One of the most anticipated games of next year for many horror fans is the Silent Hill 2 Remake. As yet, the release date is little more than the vague "early 2024" given at its announcement. Fans are eager for a new title in the long-running series that can capture what made the first four Silent Hill titles so endearing. Konami has struggled to reproduce the success of the early days of the survival horror series. Each title after Team Silent's dissolution failed to meet the expectations of both Konami and the fans.

Thankfully, in the years since there have been many independent developers that have taken a crack at replicating the mind-bending and disturbing qualities of the Silent Hill franchise. Even Capcom seemed to have taken a page from the book of P.T., the playable trailer for the now-canceled Silent Hills, in Resident Evil VII: Biohazard. One game that has more than captured the style and tone of the glory days of Silent Hill is Protocol Games' Song of Horror.

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Camera and Feel

An important aspect of Silent Hill, especially in the early titles, was its use of fully 3D environments versus Resident Evil's pre-rendered backgrounds. This has led to the first Silent Hill in particular aging a bit worse visually, as 3D graphics are always improving. Still, it allowed Team Silent to utilize the camera in unique and unnerving ways.

Protocol Games uses similar tricks with the camera in Song of Horror while still not allowing full control over it. Many times the player will walk into a room or hallway and only be given the edges of details before venturing further in. The camera freely moving through a fully 3D environment also allows the game to stay on the player as they move down a hallway, only to reveal something moving in the background just before it cuts to a new angle. These are tricks that horror games can struggle with if the player always has power over where the camera is looking. Thankfully, Song of Horror knows that a good horror game is all about player disempowerment—just like early Silent Hill.

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Puzzles Over Action

Another thing that set Silent Hill apart from the other big survival horror series, Resident Evil, was its concentration on puzzles over action. Combat was always present in Silent Hill, but it became more emphasized, especially in Silent Hill 2. The games would even allow the player to choose their puzzle and action difficulty independently of one another. Song of Horror doesn't allow for such granularity in its difficulty, but that's more due to the fact that there really is no combat in the game.

There are characters that the player can choose at the beginning of each chapter that have a weapon at their disposal. These are used more as a deterrence to the horrors that will chase the player than a solution to them, though. The lion's share of Song of Horror is slowly walking through shadowy rooms and trying to either find keys to unlock doors or pieces to complete puzzles in the environment. Some puzzles are fairly simple and can be followed in a logical order, but each chapter ratchets up the tension and complexity of both its environments and the puzzles therein.

An important dynamic with puzzles in a horror game is making sure that the act of solving them isn't actively interfered with by any real danger to the character while still making it feel as though they are in danger the entire time. It's a common pace for classic Silent Hill games (and even Resident Evil) that when a player picks up a major key item or solves a progress-blocking puzzle the player character is then put into danger. Song of Horror does a wonderful job of letting the player go long enough between enemy encounters that they can begin to fall back into the familiar pace of solving a puzzle before that security is shattered, and they're forced to break for a hiding spot in an earlier room before it's too late.

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How Song of Horror Stands On Its Own

Song of Horror clearly takes inspiration from Silent Hill, but it is also a strong horror title in its own right. It provides unique areas to explore as well as pursuit and hiding mechanics that feel fresh in a genre flooded with "hide and seek" horror, and makes choosing the player character part of managing resources.

The start of each chapter has the player choosing one of four characters with varying stats and traits as well as each having a unique key item that may or may not help them with a particular obstacle. The stat differences are subtle enough that, at first, it may seem like an arbitrary aspect of the game, but once the player begins to encounter the various enemies can greatly help, or hurt, their progress. Each character has variable strength, stealth, speed, and serenity. Each one of these dictates how easy it is for characters to defend themselves, remain unnoticed by The Presence and The Silence, how quickly they can find a hiding place, and how often they are beset by scares or pursuits from The Presence.

Song of Horror complicates the character selection even further by making it so that outside of the easiest difficulty if a character is caught by one of the enemies, that character is permanently gone. Thankfully, this doesn't lead to a full game over if every character falls, only a reset back to the beginning of the chapter, but it takes the idea of limited saves or resources that classic horror games used and places it on the actual character being picked. This can lead to large sections of chapters becoming much more difficult or easier, depending on which characters the player has chosen to venture with first.

Song of Horror is a great time for any fans of the horror genre that provides its own flavor of scares and problem-solving. In particular, though, those who remember the glory days of Silent Hill will find themselves pleasantly surprised by it while they wait to see how Konami and Bloober Team deliver with the highly anticipated Silent Hill 2 Remake.