The Silent Hill 2 remake is one of the most anticipated releases of the year, but controversy over its rating has left containment in gaming boards.

Wikipedia curators had to lock the Silent Hill 2 Remake page following a streak of vandalism over the critical reception of the game, which is in early access and will be released on October 8th.

Konami has had a tough decade or so. The exit of Hideo Kojima following the release of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain put one of the company's prized franchises in turmoil, and its executives made sure to bury the rest by effectively killing the Pro Evolution Soccer brand.

In that context, Silent Hill 2 is a breath of fresh air that could mark the beginning of a new era for Konami, with the initial press reviews scoring 87 out of 100 on Metacritic.

If you were to check the Wikipedia page for the game a little while ago though, you'd see a much different picture, with a string of ones and zeroes, punctuated by a charitable 6/10 review from IGN.

Disgruntled gamers made an organized guerrilla attack on the page against exhausted Wiki editors, resulting in an hours-long back and forth until the page was locked.

Vandalizing a Wikipedia page is an unremarkable incident on its own, but this pushback against the Silent Hill 2 remake does not exist in a vacuum.

Gaming communities are made up of people (despite occasionally not looking like it) and are therefore not insulated from external events. The "woke" panic is no exception to this.

This attitude is not new to gaming, with divisive events like Gamergate in 2014 coming to mind. Today's rift feels different though.

The release of The Last of Us Part II (which, for the record, has a Metacritic score of 93/100, in case that Wiki page gets vandalized too) is perhaps the first big battle of this war.

The prime illustration of this is the reddit The Last of Us community, which is split between r/TheLastofUs and r/TheLastOfUs2.

Albeit much smaller than the main sub, r/TheLastOfUs2 still has around 100,000 users whose sole common point is hatred of The Last of Us Part II.

Hating a sequel to something you like is normal (if unhealthy when done obsessively). The problem is that communities like r/TheLastOfUs2 dress social grievances as game ones.

The core criticism leveraged in many games now is that they are "woke," but this is rarely defined in any concrete term.

Still, the anti-"woke" game crusaders will happily provide examples of games and broader media that most definitely emanate this intangible "woke" vibe. Silent Hill 2, for example, is "woke," hence it was faux-review-bombed on Wikipedia.

Aloy having peach fuzz in Horizon: Forbidden West is "woke." Abby being ripped after years of surviving an apocalyptic wasteland in The Last of Us Part II is "woke." Having a chin that is not pointy is "woke." Being able to indicate preferred pronouns in Starfield is "woke."

If what is "wrong" is so apparent to this crowd, and if they are the self-proclaimed silent majority, one wonders why they seem unable to sit down and put together a good game with the seemingly infinite pool of wisdom and game-dev talent.

The brave players who have an issue with games moving on with the times need to say what (or who) they dislike without hiding it under vibes-based terms or quit arguing and trolling Wikipedia pages. Much like in real life, that peach fuzz is here to stay, which is good.

Posted: Oct 11, 2024 11:21 am
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/silent-hill-2-remake-wikipedia-review-fight/