Silent Hill 2 has now received its first rating, from South Korea.
As reported by Gematsu, the GRAC, or Game Rating and Administration Committee, has uploaded a page of the ratings page. It appears that Silent Hill 2’s age rating is 19, their equivalent of the ESRB’s Adults Only rating. Furthermore, they applied the content descriptors for the categories of violence, and for horrifying action.
Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 was officially announced in October 2022, but may had been in the works for some time. Bloober signed a deal with Konami at least as far back as June 2021. Bloober had wanted to share details about their development, but upon the terms of the agreement, Konami would get to decide when and how much about the remake gets previewed.
Lest we forget, Silent Hill 2 is one of the seminal titles in the history of the video game industry. With this title, Konami’s Team Silent took their franchise to a direction completely divergent from what Capcom was doing with their Resident Evil series.
With this title, Konami’s developers tackled taboo subjects like rape and suicide, and it also helped develop the idea of a psychological horror video game, as opposed to a mystery game with gore, or in Resident Evil’s case, an over the top zombie game. They also demonstrated artistic ambitions with this title, paving the way forward for the kinds of games Bloober Team and Remedy Entertainment would make.
One previous rerelease haunts this remake, in a way. 2012’s Silent Hill HD Collection was released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, but was reviled for the poor performance and overall quality of the release. As you can see, it took Konami over ten years to finally address this with a new remake, but we don’t quite know how this one will turn out.
Last month, Bloober Team confirmed that the title was nearing completion, but then controversy erupted. The studio put out a statement after Konami released a teaser trailer. Bloober’s statement explicitly states that Konami’s trailer misrepresented the overall quality of their work.
There are some fans who don’t like Bloober’s games, and are thus apprehensive about this coming remake. As this trailer got released, those fans expressed their displeasure, and there’s no doubt some blamed Bloober for it.
But as for now, those fans are forming opinions only on teasers, and not the actual game itself. It may not take long before we ourselves can decide if Bloober did this historically significant title with their remake or not.
