Silent Hill 2 Remake Changes Female Characters

Video Games

The video game industry continues to stamp out beauty wherever it may roam. Yesterday, Sony aired its PlayStation State of Play event for 2024, and one of the game trailers shown was for the remake of Silent Hill 2. Fans of the horror game series noticed something about Angela, one of the characters from the game who looks different in her new and improved modern guise. Learning the Law demonstrates how much she’s been changed for the Silent Hill 2 remake:

What did they do to Angela from Silent Hill 2? Modern adaptations are becoming daily life nightmares pic.twitter.com/9VBFTsYIbE

— LearningTheLaw (@Mangalawyer) May 30, 2024

At this point, anyone who insists there’s no pattern here is either lying or willfully ignorant. There is a push to downgrade the beauty of various female video game characters, with Angela just the latest example. Moreover, the graphics don’t even look as good in the remake, with Angela being more lifelike in the original PlayStation 2 game from 2001. I’ve never played the Silent Hill games (which is probably why I didn’t notice this when watching State of Play yesterday), but looking into it, it appears Angela has a horrific backstory involving rape, which proponents of this are suggesting is the reason why her looks were changed. I don’t know what that has to do with anything, and the images I’ve seen of the original Angela aren’t sexualized; she just has a pretty face. But all that aside, this isn’t happening in a vacuum, so I don’t buy that as the reason. It isn’t even just Angela in Silent Hill 2 – a character named Maria also got a makeunder:

Well well well, look who missed the entire point of Maria’s design in the Silent Hill 2 remake. pic.twitter.com/2RVyZ946AH

— NicTomahawk (@NicTomahawk) May 31, 2024

 As for the source of the character change, Learning the Law has an idea about that, too:

Bloober Team has hired Sweet Baby Inc 2.0 (Hit detection) a sensitive consulting company, for Silent Hill 2 Remake + ESG Konami

Ever wonder why Maria looks so sanitized? Not spoiling the game, but it’s over, bros. Pack your things. When they said modern audience, they mean it pic.twitter.com/E1g3wCQ9ph

— LearningTheLaw (@Mangalawyer) May 31, 2024

You can check out Hit Detection’s website if you like; it’s full of “diversity” and “representation” buzzwords before you scroll down the home page. So, this is the same thing we’ve seen many times recently, just with a different consulting firm, like a game of Whac-A-Mole. However, it’s not just the consultants; according to Bounding Into Comics, the chief marketing officer of the game’s developer, Bloober, said that the Silent Hill 2 remake would be “applying adjustments to certain areas where things need modernizing due to the passage of time.” This is the larger problem; if the developers didn’t want this stuff in their games, the consulting firms wouldn’t get hired. So, until the rest of the industry changes its tune, this will continue to be the norm for video games.