Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 may not come with a Pyramid Head origin story, and the horror game - and us - are better for it
Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake may not come with a Pyramid Head origin story after all, and the universe is a better place for it. Best Buy’s listing for the horror game includes a bullet point feature that had fans of the horror game feeling concerned.
“Fan-favourite character Pyramid Head makes a return along with a special origin story for fans to play through,” the Best Buy description reads.
PCGamesN‘s Will Nelson pointed out that the feature point is actually a weird rephrasing of something Masahiro Ito, director of the original Silent Hill 2, said after the remake’s announcement.
“Pyramid Head is coming back,” Ito said at the time. “A new journey for those who know the original, and his origin story for those who know that character. And… the most memorable journey of the man most closely associated with that monster.”
If you’ve played Silent Hill 2, then you probably have a good idea why including a Pyramid Head origin designed to please fans raised some eyebrows. Without spoiling anything, that particular Silent Hill monster‘s existence is tied so closely to protagonist James Sunderland that it makes little sense to even entertain the idea of an origin story. Pyramid Head comes into being at a very spoilery moment before Silent Hill 2 starts, which you figure out at the moment James realizes the truth about the mystery surrounding himself. Maybe Bloober can do something interesting with it, but that story’s already being told in the main game.
Ito even said more than once how displeased he was with the idea of Konami and the makers of later Silent Hill games dragging Pyramid Head back out just to make fans happy. Silent Hill Origins and Homecoming director Tomm Hulett even admitted there wasn’t a “compelling reason” for Pyramid Head to turn up in other stories, but he felt pressured to include the character anyway.
“We had a tough situation because, now, [Pyramid Head] showed up but there wasn’t really a compelling reason for him to show up,” Hulett said in an interview. “Whereas originally, it was like ‘Shut up, Tomm. It’s cool.’ Now it was just kind of like ‘Shut up, Tomm. He shows up.’
I fervently hope the Best Buy listing is just phrased poorly. If Bloober wanted to add some kind of origin tale, there’s a lot more they could do with the lore around Pyramid Head than just drag him back out for an encore. Ito created a whole Silent Hill mythology, with a divine being named Valtiel acting as judge and executioner and various lesser entities, including Pyramid Head, manifesting to carry out its will. Ito had plans for more versions of Valtiel, including new stories that actually, presumably, made sense without Pyramid Head in the picture.
Silent Hill 2 remake will launch for the PS5 sometime in 2024.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
