A crimson-flecked bunny is about as cute as it gets around here.
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The sickening inventiveness of the games' artists comes vividly to life in HD.
There are, however, a few key scenes where the whole does suffer: a cut-scene by the lake, for instance, where the lighter fog exposes unfinished environments; or, worst of all, a sequence in which a boat is rowed across a lake, where the water now appears ridiculously luminescent, with embarrassingly visible joins.
Otherwise, the HD upgrade captures the lugubrious despair of this stiflingly sinister game rather well on a big modern telly. 2003's Silent Hill 3, meanwhile, fares far better overall. The visual leap between the original releases was striking enough; here, the added definition is very effective for the most part, vividly realising some of gaming's most horrifically gruesome scenes.
Playing the games side-by-side, I was struck by how different they feel in tone despite employing what are effectively the same mechanics and structure. In Silent Hill 2, James Sunderland's weird search for the wife he believes is dead unravels at a funereal pace, its chills coming from the psychologically oppressive story and setting, its dark secrets lurking menacingly in the mist. Silent Hill 3's horror is delivered with greater shocks, but its predecessor is scarier in part because of what it holds back, allowing the player to fill the darkness with their own terrible imaginings. It also features the magnificently terrifying Pyramid Head, an evil figure whose awful presence is rarely far away.
The story of Heather Mason, in Silent Hill 3, is more explicitly obsessed with matters of the occult, which the game's artists have seized upon with unsettling relish. Once past the rather boring first couple of hours, the visual inventiveness on display is staggering: a blood-spattered paean to the infinite possibilities of gore, with images that will haunt the mind long after the disc is back in the box.
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Silent Hill 2, hidden away beneath the fog and in the shadows, is the scarier title.
Silent Hill 3 is the more varied title and the more accomplished game by modern standards. But the narrative is a bit too silly for its own good, its barking-mad conclusion memorable mainly for the grotesque visual climax rather than any character resolution. That said, for those on board since the PlayStation original, there are lots of neat incidental details chucked in to help make more sense of the universe.
In the context of today's games, the most arresting feature in both is the puzzle-solving. You will not be held by the hand in your journey around Silent Hill. Often you'll have little idea what to do or where to go next. Solutions can be obtuse, to say the least, and items essential to progress can be missed with dispiriting ease.
I have a dreadful memory for games I haven't played in years, a bonus here. Having to think, struggle and backtrack so frequently was a real jolt to the system - and a timely reminder of how linear action games are today, even those that purport to offer freedom. Silent Hill's lack of direction can be enormously frustrating, but it also helps this pair of oldies feel freshly engaging.
Inevitably, not everything has aged well. The bad old days of fighting against the in-game camera are back, and I lost count of the times I ended up going back on myself by mistake in confusion. And the standard of the translated dialogue in both games is, how shall I say, very 'video game from the early noughties'.
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The level of blood and guts in Silent Hill 3 may well be unsurpassed in gaming.
A quick note on the voice acting. All parts have been re-recorded for the HD Collection, with the original voices an option in Silent Hill 2 alone. From a purist's perspective, I can perfectly understand a preference for the original. But the performances were spectacularly awful first time around, and I much prefer the new takes - although there's still some appalling delivery from the new cast, most strikingly in Silent Hill 3.
Lip-syncing is another matter. Plainly, matching new dialogue with old animations must be a fiddly business. But there were too many occasions where I was left wondering whether Hijinx actually bothered trying to line them up at all. It's all over the place, to be honest, the worst instance coming at the climax of Silent Hill 3 - quite an important bit of the drama - where my characters lips were moving, but the words didn't come until seconds later.
None of the mishaps I've described were game-ruining for me (note: I haven't played the collection on PS3, which reportedly comes off worse). But we really should expect better treatment for titles of this calibre. Nothing better sums up the sheer laziness of it all than a glaring typo scrolling past in the new credits.
Silent Hill HD Collection is a product that screams "will this do?", when it should be a loud celebration of two gaming greats. And yet in spite of all that, the games themselves have aged far better than I would have expected, their foreboding atmosphere and striking imagery as impressive now as they were over a decade ago.
I can see why some fans will hate the way this collection has been handled. And I can also see how much there is for newcomers to enjoy. As a standard for HD remasters, it really isn't good enough. Lucky, then, that the games still are.
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