We should review the facts first: Angela Orosco is 19, she’s unhappy, and she has a knife.
Then Konami debuted the melancholic character in Silent Hill 2’s original 2001 release, these facts have been both true and disturbing. But developer Bloobers 2024 Silent Hill 2 remake imbues Angela with solemn dignity as well, a transformation that means more to me in a year when people were particularly weird about women in games.
For months, some Silent Hill fans and self-described gaming purists claimed it Bloober’s Angela looks too soft, too young, not pretty enough to feel the chasmic pain inside her. They preferred how Angela looked 23 years ago, when her face was serious and bloodless in one obvious demonstration of how broken trauma ages you.
To a certain extent, their position is understandable. Angela’s life has been a nightmare. Throughout Silent Hill 2, as Angela dips in and out of the game’s sea of fog, she gradually reveals the extent of the torment she has avoided. In one of protagonist James Sunderland’s earliest encounters with her, Angela is lying on the floor in front of a mirror, but is staring at her reflection in a smeared chef’s knife instead. She has not found her mother in Silent Hill, as she had intended, so she contemplates death.
“It’s easier to just run,” Angela tells James. “Besides, it’s what we deserve.”
Those ghostly lines, in Konami’s Silent Hill 2, are delivered with the incredulity that makes most of the voice acting in that game sound as uncanny as a birthday clown declaring it’s time for cake.
I’ve always felt that this childish acting combined with Angela’s incongruous matronly appearance turns her into a caricature, a passing thought of who a victim is. Inhibited and wrinkled, right?
These assumptions undermine the complexity of not only Angela’s story, but also the convoluted, confusing state of victimhood, especially when it comes to the sick boss fight with Abstract Daddy. Dad is a figure covered in stained cloth pressing against a less stained figure with his hands stuck through a bed frame, a demonic whisper of the sexual abuse Angela has suffered at home. In Konami’s game, this battle should be devastating, but Angela’s cartoonish persona contextualizes Abstract Daddy as an interchangeable boogeyman in a city full of them.
But in Bloober’s remake, the abstract dad boss fight is powerfully nauseating. That’s because in the time we spend with Angela leading up to it, we understand more clearly that life has unfairly made this teenager—still bright-eyed and in need of her mother—want to destroy herself. Voice actress Gianna Kiehl conveys this with her measured performance, which reveals the current of anger that uses Angela as a lightning rod, in addition to her repressed shame.
I was particularly moved by a moment near the end of the game — spoilers ahead — as Angela sits on a burning staircase and dismisses James with bitter misery.
“Even mom said that,” Angela says. “I deserved what happened. Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t deserve it.”
This is a painful moment, the kind that, when it happens to someone you know, makes you want to reach out and take them out to build a snowman. But no one comes after Angela – trapped behind a screen, objectified by some Silent Hill fans, pushed into a lonely existence by everyone.
Except me, I mean. While playing Bloober’s Silent Hill 2 remake, it felt like I met Angela where she was. Every time I met her, a part of me glowed with the warmth of recognition. Like Angela, I had no one to hold me while my parents slammed doors and pushed each other down the stairs. I was ashamed of the house I grew up in.
This year, as I worked through a personal loss, parts of my childhood bubbled back up like rubber ducks in the bathtub, reintroducing old issues I thought I had flushed away. I was always too scared to fall asleep as a child; this year I struggled again with insomnia. At the age of 10 I became convinced that I would be much better off if I died young; the same thoughts came back to me.
The Silent Hill 2 remake came out at the height of my anxiety, so I played it pessimistically, between crying fits. But once I got to know Bloober’s more believable Angela, I began to look forward to working through the game and, along with it, Angela’s angst. I became more willing to recognize the contradictions that I, like Angela, carry with me.
Living through abuse has made me both closer to my raw, pink inner child and more obsessed with death. I see it in the winter leaves, the aging scab on my scraped knee, the helplessness I wish I could bury.
But it’s complicated. Despite what popular video game controversies this year suggest, a female character doesn’t have to provide sexual fan service to be worthy or relatable. She just needs to be her own complex person. That’s why, when Bloober lets Angela walk up the flaming stairs with sober control, I—and so many other victims who understand Angela—feel recognized at play. But I’m not going to hell. I’ll be back.
Read our list over upcoming horror games for 2025 and beyond.
