Back Into the Fog: Silent Hill 1 Remake Announced

By Bharat Sharma June 13, 2025 1:40 am AEST

I’ve never written about games here before. This blog has always been a space for breaking down the latest in tech, AI, and developer tools. But if I’m being honest, none of that would exist in my life without gaming. It was the spark.

Back in Year 7, I got my first console — a PlayStation 4. That console became my entire world for a while. It wasn’t just about playing games; it was about exploring worlds, understanding systems, and slowly realising: someone built this. Games weren’t magic — they were engineering, design, storytelling, sound, light, math, and art. They led me to computer science. They led me here.

So today, with the announcement of a full remake of Silent Hill 1 by Bloober Team, it only feels right that this is the moment I write my first proper gaming post.

A Return to the Dream (and the Nightmare)

Silent Hill 1 is not just another horror game. It is, in many ways, where modern psychological horror in gaming began. The original released in 1999, and while I wasn’t born yet to play it at the time, its legacy haunted every piece of horror media I grew up on. When I played the Silent Hill 2 Remake last year, it finally clicked — this was something special. I was introduced to the world of Silent Hill for the very first time.

Silent Hill 2 stunned me not through violence or jump scares, but through silence, stillness, and tone. Its impact lingered long after I turned off the console. That experience made me fall in love with a different kind of game design — one that didn’t chase dopamine, but introspection.

The remake of Silent Hill 1 brings that experience closer to the source — a story steeped in cult horror, psychological deterioration, and dreamlike space. A world not governed by logic, but by emotional truth. Snowy streets. Shifting realities. Familiar places that feel subtly wrong. This is not just a game you play. It’s a place you sink into.

The Design Philosophy That Stays With You

I’ve become deeply invested in the design of games — in how they use architecture, light, timing, and silence to create feeling. Silent Hill as a franchise doesn’t just tell you what’s happening. It makes you feel it through the environment, through discomfort, through lack of clarity. It rewards presence and attentiveness, not performance.

Bloober Team showed in SH2 Remake that they understand restraint. They know how to keep you uncertain. That matters more in horror than fidelity ever will. If they can bring that same nuance to SH1 — a more surreal, less structured experience — we might be looking at one of the most significant psychological horror remakes of this generation.

And if they reimagine the Lisa Garland sequence with the subtlety and horror it deserves, it might just end up being one of the most unforgettable moments in modern gaming again.

This Isn’t Just Nostalgia

This remake matters because it signals a shift. In a gaming landscape that often prizes cinematic scale and mechanical density, Silent Hill reminds us that minimalism, slowness, and ambiguity still have value.

It’s a vote of confidence in slower, stranger, more atmospheric games. It tells developers — especially independent ones — that games don’t have to be loud to be powerful. They can be quiet. Unsettling. Personal.

As someone who dreams of building a pixelated, lo-fi surreal horror experience one day — inspired by games like LSD: Dream Emulator, Yume Nikki, and now Silent Hill — this remake feels like a signal. That these kinds of experiences still matter. That people still want to feel unease, to explore dream logic, to be lost and not guided.

A Developer’s Concern: Optimization Challenges in Unreal Engine 5

While the announcement of the Silent Hill 1 remake is thrilling, it’s essential to address the technical challenges observed in the Silent Hill 2 remake, which was developed using Unreal Engine 5. Despite the engine’s advanced features like Nanite and Lumen, the PC version of SH2 faced notable performance issues, including traversal stuttering and inconsistent frame pacing. These problems are not isolated; they reflect broader challenges associated with Unreal Engine 5’s architecture.

Key Optimization Challenges:

  • Traversal Stuttering: Even with shader compilation stutter mitigated, SH2 exhibited traversal stuttering, likely due to how UE5 handles delta time and game updates, leading to performance inconsistencies even when frame rates are stable.

  • High System Requirements: UE5’s advanced features demand significant CPU and RAM resources. For instance, running Nanite and Lumen effectively may require a 12-core processor and substantial memory, which can be a barrier for many PC gamers.

  • Inefficient Asset Streaming: The engine’s asset streaming can cause hitches in open or semi-open environments, affecting the smoothness of gameplay.

Mitigation Strategies:

To enhance performance in future titles like Silent Hill 1 Remake and Silent Hill f, developers can consider the following optimization methodologies:

  • Shader Precompilation: Implementing shader precompilation can reduce runtime stuttering by compiling shaders ahead of time, thus minimizing in-game compilation hitches.

  • Level Streaming and World Partitioning: Utilizing UE5’s World Partition system can help manage large environments more efficiently by loading only necessary assets, thereby optimizing memory usage and performance.

  • Optimization of Lighting and Post-Processing Effects: Reducing the number of dynamic lights and minimizing post-processing effects like motion blur and bloom can significantly improve performance, especially on lower-end hardware.

  • Profiling and Performance Monitoring: Regular use of UE5’s built-in profiling tools can help identify performance bottlenecks early in development, allowing for timely optimizations.

As a developer and player, I hope that Bloober Team and other studios take these considerations into account to deliver smoother experiences in their upcoming titles. Addressing these optimization challenges is crucial to ensure that the immersive worlds they create are accessible and enjoyable across a wide range of hardware configurations.

What I Hope They Get Right

  • The original’s fixed camera tension and disorienting geography
  • Dream transitions that feel unpredictable, yet internally consistent
  • Fog as an actual character — something that shapes and hides, not just decorates
  • An environment that decays emotionally, not just visually
  • And above all, the pacing — slow, strange, and patient

Final Thoughts

Silent Hill 1 is where psychological horror in gaming began. And it’s being brought back at a time when I’ve never felt more connected to the industry — as a player, but also as a developer.

This isn’t just exciting. It’s deeply personal. The game that laid the foundation for so much horror design is being rebuilt, just as I’m trying to build things myself. That feels meaningful.

So yes, this is my first gaming post here. But it won’t be the last. Because for me, games are not a distraction from technology — they’re where my obsession with it started.