Conclusion

Silent Hill 2 Remake is an amazing remake and a fantastic game on its own. The game's a superb survival horror with an unbeatable atmosphere thanks to the art and audio design and Akira Yamaoka's timeless soundtrack, which was redone for the remake. I love the ruined look of Silent Hill and its indoor areas. Bloober Team outdid themselves regarding the art direction of the game, which near-perfectly portrays the looks of a ruined town in the middle of nowhere. This is one of the rare games that matches the original Stalker regarding the depiction of urban decay.

Playing the game, especially roaming the streets of Silent Hill, is an oppressive, gritty, and claustrophobic experience that simultaneously makes you want to continue playing but also just close the game and never play it again, which is an awe-worthy accomplishment.

Personally, exploring the town and indoor areas evokes the same feelings as listening to Terra Tenebrosa's debut album, The Tunnels, a piece of avant-garde metal with strong post and sludge metal vibes combined with unsettling atmospheric and ambient elements. Listening to The Tunnels makes you simultaneously want to experience it over and over and never hear it again, much like when playing the game. If you're a metalhead and want to feel what it's like roaming around the town of Silent Hill in Silent Hill 2, give yourself a favor and spin The Tunnels. I haven't checked it out in a decade or so, but Silent Hill 2 Remake made me revisit it, and I have no regrets.

Puzzles are another strong point of Silent Hill 2 Remake. They can be quite challenging if you set puzzle difficulty to hard, providing brain-teasers that will make you revisit every dreary nook and cranny trying to find the solution, which results in a ton of agitating, disquieting moments filled with eerie visuals and unnerving sound effects.

On the flip side, the combat is a bit one-dimensional. All you've got to do most of the time is hit enemies, occasionally press the B button to dodge their attacks, and beat them to a pulp or shoot them until they drop.

That said, middling combat isn't a major issue since the game has other ways to mess with your brain, namely the aforementioned oppressive and claustrophobic exploration experience, thick dollops of psychological horror, and great puzzles. The horror in Silent Hill 2 rises from anticipating monsters, not fighting them.

Performance-wise, Silent Hill 2 Remake is quite punishing on the Deck. The tiny machine barely runs the game at 30 FPS, and no matter how low you go with settings and resolution, certain areas will mostly perform below 30 FPS, Frequent south of 30 FPS dips in combination with the traversal stutters that are quite noticeable on both handhelds, make the game unplayable on Steam Deck in my book.

On the ROG Ally, the game suffers from serious graphical issues that make it look washed out and super bright in indoor areas. The volumetric fog effect is also missing, so if you don't want to experiment with Vulkan and running the game in DX11 mode, just skip it. Playing with ray tracing—which fixes all issues sans the omission of volumetric fog—results in a level of performance that's personally unplayable.

If you're ready to tweak the game, running it in DX11 mode and using Vulkan completely fixes the graphical issues. The lighting looks normal, shadows are rendered, and volumetric fog is also present in all its gloomy glory. You can make the game run at a relatively stable 30 FPS by setting the resolution to 720p, opting for the Low preset, and setting TSR upscaling to Low. This won't give you a flawless 30 FPS experience, so if you're not ready for an occasional dip below 30 FPS, don't play Silent Hill 2 Remake on the ROG Ally. Note that the visual issues are present on all Z1 and Z1 Extreme devices, meaning the game is most likely busted on the Lenovo Legion Go, too.

Regarding stability and stuttering, Silent Hill 2 Remake suffers from traversal stutter. While this isn't very noticeable on a high-end PC, instances of traversal stutter are quite noticeable both on Steam Deck and ROG Ally, especially when roaming around outdoor areas. At least the game doesn't suffer from shader compilation stutter. The game compiles shaders the first time you launch it, which takes less than a minute. After that, it's smooth sailing regarding shader compilation unless you update your GPU drivers.

Silent Hill 2 Remake is a very demanding game that's barely playable on modern PC handhelds. This is a growing trend for UE5 games; by the looks of it, future UE5.x games will also push handheld PC hardware to a breaking point. Another worrying trend is the visual issues many UE5 games exhibit on Z1 and Z1 Extreme handhelds. We hope someone, whether AMD Epic or game developers, will resolve this nagging issue. Right now, though, it looks like these issues won't be solved anytime soon.