In my writing about Silent Hill 2 Remake, I've mostly focused on story. I don't think much is drastically changed from the 2001 original, but it's relatively new to me (though its biggest plot reveal is also something I've known about through pop culture osmosis for a long time).
However, I wanted to talk about something that I really appreciate regarding its gameplay mechanics.
In her (sponsored) video about Silent Hill f (lowercase intentional,) YouTuber Miss Chalice (whose videos on Elden Ring brought her to my attention) talked about the way that this new game uses weapon degradation, and how she liked it more as a gameplay mechanic than she does in most games. Her reasoning: in most games, you have ammunition to conserve, but given that f is set in Japan, you don't get any firearms or ranged weapons of any kind, so the weapon durability is, effectively, your ammo.
This is an interesting take, and one that I think does a good job justifying a hoary gameplay mechanic.
But it's great that 2 Remake doesn't have anything like that.
Broadly speaking, I think game designers should probably consider making more mechanically simple games. Going back to video gaming's roots, a game like Super Mario Bros. only had a small handful of inputs - you could move left and right, push down to go into a pipe, press one button to jump and one to run or shoot off fireballs if you had the Fire Flower.
Now, games' growing complexity is part of the way that the medium has matured, to be sure. But I think technical limitations have more or less vanished when it comes to game complexity. Logistical complications are, of course, still a factor.
In 2023, after playing Control, I got Alan Wake's remastered release, anticipating the sequel that was due later that year. Playing the 2010 game, I was struck by how simple it was - there were no skill trees to upgrade, and each chapter just reset things, so that there wasn't really any inventory management to consider. You were just sent out to get through the story of that chapter.
Again, I haven't played the original version of Silent Hill 2, but I appreciated that in its remake, there were relatively few gameplay systems to learn. You get three guns over the course of the game, each of which comes with its own type of ammo, and you get two kinds of healing items, one of which heals for far more, but is rarer.
And you get a melee weapon.
Here's what I find so perfect about the melee weapon. And yes, I'll once again invoke the Boss Baby meme and compare this with Alan Wake II.
In AWII, if you run out of ammo and if you run out of batteries for your flashlight, you basically can't kill your enemies. There is a melee strike, but it's so pitiful in damage that it's primarily there to just give you an opening to run away from a foe, or potentially to knock them back to get a cleaner shot if you do have ammo for your guns.
Now, I've seen a lot of people talking about how they made it through the remake with tons of ammo left over and never dying, and let me tell you: that was not me. In particular, I remember a stretch of the Otherworld Hospital where I was at super-low health with zero ammo and zero healing items and just having to be very, very careful.
But I had a steel pipe. And that meant that as bad as things got, I still had something to defend myself with.
In AWII, at least on the normal and easier difficulties, if you're really low on ammo and healing items, Taken and Restless Shadows will start dropping items. But, of course, if you don't have the means to kill your foes in the first place, you're not going to get those. Primarily, I think the recommended strategy is to run from your foes if you don't have what it takes to kill them. (The fact that turning off your flashlight makes them less likely to notice you really helps.)
But SH2R does two major things that I think allows them to avoid such contrivances (I do think that items are more likely to spawn if you're low, though I can't remember if that's only in boss arenas. Either way, I think these spawning items are less obvious because they're still in the drawers and lockers that you'd find the guaranteed items anyway).
The first is that the melee weapon is pretty effective. I think something like 4 hits with the pipe will take down a Mannequin, which is only one more hit than the handgun takes (on standard difficulty). The only reason not to just rely on your melee weapon is that you run the risk of getting hit by the thing you're fighting. While Lying Figures can spit bile at you, the other monsters generally don't have ranged attacks (I guess you could count the Mandarins' tongues as one as well, but I didn't actually even realize you could kill the non-boss ones and just ran past them). That means that you still might prefer to shoot them and burn that ammunition because you might be able to kill them before they get close enough to hurt you. Nurses in particular are quite tough, but have a head for you to shoot that takes extra damage (I don't know if the other monsters have such weak points).
The other thing that makes this work is that James' dodge is very effective. I believe it has invincibility frames, meaning that it's all about timing, and if you can read the monsters' tells right, you'll avoid damage from their attacks.
While games like Expedition 33 or Souls-likes compensate for the ability to avoid all incoming damage by making tells very hard to read and making a hit landing do staggeringly enormous amounts of damage, SH2R can get away with being very stingy with healing items.
Every time you fight a monster, you have the tools to avoid taking any damage. Indeed, the low diversity of enemy types even makes it easier to learn their moves and how to dodge them.
The survival horror genre, I think, builds its tension more on the slow draining of resources than some sudden catastrophic instant-death. By giving you all the tools to avoid incoming damage, it makes it that much scarier when you flub a dodge and wind up taking a Mannequin leg to the face. Even if that only takes out a 10th of your hidden HP pool, those errors add up.
I think about how I struggle sometimes when running D&D games to give my players a challenging but fair adventure. The existence of a reliable-if-you-have-the-skill dodge and a reasonably-effective-and-unexhaustible melee weapon mean that the game never has to worry about putting you in a state where you just cannot continue.
And I think that's good design.
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