Silent Hill 2 and the best horror games for Halloween

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James Sunderland gets out of his car and looks across the misty forest. He’s still thinking about the letter he just received from his wife, telling him to come and meet her in the remote town where they once shared a romantic getaway. The reason it’s bothering him: his wife died three years ago. Surely the letter can’t be real. But he can’t let it go, and heads to the town to find answers.

The set-up of the classic 2001 horror game Silent Hill 2, which has just received the big-budget remake treatment, might invoke familiar horror tropes, but what comes next in James’s journey felt startlingly fresh when it was released. Where previous games in the genre aimed to frighten players with jump-scares and gore, Silent Hill 2 was one of the first to nail psychological horror, and is remembered as an atmospheric masterpiece which remains genuinely disturbing in its themes, imagery and unremitting bleakness.

Halloween is a time when gamers often reach for horror releases, and there has already been a bumper crop this year. As a medium, games have the potential to be even more frightening than movies, since you’re not passively watching a character go through a nightmare, but rather experiencing it yourself. The games are most effective when played in a dark room with no distractions and, most importantly, good headphones to fully realise every chilling sound effect.

In the Silent Hill 2 remake, it’s the sounds that first get under your skin. The spare, ominous score, the noise of James’s footsteps echoing in the desolate streets and the unearthly noises of the monsters — whether real or figments of James’ grief-stricken imagination, they gurgle and rasp with authentic menace. Your fear is amplified by the thick fog that wreathes the town. At the time of the original’s release, the fog was implemented because of hardware limitations on how much could be displayed on screen, but for this remake the developers have wisely kept it in place as an aesthetic choice, understanding that nothing is more frightening than not knowing what horrors are lurking just metres away.

Fans were unsure whether this remake would do the original justice, since the series creator Konami had practically ignored Silent Hill since 2012 and the developer of this remake, Bloober Team, has a distinctly mixed track record. But the result is a welcome success and has already sold 1mn copies in its first week. The remake remains faithful to what made the original so frightening — conjuring dread through atmosphere and environmental design, alongside a plot that is more interested in psychology than the supernatural, tackling taboo subjects such as incest and domestic abuse with surprising maturity. Where changes have been made, they are thoughtful and welcome — the camera controls and combat are updated in line with modern standards, and several locations have been expanded or remixed to extend the original’s short running time.

It’s not the only new horror game with lineage stretching back to the Silent Hill series. The franchise’s original creator, Keiichiro Toyama, who departed the series after the first instalment, has a new original game, Slitterhead, coming out on November 8. The tone is quite different: this is a campy, ultraviolent slasher rather than a psychological horror. The premise adds a twist to a classic yarn: a police officer finds a body at a crime scene with an empty eye socket and a missing brain. Shape-shifting monsters, the titular Slitterheads, are stalking the streets for human prey. But rather than playing the cop, you actually control another monster — an ancient spirit who can possess human bodies and must jump from host to host in order to track down and eliminate every last Slitterhead.

It’s less a strict horror and more a horror-themed action game, with a fun layer of complexity added by switching between human hosts mid-fight — the game encourages you to think of them as disposable, instructing you: “While humans are frail, their sheer numbers are a potent weapon.” The visual design is also captivating, from the stylish cityscapes of the fictional East Asian setting, inspired by the films of Wong Kar-wai, to the monsters themselves, a nightmarish tangle of tentacles, claws and mouths that telescope sickeningly out of human bodies.

If you’re still searching for the perfect Halloween scare, there are other strong candidates available. Alan Wake 2, a postmodern horror fable about a cursed writer which was one of last year’s finest games, heavily inspired by Silent Hill and Twin Peaks, is getting a new mystery with the Lake House downloadable expansion. For those looking for a spooky experience that prioritises narrative over action, they could look to Still Wakes the Deep, the atmospheric cosmic horror set on a Scottish oil rig, released earlier this year, or the new remaster of Until Dawn, which follows a group of teens who head into the woods and realise something terrible is out there with them. So they do what horror heroes have done since the dawn of the genre: go somewhere spooky and immediately start making questionable decisions. The only difference is that here, the choices are yours to make.