Online horror game fans seem to have the mindset that there is a lot of pressure to perform for the upcoming Silent Hill 2 Remake. Specifically, this opinion seems to be coming from fans of the indie community, who feel that low-budget, indie-created games have been carrying the genre for too long.
The conversation started with a post from Horror game community Twitter account, which was responding to another post touting the significance of the upcoming remake, a game that does not have an exact release window at this time. “If this game works, it will revive psychological horror. [I]If this game fails, they will do the opposite,” tweeted Who shirako games Announce. But the horror game community and many of its 136,000-plus followers are against this idea.
“Horror is fine,” the response states, apparently addressing not just the person who wrote the original tweet, but a subsection of the gaming community that only focuses on Triple-A titles. “It’s been good for years and it’s going to be okay. Just because you ignore the indie developers and smaller studios that have been carrying the genre on their backs for years doesn’t magically make them disappear.”
Continuing this train of thought, the Horror Games Community continues to assert that big name publishers have been jumping back into the horror trend recently due to the work that indie game developers have put into the genre. The Bloober Team itself even started small, they say, and they predict that once the horror trend dies down, indie game developers will keep the genre alive and well. “I mean, hell, literally the team developing Silent Hill 2 right now have been out there for years making psychological horror games, regardless of their general reception,” the subject says. “They’re not a subsidiary of Konami. They were once a small studio, too. Bloober didn’t appear out of nowhere.”
The post got a lot of traction, and several indie horror fans took to the conversation to share their thoughts on the matter, including sharing lists and photos of their favorite horror titles, like the survival horror Signalis, which came out last October. “The AAA industry is about spectacle, which is pretty much the opposite of what psychological horror and especially Silent Hill 2 is about,” said one of the participants, Michael Redfield.
Another person who seems to agree with the Horror Games Community, Night Shift Radio 0, pointed to the streaming community as evidence that games and developers have had a strong interest in horror for a long time. “The fact that Markiplier hasn’t run out of horror games to play at this point is proof enough to me that the genre is still alive and well,” they stated.
While there’s no denying the popularity of Triple-A horror franchises like Silent Hill and Resident Evil, indie fans make a strong case for the importance of their favorites, too. After all, indie horror properties have been creeping into the mainstream lately. It’s hard to consider Scott Cawthon’s Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise as standalone at this point, but it sure was when he released his first game back in 2014, and now he’s set for a major motion picture release this coming October. Meanwhile, the aforementioned Markiplier, who dubs himself the King of Five Nights at Freddy’s, has his own adaptation of the deep-sea indie horror title, Iron Lounge.
All that said, there are still those who would argue against underplaying Triple-A horror titles in the thread. Andrea Pichinini wrote, “They’re only capping Silent Hill because Sony pushed a PS5 exclusive. The hypocrisy is that these same people busted the Blair Witch.” [sic] and The Medium, which are games made by the same studio.”
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