games

Silent Hill 1/2/3 are probably the earliest examples of professionally produced games having genuine theming, properly written and conveyed subtext, as well as taking advantage of the medium and landing as a great psychological horror. Pyramid Head is neither meant to be a foreboding metaphor nor a heart-racing boss fight. He is James' self-punishment made manifest, his belief that he deserves pain for what he has done. But like, not metaphorically. That's literally what the monster is in the story, brought to life by a town that holds a unique but very defined spiritual power.

James killing the monster at the end is him killing the part of him that feels guilty for what he has done, which materially changes how James behaves. Depending on James/player behavior, this why the endings of the game can range from James killing himself or James making peace with his distorted memories of his wife and leaving town.

I'm sure that a game released in 2022 does all of this at least as well if not better, but SH2 was absolutely monumental for the industry and almost every psychological horror game today has some roots in what SH1/2/3 were doing. There's a definite 'Seinfeld effect' with this. But I do reject the idea that you had to play it in its prime to properly 'get it.'

I will say that its exploration of domestic abuse, sexual violence, terminal illness, did not come off as edgy in 2001. It came off as downright shocking that a game dared to explore it and demanded maturity from its audience. Back in 2001, this was unheard of in games.

It's interesting you describe Silent Hill 2 as "2000s edgy" when the Team Silent games most definitely never gave me that vibe. If you want to see "2000s edgy" Silent Hill, check out basically any of the Western-developed Silent Hill games made after Silent Hill 4 (sans the 2 remake)

I'm probably a bad person to try and explain what to look out for in the remake compared to the original because I think the remake fundamentally has boring generic design for the gameplay. I think the original game has a unique experience with the atmosphere and the general traversal of the world, with the camera oftentimes deliberately forcing you to head towards unknown areas that you can't fully scout ahead of time, and a lot of the moment to moment scares within the gameplay rely on that, also it uses wide angles to emphasise isolation in a lot of the outside areas while using close ups to emphasise the cramped indoor spaces.

As far as the combat gameplay goes it does seem like that's more of a draw for you so I definitely see how Signalis would work better, and the new remake might work better just by virtue of following very blatantly in the footsteps of RE2 and RE4s remakes with tactical locational damage as a pretty critical part of crowd management, from what I've seen.