So one of the things that Silent Hill 2 Remake does is lean heavily into the Loop Theory; aka every ending is canon because James is basically stuck reliving this over and over again until either he truly accepts responsibility for his actions or maybe just plain forever because that's how Silent Hill is sometimes.

And most of these are in two categories. The first are things that were in the original game like all the corpses you find looking like James and maps and notes that feel like they're from either him or someone going through the same things, which the remake adds a few of and even has some of the maps be the original games' and not the remake's map.

Or they're subtle or obscure things, like the Glimpses of the Past where you get an examine prompt for things that changed between versions and it plays a music sting and gives you a closeup on it, or the weird polaroid photographs that have a very odd puzzle on them, which, if you solve it, spells out the phrase "YOUVE BEEN HERE FOR TWO DECADES".

There's also some memos that hint at this added to the game, and one I just learned about recently, the televisions that're on in the hospital but malfunctioning play morse code messages that are just AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN AND..." on loop, fading in and out.

And given this is Bloober of Nazi Rape Suicide Demon fame, I am genuinely impressed by it. Like even some of the on the nose stuff is at least semi-obscure, like the theater they added showing a movie adaptation of An Occurrence at Owl Creek.

So what irritates me is at the end of the game, when James finally watches the tape that reveals to him what he's been in denial of doing this whole time.

In the original, this scene just kind of hangs in the air; he watches it, he has a conversation with Laura where he admits what he did to her, and the room is just kind of quiet and ominously there, making your walking into the fucked up otherside version of the Hotel when you leave it a bit jarring as James now has to fight his way to the end.

In the remake, when you get to the hotel room, instead of it being pristine, cleaned because the hotel is closed for the season room, it's been ransacked. There's footstep trails in the carpet, every drawer and cabinet has been opened, the sheets have been thrown like someone was looking through them, and a VCR has been clearly dragged in from somewhere.

And that, honestly, kind of ruins it for me.

yeah it's like.

everything prior clearly shows they understood the assignment and knew what to do

so it's unbearably frustrating to see them fuck it up for the cheap shot at the end

It's that and what follows: the fact that in the Otherside Hotel, aside from the two boss fights, all the monsters now run from James or are just lying there dying. or when you save after the big revelation James will always be looking away in the background instead of dead-on.

It feels like cheap melodrama points when they had been so remarkably restrained before.