Silent Hill 2's new patch fixes its last patch in possible meta commentary on recursive horror
Remember the Silent Hill 2 remake's 1.04 patch? The one that nerfed James' wide array of wizardly powers like matter-phasing and teleportation? Well, it turns out that in addition to severing our protagonist's connection to the arcane, it also severed some players' ability to, ah, complete Silent Hill 2. It introduced a bug that afflicted players who loaded a save in the Labyrinth area that would essentially block off further progression.
Which is not great. Fortunately, Bloober Team was pretty quick on the draw: The studio has released a new hotfix for the game just a few days later. Patch 1.05 is out now, and has "implemented a fix by adding a safeguard that forces proper activation of the necessary triggers" for anyone loading up a save in the Labyrinth, "ensuring smooth progression moving forward."
But also, you'll now be able to sync that save across multiple devices: Your Steam Decks, desktops, laptops, and whatever else you can install Steam on. Bloober has flipped on the Steam Cloud switch, meaning your saves will now port across devices. Notionally, that 1.04 patch improved the game's performance on Deck, where the game was pretty much unplayable when I booted it up at launch. That might make the feature a bit more immediately useful to those of us who own Valve's portable.
Then again, having just fired up the game on my own Deck, I think SH2 might need a few more patches before I feel comfortable calling it 'playable' on the handheld.
Anyway, I'm glad to see Bloober responding promptly to issues with the game. The Silent Hill 2 remake has gone down a lot better than even I—who had a good time with a preview—would have expected. In PCG's Silent Hill 2 review, Kerry Brunskill called it a "fun but flawed take on a flawless gem," scoring it 78%. Of course, that was before Bloober patched out the teleporting. Maybe it'd be higher now. Or lower? Tough to say.