A Small Concern Over the Silent Hill 1 Remake
Thanks to the recent release of Silent Hill 1’s PC decompilation, I found myself with another excuse to replay my comfort game. But more than journaling my experience with it, as usual, I found my thoughts wandering towards its upcoming remake. Specifically, what the original game might gain and lose in the process. Truth be told, I only have one major concern about the whole thing.
It’s Harry Mason. Let me try to explain my perspective.
In the original game, Harry comes across as an incredibly composed and focused individual. You can reach this conclusion for several reasons. The camera rarely gets close to him (due to hardware limitations); only a few FMVs actually allow him to express himself, and the VA performance is also quite restrained. Funnily enough, all these things combine to make Harry almost feel one-note in a good way. A father who is singularly focused on finding his baby daughter.
It’s a very understandable stance, too, as I’ve often seen parents become intensely task-oriented in emergencies. As a result of this, he almost becomes a comforting presence as you trudge through the nightmares of Silent Hill. Despite trapping us in such a horrifying setting, we never feel overwhelmed because Harry is there to make us feel less vulnerable. His determination is what makes him so lovable to me.
You can take this in a slightly different direction, too. When I first played Silent Hill, I remember how I stopped seeing Harry as a separate character and instead saw the situation solely from his perspective. Our daughter is missing, and everything can go to hell if it means we can reunite with her. If there are monsters, deal with them. If there are weirdos hanging around, deal with them. If there is a giant dog-lizard freak or a massive moth trying to eat you, shoot them with your shotgun and move on. The objective is always to find Cheryl.
He’s just a very different character from every other protagonist in this franchise. Unlike James, Heather, Henry, Hinako, Alex, and Murphy, who are all deeply connected to the horrors surrounding them, Harry (along with Travis) is just a normal dude trying to navigate this nightmare in search of his daughter. But it’s also why I’m concerned about his characterisation.
Modern AAA games are now capable of so much more than was once possible on the PlayStation 1, excelling at jaw-dropping cinematography, intense performances, and emotional expression. Every reaction, every fleeting emotion can now be captured with incredible detail, something that worked in James’s favour in the SH2 remake. Now there’s a character whose psyche and interactions with others form the core of the story, with all the horrors connected to his guilt, grief, and denial. So, a remake can easily enhance what was already there for him and his character.
But I cannot say the same for Harry for now. If the remake gives him too much emotional expressiveness, it might cause a bit of whiplash. But they mustn’t turn him into someone completely unaffected by everything happening around him, either. He’s not the Doom guy, he’s just a guy. It will be a very delicate balancing act, all things considered, and careless handling could cause the traits that made people fall in love with the character to disappear almost instantly.
I think a good way to approach it is to use more physicality to convey Harry’s feelings and thoughts in the remake. Make him flinch, look disturbed, and be tired, but maybe don’t have him verbalise his fear or even linger on his emotions for longer than a few seconds. His concern should always remain focused outward and forward, always on finding Cheryl and getting out of this hellscape. His determination should be the most easily communicable aspect, not fear or any other emotion.
Admittedly, all this probably makes me sound far more pessimistic about the remake than I actually am. There are several obvious benefits to a remake. The town itself could be fleshed out a little more. The voice performances (though absolutely endearing in the original) can be tremendously improved. The gameplay can be adjusted to better suit the current trends. There is even scope for one or two more endings in this game.
The storytelling itself can also see a massive improvement. Considering a newcomer’s perspective, I think the original Silent Hill can be a little more difficult to follow than its successors. While the broad strokes are easy to grasp, some finer details (which fans know by heart at this point) can be easy to miss at first. All of this, a la the way of the Silent Hill 2 remake.
Inevitably, some smaller aspects of Silent Hill will also be lost along the way, as much of what makes the game, THE GAME, is tied to the circumstances under which it was created. Its purplish, snowy fog, crude character models, the Otherworld’s nightmarish design, and liminal-ish environments may be gone with a remake, taking with them the dreaminess of the first game. But given the wonderful job Bloober Team did with 2’s remake, I’d like to trust them with all this for now.
For Harry, I’ll be cautiously optimistic. You can create the atmosphere, expand the town, and flesh out the story further, but Harry embodies an aspect of the original that can be difficult to recreate. If Bloober Team can make it work, they’ll have preserved the heart of the original game. For me, at least.
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Thanks for reading. This is my first time writing on this platform, which I hope will mostly serve as a place for me to collect and share thoughts on media I love. While writing this, I did find myself thinking about several other (darker) aspects of Harry’s character, but felt that they deserve their own space. This is more about a slight anxiety I felt while replaying the original and thinking about the remake. Maybe some other time.
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