Following the release of Silent Hill 2 Remake, many online discussions have noted a shift in the game’s approach to combat, with some players suggesting it has become more combat focused and that avoiding enemies is now less feasible. While the remake does incorporate significant upgrades to combat mechanics, players still retain the ability to avoid certain enemies in various scenarios.
“One prominent example of this perspective appears in Modern Vintage Gamer’s YouTube video, Silent Hill 2 Is A Remake (Mostly) Done Right. In the video, MVG notes that the ability to avoid enemies, a notable feature in the original game, has been altered in the remake, commenting that ‘avoiding enemies is unfortunately not part of the remake’ and that ‘players will need to engage in combat.'”
While I disagree with this point in the video, I appreciate that MVG has highlighted the importance of enemy avoidance in survival horror games; after all, this is a key aspect that separates them from action games.
Survival horror is a puzzle game of efficiency , the whole time you are playing every action you take is all part of a grander puzzle. I’m not only referring to the classic puzzles, like finding and rearranging coins, but also the intricacies of combat, resource management and navigating the maze-like environments. If you boil down the gameplay of Resident Evil 1, the core objective is simple: get from point A to point B without dying, often picking up a key item along the way or backtracking to retrieve one. This is also true with Silent Hill 2 and the Silent Hill 2 remake. The trick is to get to point B the most efficient way possible, and often the most efficient way to do this is to avoid combat altogether running past the enemies saving your ammo for later. I show an example of this in the video below.
As shown in the video above, enemies can be avoided about 80% of the time; you can either run past them or use the newly added dodge button. For the remaining 20%, however, dodging is impractical, and it’s more efficient to eliminate them.
The enemies are also much more aggressive than in the original Silent Hill 2, where you could literally walk in circles around them, even the initial encounter with Pyramid Head was almost comically easy to avoid. Not so in the remake, and the game is all the better for it.
Since 2001, people have become desensitized to horror; we now see far worse things on YouTube or in the news. If the enemies in the remake were as easy to avoid as in the original, there would be no sense of tension or threat. Bloober Team made the right decision to make the enemies more relentless while also retaining a fundamental trait of survival horror games, the ability to avoid the enemies.
