Horror game fans online seem to be of the mindset that too much pressure is being put on the upcoming Silent Hill 2 Remake's performance. Specifically, that opinion seems to be coming from fans of the indie community, who feel that lower-budget, independently created games have been carrying the genre for a long time.The conversation began with a post from the Horror Games Community Twitter account, which was responding to another post that touted the importance of the upcoming remake, a game that has no set release window at this time. "If this game succeeds, it will revive psychological horror. [I]f this game fails, it will do the opposite," a tweet from Shirrako Gaming declares. But Horror Games Community and several of its 136,000-plus followers are opposed to that idea."Horror is fine," the response states, seeming to address not just the person who made the original tweet, but a subsection of the gaming community that focuses solely on Triple-A titles. "It's been fine for years and it's gonna be fine. Just because you ignore indie devs and smaller studios who had been carrying the genre on their backs for years, doesn't make them magically disappear."
Continuing that train of thought, Horror Games Community goes on to state that big-name publishers have been jumping back onto the horror trend recently because of the work that indie developers have been putting into the genre. Even Bloober Team itself started out small, they argue, and they predict that once the horror trend dies down, indie developers will keep the genre alive and well. "I mean, hell, literally the team developing Silent Hill 2 right now has been there for years making psychological horror games, regardless of their overall reception," the thread states. "They're not a subsidiary of Konami. They were once a small studio too. Bloober didn't just appear out of nowhere."
The post has been garnering a lot of attention, and several fans of indie horror have jumped into the conversation to share their thoughts on the matter, including sharing lists and images of their favorite horror titles, like survival horror shooter Signalis, which released last October. "The AAA industry is all about spectacle, which is pretty much the exact opposite of what psychological horror and particularly Silent Hill 2 are about," opined one respondent, Michael Redfield.
Another person who seems to agree with Horror Games Community, Night Shift Radio 0, pointed to the streaming community as proof 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 for me that the genre is 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 as well. After all, indie horror properties are even creeping ther way into the mainstream of late. It's hard to consider Scott Cawthon's Five Nights at Freddy's franchise as indie at this point, but it sure was when he launched the first game back in 2014, and now it's set for a major motion picture release this coming October. Meanwhile, the previously mentioned Markiplier, self-dubbed as The King of Five Nights at Freddy's, has his own upcoming film adaptation of deep sea indie horror title Iron Lung.
All that being said, there were still those in the thread who dissented against the downplay of Triple-A horror titles' importance. Andrea Pichinini wrote, "They are capping for Silent Hill just because Sony paid PS5 exclusive. The hypocrisy is that these same people trashed on Blair's Witch [sic] and The Medium, which are games made by the same studio."