiving a mysterious letter from her. As you progress, the game unravels a deeply emotional and disturbing narrative, exploring themes of grief, guilt, and the human psyche.

The puzzles in Silent Hill 2 aren't just there to fill time; they're woven into the atmosphere and story, deepening the mystery. Some require sharp observation, while others challenge you to interpret eerie, cryptic clues. Depending on the difficulty you choose, the puzzles can either be more complex or straightforward. Whether you're unlocking safes or solving riddles to progress, they enhance the immersion and tension, providing a mental challenge that heightens the overall sense of unease.

What I didn't like is that movement is extremely slow, which feels like wasted time to me, especially when navigating between puzzles—Cheat Engine Speed Hack helps. There's also only minimal variety in the enemies and bosses. Still, it's an excellent horror game and I can definitely recommend it, if the genre is your cup of tea and you haven't played the original.

Graphics
Thanks to Unreal Engine 5, the graphics in the game are (just) "good," but environments are perfectly crafted in a dark, gritty art style. The textures are top-notch and add to the atmosphere, though I wish there was more geometry detail in the map and objects. Character models are lacking, too, with low-poly counts and dull facial animations that fall far short of what we've seen in recent titles like Hellblade 2 or The Last of Us. It also seems that the maps were designed by different teams—some look spectacular, thanks to highly-detailed textures, others look a bit boring.

Reflections work very well and look like hardware ray tracing. Many of these are not your standard screen-space reflections, so they work well from most angles and don't just disappear when you look down. While enabling hardware RT does improve the image quality a bit, it's not a major difference—Unreal Lumen looks good with just shaders, too.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
The game does compile shaders on startup for a minute or two. Once that is complete, there is no more shader compilation, even when the game is restarted, until a GPU hardware change or driver update. Level loading is pretty fast, too, no complaints here either. While there have been lots of reports about major stutter, I was lucky enough to only have minor stuttering on two systems. As you move between areas, even on the same map, there's a split-second of stuttering, which can be a bit distracting. Once you're past that, the game runs pretty smoothly, even though there is a little bit of additional stutter from time to time. There are several options for contrast enhancement, which helps visually impaired people navigating the dark. I also like that there's separate difficulty settings for the fighting and the puzzles.

Effects & Upscalers
Silent Hill 2 has support for NVIDIA DLSS, AMD FSR and Intel XeSS, but there is no support for Frame Generation—no idea why. Adding Frame Generation in an Unreal Engine 5 game should be really quick and easy and can be accomplished within a few hours. Sharpening is quite well-behaved, and can be adjusted; you can turn off motion blur completely, too. The FOV is too narrow for me and I got a bit of motion sickness, even though I'm usually not susceptible to that. Here, too, no idea why there's no FOV setting in a game in 2024.

Hardware Requirements
Given the graphics, performance requirements are pretty high, and you'll probably want to opt for some upscaling or lower details. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, Epic settings, without upscaling, you need a RTX 3080, RX 7900 GRE or RTX 4070. Got a 1440p monitor? Then you need a RTX 4070 Ti or faster, AMD's fastest, the RX 7900 XTX reaches 56 FPS. 4K60? Not even RTX 4090 can reach a stable 60 FPS, but it's getting close, with 54 FPS. Despite our use of game-ready drivers from all vendors, the game runs much better on NVIDIA than on AMD. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a larger outdoor area with fog and reflections. Some areas in the game will run higher FPS. Interestingly, some indoors sections run lower FPS than outdoors—usually it's the other way round.

Settings Performance Scaling
The performance scaling of Silent Hill 2 is OK, but it's highly dependent on the location. In some places you can double your FPS by going down to low, in others it's just a +50% improvement. Visually, the differences are minor, the game looks pretty good on "low." I would have wished for more scaling between the settings, "low" should really look "low" and give you a huge boost to FPS. Black Myth Wukong handles this much better, letting you triple the FPS with just settings.

VRAM
Our VRAM testing shows that Silent Hill 2 is very well-behaved in terms of VRAM usage. Even at 4K you're barely hitting 10 GB; lowest settings runs at around 7 GB, so most cards can handle the game without problems.

Overall, Silent Hill 2 is a solid port with small issues like the traversal stuttering and the lack of frame generation. I can still recommend the game, maybe wait for a patch or two, if you can.