Trees Turn to Black Blobs After Silent Hill 2 Patch

Patch 1.07 for Silent Hill 2 Remake was supposed to make the game look better. Instead, trees around the town of Silent Hill now render as featureless black blobs, room corners collapse into pitch-black voids, and character models exhibit ghosting on their hair and faces. The update, which dropped last week on PS5 and PS5 Pro, promised improved fog rendering, reduced shadow flickering, and boosted overall image quality. What it delivered, at least in Performance Mode, is a game that looks actively worse than it did before the patch.

Konami acknowledged the problems on X/Twitter, posting a brief statement:

We would like to confirm that we are aware of the recent issues affecting Performance Mode on PS5 and PS5 Pro in SILENT HILL 2 following Patch 1.07. Our team is currently investigating these issues and looking into potential solutions. Thank you for your patience and understanding. We'll share more information as soon as it becomes available.

No timeline for a fix. No specifics on what went wrong. Just "investigating" and "potential solutions." Players who want a workaround right now can switch to Quality Mode, which caps the frame rate at 30fps and appears unaffected. For anyone who bought a PS5 Pro partly to run games like this at higher frame rates, being told to drop back to 30fps is not exactly a satisfying answer.

Crushed Blacks, Cursed Foliage

The core issue is what's known as crushed blacks: darker areas become so uniformly dark that all detail disappears. Branches, leaves, texture on walls, anything in shadow just gets swallowed. Players on Reddit described the effect as making foliage look "cursed," while others pointed out that shadow strobing, one of the things the patch was meant to reduce, has actually gotten worse. One commenter asked the question I keep coming back to: "How on earth did this pass QA?"

It's a fair question, and it's not the first time anyone has had to ask it about this game's PS5 Pro performance. Silent Hill 2 Remake's PS5 Pro support has been troubled since the console launched. Digital Foundry flagged image stability issues and a problematic PSSR upscaling implementation at the time, and the problems persisted long enough that fans assumed Bloober Team had simply given up on fixing them. The studio eventually confirmed work was ongoing, but only after being directly asked by press.

Konami and Bloober Team eventually swapped out PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution entirely in favour of Temporal Super Resolution. Patch 1.07 was supposed to be the next step forward from that transition. Instead, it's a step sideways into a dark room where you can't see the walls.

I keep thinking about the pattern here. This is a game that scored a 94% recommendation rate on OpenCritic, crossed six million players by last May, and earned near-universal praise for its art direction and atmosphere. The base game is excellent. But nearly two years after launch, the PS5 Pro version still can't go more than a few months without a patch introducing new visual problems. Every fix seems to break something else, and each time the response is the same vague acknowledgement with no timeline attached.

PC players appear unaffected by this particular issue, and the base PS5 in Quality Mode seems fine. But if you're running Performance Mode on either PS5 model, you're stuck waiting. Silent Hill: Townfall launches September 23 on PC and PS5, giving the franchise another shot at momentum. Konami would do well to have this sorted before then, because asking players to get excited about a new Silent Hill game while the last one's trees are rendering as ink blots is a tough sell.