SH1: Rusty metal, symbollic of Alessa's pain.
SH2: Rot and decay, symbollic of James's state of mind.
SH3: Blood and flesh, symbollic of Heather's demonic pregnancy and womanhood.

Glad somebody finally responded to people with the "Gamey" arguments regarding the breakable wall in the well from the original SH2.
Like you said, people don't seem to understand the genre of survival horror sometimes need to break the conventions of normal gaming rules in order to unsettle the player...having consistant and obvious rules in a horror game will create a sense of security that make the player feel safe and settled.
Sure, a game's graphics and visuals can be unsettling, but making the player physically participate in it through gameplay is what seperates good survival horror games from bad ones in my opinion.
The wall in the well in SH2 is memorable because it is a special moment that made me question whether or not I reached a dead end and soft locked my game، it unsettled me and made me feel that my progress was in jeopardy, the wall in the well in SH2 Remake is just another breakable wall among many, nothing special or memorable about it.

Each Team Silent game treats the "otherworid" or nightmare different
In Silent Hill 1 the town is slowly being swallowed by darkness twisting the world around everyone caught in the nightmare.
Silent Hill 2 has James slowly descend into his nightmare
Silent Hill 3 the nightmare forces it's way into being in the form of painful contractions
Silent Hill 4 "You are born into it"

Honestly, and sadly i feel the same. It’s one of the main reasons why Silent Hill 2 Remake leaves me with a kind of rejection i wish i didn’t feel. But in a way, they stripped away the subtlety that Team Silent so masterfully achieved in the original, the very thing that made it so special. The Otherworld and the overall quiet design of the town James explores were deeply important to me, and I was hoping to feel that same sense of haunting beauty with Bloober’s reinterpretation.

Instead, they made the remake feel disconnected from the original experience. In the original, i felt suffocated, alone and slowly, as a player, I started to piece together how everything i saw related back to James, because the town revolved around his psyche. But in the remake, every Otherworld section did nothing but give me headaches and nausea; constant orange "filters", too many enemies, too much intensity, poison, filth and none of it felt personal to James. It was overwhelming in the worst way, stripped of its poetry and replaced with something crude.

Swinging between the visceral and the mechanical, it reminded me far too much of Silent Hill: Homecoming, where the Otherworld was used excessively without narrative weight, thrown in more for branding than storytelling. In the original, the approach was much subtler. I loved the abandoned feel, the dampness, the decay, the muted blues, greys, and shadows. There was a restraint to it.

Silent Hill 2’s original also handled symbolism so well, both direct and indirect. The direct symbolism came through the riddles, which always carried layered meaning. The indirect symbolism was in the environmental design, always quietly whispering something more. Bloober’s remake, however, drowns in over-saturation, it throws so much symbolism at the player that it loses its weight, and that eerie, quiet unease of the original vanishes.

There’s so much to critique. I could go on for hours trying to explain it all properly. The remake is good, i did enjoy it but I would’ve appreciated a more thoughtful treatment, a deeper understanding, and perhaps a less clichéd and overloaded approach to its themes and imagery

The intense opening of Homecoming is based on the movie, Jacob's Ladder, which also involves a guy back from war and what he saw there. Jacob's Ladder is also one of the biggest inspirations for Silent Hill 2.

Great video! Thanks for posting this. Going into the detail about the ambiguity of "what is the other world and what is not" is something that I hadn't considered as lost in the remake, but it definitely was lost, and it's a less obvious detail than some of the other complaints. The clip of James jumping between the two apartments that are in surrealist fashion 3 feet away from each other is a perfect metaphor.

Replaying 1 and 2 on ps2 recently, the sense of ambiguity of whether they are referring to reality or other world for any given section of the game is much better executed. The restraint in the original creates an effective sense of disorientation, even coming down to the notes that are written and how they describe the lore of the town. Disorientation / Ambiguity were more meaningful in OG SH 1/2.

I agree that the game is longer than I wanted it to be, it feels bloated and it feels like it's cut into "zones" and zones have the same loops of find puzzle area, explore big closed off area, solve puzzle, area turns into nightmare version, do the same thing but in the nightmare version of the area.
Also the overuse of Mannequin ambushes got a bit annoying, however, I really liked the combat in the game.

When I first played og silent hill 2, I didn't even notice the existence of an otherworld. When I entered blue creek in the remake and I read the achievement "enter the otherworld", I said: "wait what"

There was no arsenist. The hotel burned down because of a heater in the employee's lounge.

22:11 Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition project is free, easy to install, and makes the PC version very good.

I really enjoy your understanding of the series, its art, its story, etc. Great video and writing!
Another thing I would add that is not good at all in the Remake is the LOUD and NOISY hill it has become. There is no more intimacy and uncanniness from the SILENT atmosphere that was so contrasting and present in big part of the game. In this remake there is always noise sound which one could argue that it makes it feel more "realistic", but that's exactly the problem, it losses the Uncanny and sense of "wrong" in the town, and the absence of silence also diminishes a lot the horror factor because you get so used to noises that any noise that is supposed to be scary is no not so scary (or any at all).

I always liked the otherworld transitions more in SH1 because I felt they were the most memorable. I still feel that way.

But you managed to instill some new appreciation of how SH2 handles it because it fits thematically more with the on-going symbolism for "James doesn't know what's real" that is a lot of the backboen of how SH2 tells its story. Besides we still get some memorable moments out of it nonetheless, what with the PH ambush in the roof of the hospital and that claustrophobic dutch angle when you cross between the apartments.

Not quite a night and day transition but it's still symbolic of a fall, or in the latter case a fear of falling, like all throughout James is worrying about slipping down and by the end his character arc takes him to the point where he's jumping down of his own volition to the lowest depths of his subconscious searching for a truth that will bring him escape from this pain, this torture, that might bring him closure, when in fact that exact truth is what he's running away from in the first place.

I'm all for repetition, once is an idea, two is validation, three is a pattern. You expose the player to concepts in each set of around three intermixed encounters/puzzles/moments, and then you subvert their expectations, then you change it up maybe make it harder so that the patterns mirror James' psychological barriers/patterns of maybe fighting against his own shadow, his own distorted mind trying to justify or rationalize or just escape the truth by choosing another monster to fight instead of himself. It also makes it less tedious and padded.

Two for one, Bloober, take notes.

I hear you about some of the doors in the original SH2 being locked being left up to the player’s imagination of what could be inside.
In the Wood Side apartments on the first floor near where you meet Eddie there is a locked apartment door and on the walls next to it the words “to hell!” are painted in red, or it could be blood. Makes you wonder what could be inside 😮

I like the Remake but you are spot on. The "otherworld" parts were over done. I looked forward to playing the OG because it was chill but unsettling. In the Remake it "ugh this part again"

The loop theory was made as a joke to explain the new game plus cycles and endings. I know because I was a prominent member f the old SH heaven forums from the time that it was created, and I know the person that made it. The biggest issue I have with this remake aside from the Bloat, the excessive combat, the misunderstanding of literally everything, is the fact that Bloober thought that it would be a good idea to make a nod to it. Because now I see people acting like it's the greatest thing and that Team Silent "always wanted it in the original" when in reality it wasn't. It was just a joke.

I know they will screw up SH1 remake, because I'm already seeing "fans" making posts about how they want all the same stuff that are very legit problems in SH2r to be in SH1R. Get ready to see Harry doing parries and timed counters while exploring the two extra floors and new wings added to Achemilla Hospital.

Bro the Homecoming opening is ripped straight from Jacob's Ladder, one of the biggest inspirations for the Silent Hill series.

I was skeptical about the remake. Especially because of bloobers past games. I was still excited nonetheless. I took a few days off to play the game and I have to admit that about 3 or 4 hours in; i was like "damn there is so much combat and they stretched out the areas like crazy". They took the most tedious areas and somehow made them even more tedious and then bogged it down with combat every 5 seconds. The remake just wasn't scary at all to me. I think also my issue is that Im not going to get anything out of a modern somewhat shallow remake of a game I played so long ago. We are in the era of zoomers playing remakes of old games they refuse to play and then them defending the remakes with every fiber of their being because they desperately want to be part of a Fandom they're too lazy to even really enjoy. The remake isnt bad. Its good but the original silent hill 2 wasn't just good. It was a masterpiece. It deserves a 10/10 remake. Not a glorified resident evil clone with last of us combat. Theres too much combat and bloober does not understand nuance. Bloober has never understood nuance. And its important to mention that if you haven't played the original, its not that your opinion doesn't matter. Its that you're missing context. Its the same with people who glazed the resident evil 3 remake but refuse to play the original. That re3 remake is awful and you will not understand why people have issues if you are too lazy to at least try the original

for me the worst change was the self insert of Shawne Benson over Angela, her va direction, what they did to abstract daddy's boss room, failure of the devs to understand cutscenes like Maria's jail scene if you compare it side by side.
I also hated that the devs tried to treat their fan cannon as cannon, confirming things that were meant to be open ended.

the core issue I felt was that no one working on the game actually understood the material they were working with and decided to make heavy handed changes without a second thought.

This is an insightful video. Other than the overreliance of combat for a player character that is supposed to be an average guy and the dragged out pacing and jump scares, the biggest problem I had with the remake was the lack of subtelty.

I am one of the few who even thinks that being chased through Angela's childhood home in the remake is too on the nose. I had no problem figuring out what happened to Angela and who the Abstract Daddy was in the original game with the context it provided. The way it was presented in the remake relied on a lot of cliches.

I know that you appreciated the new version of that scene. I can tell you have overall insight about the lack of subtely in the game, though, and I enjoyed this video.

I have something to add, that the remake does not understand the Otherworld's art style at all. In fact, none of the western renditions of SH do. In all 4 original games,  the Otherworld is not simply a grunged up, industrial and/or gory version of the real world, but even in the more "tame" version of it in 2, the textures, the shading, the contrast of colors, makes it look demonic overall and uncanny at times, using pareidolia (there are many "mirrored" textures that look like distorted faces up close) to make inanimate objects like walls and doors look almost alive and threatening. It's supposed to look like a gross deformation of the familiar, and imo it does that best in 4, which, although doesn't have the most aggressive otherworld, it's still the most uncanny one, it's a repulsive, almost offensive defilement of the world of our Lord, as one of the memos in the game puts it. Although the demake has some specific spots where it does it right, like the prison basement, most of it is simply grungeland.