I’ve never finished aDragon Agegame. I’ve neverplayedaSilent Hillgame, period (aside fromThe Short Messageand, for the series' sake, I’m not counting it). But, this month, the two biggest releases in gaming areBloober Team’sSilent Hill 2 remakeandBioWare’s long-awaited return to single-player role-playing,Dragon Age: The Veilguard. As an agnostic about both series, I’m really debating where to spend my time and, more importantly, my money.
The Long-Awaited Returns Of Dragon Age And Silent Hill
The tough part is both games seem pretty good. Silent Hill 2 launched last week tostrong reviews, and Dragon Age’spreviews were near-universally glowing(barring the one from TheGamer’s Eric Switzer, whoremained skeptical). These are both games that had low expectations among fans ahead of release. Silent Hill 2 because many gamers don’t like Bloober Team. Dragon Age because BioWare hasn’t made a great game in a long time, and its last game,Anthem, was a live-service disaster. And yet, now that both games' release month has arrived, fans seem more optimistic.
Having to choose between the two games is highlighting the major similarities between them. In both cases, they’re the work of studios that are coming off of major bounces. Anthem was a ‘come to Jesus’ moment for BioWare, pushing the studio to ditch multiplayer plans for Dragon Age 4 and double down on the single-player gameplay it’s beloved for. Bloober, meanwhile, is coming offThe Medium, which wasn’t as big of a failure commercially, but which tainted the studio’s reputation with horror fans due to itsill-advised handling of a child abuse plotline. Both Silent Hill 2 and Dragon Age: The Veilguard are providing the chance for comebacks for their respective studios.
Their respective series, too. Dragon Age has been AWOL for a decade, following 2014’sInquisition. Silent Hill, likewise, had a splashy entry the same year withP.T., Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro’s ‘playable trailer’ for Silent Hills. After that game’s cancellation, and Kojima’s messy split from Konami, Silent Hill laid fallow for nine years before returning with Silent Hill: Ascension in 2023 and this year’s Silent Hill: The Short Message. Ascension is an interactive streaming series, and so barely counts. The Short Message is bad and extremely short, so I wouldn’t count it either. Silent Hill 2 is the series' first real, full-length entry in over a decade, and that made the stakes pretty high.
Series May Rest, But They Rarely Die
But that long hiatus means that there haven’t been new games in either series since I got back into games in 2016. At this point, that feels rare. So many series that had been away for a long time have gotten sequels in the past ten years. In 2021,New Pokemon Snapbrought the photography series back after 22 years.Return to Monkey Islandsaw Guybrush Threepwood set off on his first voyage in 13 years. New Pikmin, Dead Space, and Armored Core brought each long-dormant series back to the spotlight in 2023.
Nostalgia has been part of our gaming diet for decades, but this generation it has become, arguably,thedriving force in the medium. Remasters and remakes are a huge pillar of every year’s release calendar. Lengthening development cycles push companies like Naughty Dog and Capcom to turn to their back catalog. Online services like PS Plus and Nintendo Switch Online are increasingly sold on the opportunity to play old games. Nothing stays dead forever.
So, it’s interesting that Dragon Age and Silent Hill 2 stayed in hibernation for so long. I don’t know which I’ll end up playing, but in both cases, I’m eager to see what the fuss is all about after all these years.
