The Silent Hill remake is real… but only because fans are making it

Silent Hill remake screenshot — Fans do what Konami don’t (pic: YouTube)

Konami still hasn’t announced a new Silent Hill but a team of fans are working on their own Unreal Engine 5 remake of the horror classic.

For years there have been rumours of a Silent Hill remaake and there’s still a reasonable chance an official one might happen, but if you can’t wait until pigs sprout wings then there is a new fan project on the way.

The group calling itself Codeless Games has already recreated the Midwich Elementary School building and has released a 10 minute gameplay demo that looks very impressive.

The camera seems a bit skittish but the graphics themselves are excellent, having been built with the state-of-the-art Unreal Engine 5. More importantly, the demo seems to recreate the unnerving atmosphere of the original – something even many of the sequels never did.

There’s no indication of when the remake might be finished and to be honest these sorts of projects do have a habit of fizzling out or, even more commonly, getting sent a cease & desist order from the original publisher.

That’s more than likely what will happen here, as rumours suggest that The Medium developer Bloober Team are working on an official remake.

If they are it’s a mystery as to why Konami hasn’t just announced it, but if Sony does have a second summer State of Play planned it could be that it’s being saved for that.

Silent Hill was released for the original PlayStation in 1999 and to this day remains one of the scariest survival horrors of all time, with its two sequels also being well regarded by fans of the genre.

None of the games were especially big hits though, despite inspiring two movie adaptations, and the series seemed to come to an unofficial end when Hideo Kojima’s plans to reboot the franchise was cancelled by Konami and he was spirited out of the company.

Nevertheless, rumours suggest that there are in fact multiple Silent Hill games currently in development, but why Konami has waited till now to go all-out on the franchise is a mystery – as is why they don’t just announce the games and put an end to all the speculation.