He quoted a saying of Nietzsche's: "I did this," says my Memory. "I cannot have done this," says my Pride and remains inexorable. In the end - Memory yields.' 'Well,' he continued, 'my memory has not yielded on this point.' 'That is because you derive pleasure from your self-reproaches as a means of self-punishment.'
-Sigmund Freud, Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909)
As with any remake, things begin with a non-beginning: a return to our special place. Looking across to where things will happen again, James asks "what do I think I'll find here?" It's a good question. What will James find that he doesn't already know? And what will we, the returning player, find that we haven't already experienced? James says that he is looking for his dead wife, who has sent him a letter, beckoning him here. He knows this doesn't yet make sense. Making sense of that impossible call is a good cause for multiple endings: we all receive the same clear goal (to find Mary), while our reflexive habits are observed by the game and used to retroactively generate a motive for returning. James may be 1) unconsciously seeking forgiveness for something he's forgotten, 2) unconsciously re-staging the conditions that led to the thing he's forgotten (so that he can do it again), or 3) unconsciously wanting to be swallowed whole by the thing he's forgotten. Silent Hill 2 (2024) is a remake of this second ending, but not the first or third. It thinks the desire to return is evidence of a repetition compulsion, and it subsequently reorients the original's aching sadness to a play of cheerful, sadistic violence aimed at perpetuating itself.
That videogames involve repetition, and the revelation of events already programmed into the text, makes them a rich medium for exploring time and memory. One of the things that makes Silent Hill 2 (2001) so affecting is the way it maps the repetition and fate immanent to the medium onto the temporality of grief and obscurity of the traumatic event. Both Silent Hill 2s are set in motion by, and converge on, the revelation of a non-negotiable event: the death of Mary. Like any videogame narrative, this already-programmed event precedes and survives every instantiation of gameplay, accompanying the player's journey to its telic revelation, and then returning to its undead latency. Unlike many other videogame narratives, we can only encounter the event through its traumatic echoes, and these traumatic echoes make up Silent Hill 2. This reversal of telic revelation is critical to the game's sophisticated treatment of grief. Texts that give us access to the 'immediacy' of traumatic events are selling us a fantasy in which grief doesn't radically disfigure time for the subject. What makes the event traumatic is that it is untethered from cause and effect. It's atemporal, it's always already stained the world. It wants us to know that not only can we not be free from it in the future, we have never been free from it because it precedes us. This is why the forgiveness and drowning endings both carve a hole in the player's guts. In the former, James undergoes a 'reality test' in which he must realise that Mary is gone and was never calling out to him. The grieving process does not absolve him, and he will always sense Mary calling, but it is now possible for him to keep moving. In the latter he bypasses Mary as the object of mourning to pathologically fixate on his grief. As a consequence he loses both Mary and the world.
The same mechanism of repetition and immanence that makes videogames so well-suited to exploring time and memory also makes them innately self-reflexive when it comes to remakes. When James returns to Silent Hill in 2024, we're re-experiencing his return to Silent Hill in 2001, which was a return to Silent Hill as he once experienced it with Mary. The remake adds an extra-textual layer, where we're asked not only why we've returned to a text, but why we've asked for something from the past to have been made differently, as though oblivious to the passage of time. The Silent Hill James searched for in 2001 is already gone, in that the idea he has of it cannot coincide with the haunted, dilapidated reality he encounters on his return. The passage of time always reveals the incongruity of the places we hold dear, and Silent Hill 2 is a terrifying reminder of this. But the Silent Hill we return to in 2024 is not weathered; it's an entirely different place. That which once traced the discontinuity between memory and matter now asserts a distinct material cost, wherein the past can both be presented as though it's not of the past, and must concurrently refer back to the past it knows we long for. It's a doppelganger, and it wants us to be satisfied with this, which is what makes Silent Hill 2 (2024) such a successful remake of the Maria ending. As a doppelganger, it offers us a very different way of dealing with the lost object of grief. It tells us that, rather than having lost something, we have before us the tools through which to perpetuate loss as an object we can possess. The possession of loss is expressed in violence, as we see here. This is a distinct aberration of grief, which I'll come to.
To understand how Silent Hill 2 (2024) turns the repetition underlying grief into the recurrence of sadistic violence means appreciating the ways it occludes ambivalence and embraces certainty. The original operated as a field of uncertainty the player would stumble across and fill in disoriented, terrified action, articulating in every misstep the contours of James' psyche. Monsters writhed and convulsed across the field too, as confused and disturbed by their having to be here as we were having to see them. They seemed too clumsy, too unaware of their surroundings, to be in any way malicious, and entering into conflict with them felt as though we'd all just blindly crossed paths. In this 2024 remake conflict is always certain. These same monsters now hunt us down, play with us, and the game corrals us into ordained confrontations where the only way through is violence. This certainty extends to the way that James now possesses his body and its capacity for violence. What I mean is that Bloober Team's application of a contemporary third-person perspective in the game is more than just a neutral 'update': it puts James in control. The camera hovers at his waist, in the medium-framing videogames came to adopt from cinema's 'American' or 'cowboy shot' some time in the mid-2000s. There as here it presents the figure as the thing ready to deliver action. When action occurs, our framing crashes from James' mid-back to his shoulders, emphasising the heavy work of the arms shooting and beating things into submission. Things shake, things scream, James grunts and heaves and exhales, bloodied and relieved above the dead thing on the floor.
It's curious that so many have praised the embodied heft and sense of release to the violence in this without asking what it means. To be clear I'm not criticising it for this, I'm just pointing out that so significant a change to the way a game plays significantly alters the way the story is told. I'm thinking of the way Brendan Keogh in A Play of Bodies (2018) describes encountering GTA IV (2008) for the first time, and realising that the same actions he'd performed in the PS2 titles now had a different meaning. The weight of the violence felt tragic. In the Silent Hill 2 remake it's not only the weight of the violence, but the way violence is programmed that changes things. Scares are cued through the sudden activation of sound and image, rather than sutured into the fabric of the setting. The game attacks our nerves, and encourages us to harness James' action-instinct for the expulsion of our nervous energy. Excitation is met with release, in the way Freud characterises ordinary pleasure in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). It's supposed to feel good. It's clear that James takes pleasure in killing these Frankensteined assemblages of women's body parts, because in killing them he's briefly relieved of the burden of his desire. What we see as an obvious pattern of pleasurable action, James has tricked himself into believing is some sort of solemn duty to relieve himself of the sexual desire that brings him so much guilt. His desire, of course, survives every victim, his excitation appears to increase, and Silent Hill responds to this by generating an infinity of objects to meet this need. James' desire to eliminate desire escalates his will to the realm of the infinite, rehearsing in play what the libertine in Pasolini's Salo (1975) says to the victim "Don't you know that we'd want to kill you a thousand times, to the limits of eternity, if eternity has any?" He is here to kill Mary, over and over, in whatever form, and by whatever name she takes, until he has killed the very last Mary.
Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And, actually, this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.
-Sigmund Freud, letter to Ludwig Binswanger (1929)
There was a hole here. It's gone now.
-Silent Hill 2 (2001, 2024)
James returns to Silent Hill to find the last Mary, so that he can be set free. Of course there is no such destination. There will always be another cycle, another Mary, in Silent Hill's n+1, or bad infinity. This is why I say that Silent Hill 2 (2024) is a remake of the Maria ending and not the others. There is insufficient ambivalence, fear, or pathos for anything else. It wires our nervous system to James' violent expulsion; it grants noncognisant monsters sufficient acuity that they become willing players in his violent game; it reveals this was never about ending desire, but perpetuating it. In his 2022 paper, Ben Nicoll writes that games have a way of showing us how our desire is entangled in repetition, not as a curse inflicted on us from elsewhere, but because it's the very mechanism driving desire. We may consciously wish for it to diminish through mastering or finishing a game, but our unconscious intention is to sustain it, and this is what Freud calls our "horror at pleasure." Silent Hill 2 (2024) implicates us in and exposes us to the horror of James' pleasure, which is also our devotion to another cycle, another Mary, another remake to fill the gap that can't be filled. Should we choose to imagine that James is happy in the eternal recurrence of Silent Hill, it will be because his conscious goal to free himself of Mary is only a ruse to sustain the horror of his desire. If on the other hand he is not happy, it's because he genuinely believes it's possible to find the thing that will set him free.
Remakes tend to tell us they will be the thing that fills us, by returning us to the beloved object (the original text) as though it was lost and now it's back. This has the effect of making us believe there was something missing in the beloved text that has now been fixed. Because the remake can only fail to deliver on the sense of wholeness it promises (wholeness being an impossibility), this threatens to leave us without the beloved object, and without its doppelganger. The paradox of remaking Silent Hill 2 is that it's beloved precisely because it's lacking, because it can't be fixed, because it inflicts on its player the sense that we have lost something unfathomably important, and that we will never know what it was, much less how to get it back. The remake can't spoil the original by retroactively disclosing its lack, because its lack was already-known. We return to Silent Hill 2 because it makes a point of accentuating the terrible absence in our hearts, and resolves to tell us it will never go away, however things end. This is why when James asks us what we think we'll find here, it's a warning. We should know that nothing is ever found in Silent Hill, only lost. If we think we'll find the thing to satisfy our longing, we'll be disappointed. At this juncture there should be another warning: if we seek the thing that will inflict a new wound atop the old, making our longing all the more excruciating, making it so that we find that we cannot breathe, the disappointment of this remake will be even greater. Only a work as resolutely, preternaturally uncertain as Silent Hill 2 (2001) could accomplish something so noble as that.
2 September 2025