I'm Here to De-Hype You on Silent Hill | Extra Punctuation 

At this point, the only thing that would really excite me is if they actually gave us proper ports of the first 4 Silent Hills. These games are art, and art shouldn’t fade from history because it’s stuck on old consoles that will eventually stop working, leaving future generations with no means of ever experiencing it.

I heard about this and was like "Neat, I liked the first one. It'd be cool to revisit it all these years later." Then I saw that Bloober Team were involved and thought "Nah, dawg. Let's leave those good memories alone."

One of the interviews from the head developer of Bloober Team said that Konami gave them a near unlimited budget and that raised every red flag for me.

2:40 to 3:28 is one of the BEST takes I've ever heard about the creation of art and can be applied to pretty much every medium. I've always held it to be true that 'mistakes' are inherent to any piece of media and are often times very benefitial, it's just great to hear someone say it in such a coherent manner.

I love Extra Punctuation and I'm glad you brought it to youtube. ZP feels like listening to Yahtzee at a standup-comedy club, joking about politics, society and such. Meanwhile EP feels like he joins you at your table afterwards for a beer, and discusses the contents of his jokes more sincerely and more personally.

Only thing to note on Silent Hill Fffffffffff is that the writer of Higurashi is working on it, and that is one of the best examples of small Japanese town horror out there and honestly one of the best Visual Novel series to boot, so big hopes for that.

Konami: "We're remaking a Silent Hill game!" Me: "Okay, I'm interested." Konami: "It's developed by Bloober Team." Me: "I'm no longer interested."

That "Eyyy!" at 0:40 was *exactly* as long as it needed to be to make the switcheroo ironic enough to be justified. Well done, Yahtzee.

The people in the announcement literally said "The movie is the catalyst for the revival of Silent Hill". They said, AND I QUOTE, "We are also doing our best to make sure that our games are AS GOOD AS THE FILM." To people that haven't been around for the past 16 years, this sort of language should be concerning.

Wow, you can just feel Yahtzee’s anger gradually growing as the video progresses

I was watching Konami's stream of this, and the second Bloober Team was confirmed to be the one developing Silent Hill 2 Remake a bunch of people were like "F***ing Bloober Team. I'm out."

The best horror moments in dead space 3 are when one of the character is having hallucinations and the other is perfectly normal and all he can do is looking at the other player losing his mind. So even in a co-op horror the only times they really managed to create good horror was when they the players were isolated in their own different experiences.

Always good to start the day off with some passionate spite. Thanks yahtz

I liked the Silent Hill movie. Hiring dancers to play the monsters and having them be costumes/live action as much as possible was great. The nurse scene near the end is still incredibly tense

Bloober Team doing SH2 is the most worrying part of everything. Combat and interactivity were crucial to that game and not a single Bloober game has either of those done well.

I started reading higurashi since the announcment of silent hill f (since it's the same writer), and so far it's amazingly chilling and tense (at least once it gets going, it's a bit of a slow burn). So if silent hill f *does* come out, I'd like to think it's in good hands; and if it doesn't at least it got me to read higurashi.

For yahtzee's attempt to kill the hype, all I can say is: You can't kill what's already dead.

Mary = The Silent Hill Franchise James = Silent Hill Fans It's time to let her go, James. She's dead. There was a good game here. It's gone now.

When making the original, the director specifically told the actors to speak their lines weird. I believe Guy Cihi said that they told they told them to space out the syllables every now and then, and speak kinda blandly and then go emotional for a couple words randomly, shit like that to make the characters intentionally feel odd. Nowadays if you don't know that it just seems like bad voice acting that worked out for the better. However, I worry about the remake because (among other many reasons) I doubt they'll ever direct it like that. They're going to do the same thing that the HD remaster and try to make it sound all professional and it just won't make the characters feel like they do in the original.

Frankly, given how dickish Konami has treated their Horror franchise prior to the swarm of silent hill releases they announced (From homecoming, downpour, those pachinko machines, canceling silent hills) I'm on my guard for what these new entries will bring.

The only thing from this I have any hope for is Silent Hill F, as it's looking to go for the whole Silent Hill 4 gambit of exploring a new concept adjacent to the original games, and the project writer, Ryukishi07 (it's their pen name, don't be a pedantic twat about it) made a visual novel series "When They Cry", specifically Higurashi and Umineko, that I've heard are very good and well written, so hopefully Silent Hill f will also be well written. Though again that just adds a few percentage points to the ??? probability scale, but hey it has higher chances of being decent than the Silent Hill 2 remake at least Well, that and the Shiba Inu Silent Hill 2 ending figurine. I don't care what anyone else says, that is a brilliant idea and I want one

This was the Extra Punctuation I was hoping for!

The project I'm most interested in would be Silent Hill: Townfall. Not only is No Code working on it (I friggin' loved Observation), but it seems like it may be trying to do its own thing with the IP.

Refreshing to see some healthy skepticism. I'm the odd duck in my circles for going "maybe cool it with the expectations..."

The thing that caught my attention in the livestream was when they mentioned that it'd been almost three years since they approached Masahiro Ito about the remake, at which point I did the math and said "so you noticed the boatload of cash Capcom made off the Resident Evil 2 remake and you want in on that, got it", and the rest of the presentation just cemented that conclusion.

I saw a problem when James had an emotion in the new scenes. His not seeming to care was important. It made him more distant from what he had done and showed that he didn't comprehend or care for his crime.

I'm at least cautiously optimistic about f because of the writer, Ryukishi07, who has an absolutely stellar track record with psychological/nightmarish horror as well as someone who clearly understands people a lot (he has a background as a social worker). Not to mention f seems to be set in a small Japanese town, which is a setting he's familiar with as it's the setting of what is arguably his most famous and beloved visual novel Higurashi. Also I don't think it's fair to say that the voice acting in 2 is a happy accident, especially when you take into consideration Monica Taylor Horgan's excellent performance through and through, and the fact that the characters who do have strange line deliveries are all severely psychologically damaged weirdos who don't know how to even properly interact with other humans, it only makes sense they'd come across as stilted and awkward.

I'm extremely interested in Silent Hill f due to who's writing it, and nothing will un-hype me for it. But that being said, I have no emotional investment in it actually being Silent Hill. I wouldn't be surprised if it ends up feeling like something else that they slapped the brand on for marketing purposes.

I’m not sure how much Yahtzee knows about visual novels (not a dig), but if I had to guess the reason SHF is set in Japan, it seems to be because of the writer, Ryukishi07. He was the writer of a series of visual novels, all collectively under the banner “When They Cry”, with far and away the most popular one being “Higurashi When They Cry”, which has like 12 animes out. Higurashi is HEAVILY steeped in Japanese horror and superstition, and while I don’t have much experience with the rest of the WTC series, it seems like keeping the horror very Japanese might be what Ryukishi07 wants to do. That’s what I think at least, and I could be totally and completely wrong, so take my opinion as such.

I will never get over the fact that the people who made the hallway baby that hilariously bonks its head on a cabinet over and over again somehow got selected to make the new Silent Hill 2 Remake.

I’ve heard in rando forums that the “f” of Silent Hill f might actually be the musical symbol for Forte. I.e. Loudness. And the notion of Loud Silence is very clever; which makes me think it’s wrong as Konami is antithetical to Subtlety.

The thing about group horror is, at least for now, it only works in one of two variations: 1. The group starts getting smaller, i.e. people in the group start getting killed off or "disappearing". The tension there is the dread that you will either be one of the people silently taken/killed or you will be the last one remaining against an unknown entity. Either way, it ultimately results in solo horror. 2. The group begins to distrust each other. In this instance the horror is more paranoia than anything else as everyone in the group doesn't know who in the group is a friend, and who is trying to kill them. This is group horror only in the sense that a group of people is involved, but ultimately they are very isolated from each other.

The fact that Konami makes anything is a dealbreaker for me. Metal Gear: Survive & Contra: Rogue Core proves how little they care about quality control.

Just by the amount of announced SH games, I can imagine board meeting prior to green lighting those projects starting like this: "Remakes of Resident Evil and new entries are selling like cupcakes..."

It's alarming that Yahtzee's best case scenario for the SH2 remake is Gus Van Sant's version of _Psycho._ It makes me imagine Vince Vaughn as James' voice actor 😐

7:45 Now I want a range of novelty cookbooks that use horror words, as in: 1. Lightly torture the steaks. 2. Flay the potatoes until golden brown. 3. Maim the mushrooms over a bed of rice.

Bloober team in over their heads on this one

Some people say that the worse case scenario is that it sucks. Actually, I think the worse case scenario is that it actually works and Konami takes that as leave to keep remaking their IPs instead of try something new with diminishing returns on each reboot.

I wish they would just make it easier to play the first 4 games. SH1 hasn't had a rerelease since the PS3 and 2-4 have to be modded on PC just to play.

I don’t keep up with video game news, and the reason is to avoid getting hyped over anything.

I think at this point I almost like extra punctuation more than zero punctuation

Also when you watched the Silent Hill showcase event, didn't it feel like all the hosts in that event were pretty much dead inside. Like they didn't feel like they actually were excited about all this.

Yahtzee, I've never played Silent Hill, so I'll be happy to be the guinea pig who plays it for the first time and gives a definitive opinion on it. Just buy me the game and necessary hardware and we'll be set. K thx.

It's honestly refreshing to see my thoughts of SHf mirrored-- I see so many people excited for it being "fresh and new" but it's like... it doesn't even look like a Silent Hill game. The point of reviving a series with a new installment should be to USE the series' established tropes and setting to tell a new story; you can't shake EVERYTHING up or else it just becomes In Name Only

"Citation Needed" 🤣

Two other things: 1. Ascension is partially made by Bad Robot, aka JJ Abrams’s production company, aka a vehicle for one of the greatest cinematic frauds of the 21st century. 2. It’s Konami. And we all know what your old colleague has said about them, many times.

"The devil shivers when yhatzee loses his temper" Gave serious "I'm not mad, I'm just pissed" energy tbh

As someone whose favorite game is also SH2 (With Team Silent SH games being my favorite games) I also had red flags set off during the SH2R trailer, mainly relating to the overexaggerated tone in some of the important scenes we saw. Felt a bit more Hollywood and less Lynch. HOWEVER! Silent Hill F is narratively promising because the writer of that game is the person who wrote Umineko, which is one of the most genuinely interesting stories that I've read as far as video games/Visual novels go (the coincidence was cosmic, as I had finished Umineko a month before the SH Livestream). Granted Silent Hill F also does have some of its fair share of red flags (for example, a potential awkward workflow because all the creative decisions are made at a new internal "Team Silent" at Konami with Neobards handling 100% of the implementation of those ideas. I could see some potential issues there. Another example is that the trailer we saw was outsourced as well by a company not related to either Neobards nor Konami, which is equally worrying because as you mentioned, we even have less of an indication as far as the talent and work concerned). As as aside, Townfall's announcement made me want to check out No Code's catalogue. I thought the first "chapter" of Untold Story utilized some pretty interesting setup for scares, with the rest of the game mostly falling flat and missing the emotional mark that it was going for. I started Observation yesterday which is already touching on some pretty interesting gameplay and narrative concepts. I think No Code might be better off writing a Silent Hill game that leans more concepts as opposed relying on character/emotional core, which is already a strange thing for a Silent Hill game to be but I think it's important they play to their strengths.

Y’know what’s really sad? At this point I’m completely numb to shit like this now.

"[Bloober Team shouldn't] be trusted to reboot anything beyond a Sinclair ZX-81." Ooh, that was a good one.

Horror Tabletop games do the feeling of dread while being at a table with several other players. People need to try out Dread - it uses a Jenga Tower whenever you do anything risky. Or 10 Candles where the room gets more dark as your characters come closer to their doom and candles are extinguished.

TBH, most of the time when developers publicly say to hell with the original, it's far worse than when they give the namby-pamby response. The namby-pamby response really is the only sane response because it gives them some room to maneuver while still being cut from the same cloth as the original. Truth is, you usually can tell jackshit from the marketing, because marketing is mostly just lying. It's only when the lies are so bad does it become obvious.

Having Chat interact with something reminds me of something else where audience participation was promoted as a big deal. Some time ago, there was a Warhammer fantasy event. The infamous End Times. Actual players would pit armies against each other and the results would effect what happened within the fantasy universe. Sounds good right? Thing is, the writers wanted things to go one way, the Chaos factions winning. So naturally the Chaos factions got stomped at nearly every opportunity. But the writers had already decided that things would end one way. So when in reality, the bbeg got his nuts kicked in by an orc, the entire event was treated as if it never happened. I get the feeling that this is what will happen. These writers or “writers” most likely, won’t even give a single fuck about the audience. Granted, since the very first thing that will be encouraged will likely be shooting civilians maybe they shouldn’t have considered this in the first place.

Another thing that makes me somewhat interested to see what Townfall specifically is is how it's being co-published by Annapurna of all publishers. Who certainly have a brilliant track record with great single player narrative-driven content to say the least!

Even though I've only played through Silent Hill 2 about 6 years ago, I am scared for what becomes of this remake.

that visual hint to Gus Van Sant at 3:47 is why I fell in love with ZP (and EP now, I guess) in the first place.

Comparing the jank of PS1/2 games with the impurity of Jekyll’s elixir may be the greatest metaphor I’ve ever heard, and I will be using that someday.

videos like this is why we still need Yahtzee

Also The Room showed us the Otherworld exists in many towns not in Silent Hill so I'm not surprised a town in Japan has it too, we likely will get an official answer on that and how it does exist everywhere.

Isn’t taking the original, dismantling it, casting the bones on the floor and jumping on them more or less what they did with Silent Hill Homecoming?

Us: Hey Konami, can we please get Silent Hills? Konami: Ok, sure! *releases multiple Silent Hill products* Us: ….. that isn’t exactly what we meant….

3:38 I see that Yahtzee shares Jack Packard's hatred for the "Gunshot Fade to Black Ending" trope.

That sort of playing around with the innards of the original to create something new you described at the end is precisely a reason I rather enjoyed Shattered Memories for what it was.

An "In The Loop" reference? You beautiful man.

Silent Hill F is the only one that made me happy because it's finally a Silent Hill game that by the looks of it isn't trying to be Silent Hill 2, which was one of the biggest downfalls of every Silent Hill game post 4. It's also going to be, hopefully, severely carried by Ryushiki07 who's just amazing at psychological horror, mindfucks and making everything feel paranoid.

In slight defence of Silent Hill F. It’s an established fact in the canon that Silent Hill appears different to everyone based on their memories, guilt, trauma etc. So it isn’t entirely unreasonable for it to be able to completely change its architecture to resemble a different culture.

Speaking of horror in a group, it really doesn't work because horror is really dependent on immersion. Having someone by your side is a constant reminder that this is game, essentially breaking the immersive experience. I've watched a streamer who is really big on immersion play phasmaphobia with some friends. All that ended up happening was them singing baby shark while being chased by ghost.

"I'm Here to De-Hype You on Silent Hill" You're too late my friend, I was never hyped to begin with.

Excellent transition into the Bloober Team mention.

I'm one of the people who actually loved the first silent hill movie, ONLY the first one. The second one was liquid diarrhea, but the first one had a very interesting element of intrigue where you really wanted to see where it was all going. I even enjoyed the ending as I thought it was perfectly reasonable that she would be trapped there forever after she allowed the demon girl to possess her body. It didn't have a lot of plotholes, characters were actually pretty intelligent in their decisions, and the moments when it transitioned into nightmare world were very chilling. Most of the people hating on the movie just didn't like the ending, because spoilers... She never left Silent Hill. She drove off, thinking she was safe, but she is trapped there forever now. Then in the second movie it's basically Silent Hill 2 with James going to get her out and also becoming trapped there, except the movie veered off into the drug taking direction with stupid shit everywhere.

My first thought when I heard that they were remaking Silent Hill 2 was to wonder why not give that treatment to SH1 first considering that it's older and it never received any ports, a few seconds later I realized that this is just a cash grab and SH2 is more likely to generate larger profits.

"Hype is an insidious thing." I'm pretty sure the Darkest Dungeon narrator said that at some point in the game.

I think in this modern climate, we really need a dedicated de-hype man to counteract the increasingly fervent fan response to so much as a twitch from an existing IP. Thank you for being that de-hype man this time, Yahtz.

Regarding Silent Hill Ascention: If it is what you described, it sounds just like Adult Swim's 'Cry of Mann,' which was a live-streamed pseudo-soap opera with very Lynchian vibes that was, at its heart, a horror series. I loved that show, and the live interaction quality was what the entire experience and narrative were built around. It also had an 'after show' a la 'Talking Dead' that was called 'Call of Mann' which also directly played into the themes and narrative of the show. Please, go watch it.

the fact silent Hill F is beingh written by Ryukishi07 gives it very good chances of being good

The fact that they revealed 4 games is the problem. Blooper team hasn't made anything i would call beyond mediocre so sh2 is probably screwed. Town fall seems like it will be a normal silent hill game but we know nothing about it. Silent hill f looks cool conceptually but it takes place in Japan so that alone makes no sense and not feel anything like silent hill

I had the strongest face palm when they said they were doing an over the shoulder camera for sh2 remake

I like the de-hyping. Would have loved more of it when Cyberpunk was announced. I'm convinced CD Projekt Red would have loved to be de-hyped themselves, us the audience, and the investors, so that we'd all have had a proper game released. Oh, well, history and ifs.

I think the most obvious reason it's going to suck is because Konami are involved and they absolutely destroy everything they touch in the last 10 years. Their track record is downright impressive.

I expect to squeeze through many wall cracks with the same slow walk animation, and to mash a button prompt to push a thing

I had the same feeling about the SH transmission thing. The 2 remake fills me with no excitement, Konami just saw what Capcom was doing with RE and screeched ME TOO. I don't know what Townfall is supposed to be so I can't even raise an eyebrow at it. F looks interesting but like it has fuck all to do with Silent Hill. I'm still irrationally pissed off about the last Silent Hill movie. And finally Ascension.... because nothing say we're taking this series seriously than giving it to fucking JJ "Mystery Box" Abrams. The man who already made both Star Wars and Trek worse and seems to be holding a bunch of DC characters hostage at the moment. I legit went into the thing with one hope, straight ports of the original trilogy and maybe 4 on Switch. Not remasters, I've been burned before. Just some good old ports of the classics. But sadly Konami is Konami so we are getting crap no one wants and with the 2 remake, handled by a worse team than the Eastern European shack that put out Downpour. I firmly agree Silent Hill should be put out of its misery. Even if some freakish planetary alignment happened and magically the MVPs of Team Silent came back together. I think I'd much rather they crowdfund something "new" that's not owned by Konami. Just pull a Bloodstained, that one worked well.

Why change the camera...? That's just nonsense. The fixed camera in the original was an integral part of the horror experience, as the angles in question were deliberately chosen to instil a sense of wrongness, unease and vulnerability, thereby enhancing the atmospheric dread without having to rely on jumpscares every 30 seconds. Turning the camera into the standard 3rd person shooter cam may make handling easier but goes against the whole bloody point of SH2's core design.

The full title of silent hill f is silent hill: press f to be spooked.

How will they recreate the scene with James and Maria running away from pyramid head in 3rd person? Thats where the fixed camera really shined and created a sense of dread and horror

The thing is, silent Hill has been always a kind of a "niche" game, and Konami hasn't understand that. In their race to open up the series and making it more accessible they destroyed the essence. It's not about it's aesthetic concept, nor the sound design: it's about the story, everything stems from it. From the poetic tragedy. And though there's a market for this kind of rare beast, making it popularly massive isn't te right goal. And that seems to me is the idea of Konami. Make Silent hill massive. I can see now what type of remake it's going to be. A linear game that tries so hard to be a movie, you don't have any agency on the story, the majority of puzzles are going to be left out, no backtracking, lots of linear walking, forget about roaming the town wherever you want, the game literally holding your hand as if you didn't know how to play a videogame like this, and a resident evil-esque combat system... What a generic MEH of a game.

I'm significantly more excited for Townfall, because not only is it going in a new direction instead of replicating a thing they don't seem to really understand, but No Code have a strong record of spooky messing-with-you games and I've tremendously enjoyed both of their previous games. That said, even if that's two of three, the third is that it is still owned by Konami - Annapurna's good record of letting weird games be weird means nothing if Konami's horrible track record still has their hand on the plug. I'm confident it will be good but they still don't get my money until I get to see if Konami ruined it.

Also, I know that Silent Hill 2 is being remade because it's been judged the "best" one by fans and critics, but I feel like Silent Hill 1 would be the best starting point, remake-wise. Let's face it, its graphics have definitely aged the worst.

It's interesting to see a silent hill set in 60s Japan because the same people that was a part of original Team Silent on this team also made SIREN Blood curse, which has similar setting with a American foreign exchange student as the protagonist.

Basically every Bloober Team horror game so far was them trying to make their own version of Silent Hill, without even the slightest understanding of what make the good games in the series good. Normally I'd just ignore the remake, but considering that BT is responsible for some of the most tasteless depictions of mental health and abuse survivors in media in recent years, I really want these "new" Silent Hill games to be cancelled.

Totally agree about hype. There's literally nothing for gamers to gain from it and it will almost always leave you disappointed

The walking simulator merchants? Oh no.

See, I feel like cash goals are kind of destructive. I'm sure there are 1000s of programmers who would love to work on a game like Silent Hill remake as an appreciation of a game that may have inspired them, but you know that it's being remade because the Resident Evil remakes have been so successful that it would be dumb to not try to capitalize on survival horror nostalgia in this moment. There had to have been a push to remake RE2 out of at least some kind of passion because they were having so much resurgent success with their 1st person reboot that it would be more of a risk to go backwards. After that the RE remakes turned into grabs at cash but now on less of a shaky foot to stand on, this Silent Hill remake feels like the developers looked over at what RE was doing and said "hey, we used to be college roommates and shared the same major, let's rip off what he's doing and hope to be as successful," which feels disingenuous but here's to hoping it's at least satisfying to engage with.

I foresee the same problems to occur with the SH2 remake that happens with every other Blooper Team game, and to describe that, I quote Yahtzee’s Evil Within Zero Punctuation where he described it as if someone just said “make a horror game” with no rhyme or reason to the horror game elements, and that definitely reflects Blooper Team’s horror games; it’s like they have a check list of possible scary stuff. Walls that bleed? Check. Twitching woman that kills you? Check. Lights flickering off? Check. The door you go through again leads to an entirely different location? Check. Walls start warping and distorting? Check. I also wish some developer would revitalize the psychological profile gimmick SH Shattered Memories had. Yeah, it was basic and didn’t affect much, but it could’ve laid the brick work for it in a future horror game. Like imagine filling out a questionnaire asking what scares you and having it affect the gameplay. You answer that you’re afraid of the dark? Watch the gameplay becomes noticeable darker, flashlight and light sources flicker or die randomly. You answer that you’re afraid of forests and trees? The one forest section of the game becomes more dense with trees and the trees distort into horrifying images to unnerve you. Etc etc.

"Oh cool! Silent Hill 2 is being remade!" I thought excitedly until I saw who was making it. Bloober team, the people responsible for such "classics" as Layers of Fear, The Medium, and Blair Witch. "They're somehow going to make 'In Water' the 'good' ending aren't they?" I asked, incredibly disappointed.

100% agree with everything in this video. I am not expecting anything good from these new products.

I think having the writer of Higurahi: When They Cry could make an interesting psychological horror game. Was kinda hoping to see some comment on that but I forgot you're not really an anime guy which means a) You more than likely haven't heard of Higurashi: When They Cry b) If you have heard of it, you probably haven't touched the visual novel game or the anime based on the visual novel

Soooo... How did your opinion change overall after the release of the remake? :))

I only have any enthusiasm for Silent Hill F, and only because I know exactly who's writing it and I trust him. Because Higurashi and Umineko are fucking amazing, and the former especially proves me knows how to do atmosphere, can misdirect the audience without going "haha, fooled you!", and knows how to really psychologically torment his characters.

But I was already de-hyped, so you just re-hyped me. Thanks a lot Yatzy!

The moment I saw Bloober I immediately knew there was nothing to be hyped about