The Silent Hill 2 remake released this week, and though it's working relatively well there is one soft lock glitch that can make it impossible to progress without reloading an earlier save. The glitch takes place near the end of Brookhaven Hospital—but it can be avoided.
As spotted by Eurogamer and by many helpful fans on social media, you're able to soft lock your game by interacting with a porthole in a door on the third floor of Brookhaven Hospital. Here's a relatively spoiler-free description of how to avoid soft locking.
After entering the third floor of Bookhaven you'll have a short cutscene looking through a little window—a porthole—in a door. When you return to the third floor later on you'll need to be sure you manually save before going through to the rooftop. Once you're on the other side of the door you should autosave—but be sure you do not interact with the porthole from the other side. Just continue on your merry way.
Interacting with the porthole from the wrong side will teleport you to the wrong side of the door, preventing you from exploring the area you just got to and soft locking the game with no way to progress. If you accidentally hit the button and get teleported to the wrong side you should be able to reload that autosave—but some people can't reload it. That's why you made that manual save before the rooftop, which should get you back on track quickly.
I was able to easily replicate the soft lock using a save. There's no word from Bloober Team on how soon this will get fixed, but since it's easily replicated I'd hope they can make the change in a hotfix soon.
The remake of Silent Hill 2 is doing pretty well for itself, with developer Bloober Team reporting over a million copies sold and commentators praising it for staying true to the vision of the original—like how protagonist James just isn't that cool a guy.
"Bloober Team's remake hews closely to the original's high standards, but occasionally stumbles," said critic Kerry Brunskill in the PC Gamer Silent Hill 2 review. "When it's good it's excellent: any game that hews as closely as this one does to something with Silent Hill 2's high standards can go toe to toe with any other modern horror game. But it relies too much on its repetitive, violent encounters."
