Radical Remakes That Offer a New Interpretation of Familiar Material

Harry Mason is still looking for his missing daughter, but the Wii retelling of Silent Hill gives that search a different rhythm. The game uses your answers in therapy and the way you explore to change things such as characters' appearance and behavior. When the town turns hostile, Harry has to get away. How you look for answers matters as much as what you find.

The 2016 PS4 game hands the story of Ratchet and Clank's first meeting to Captain Qwark. You're playing the version he tells, which makes his view of the partnership part of the joke. The retelling also rebuilds the route through the adventure with new boss fights and flight sequences.

Atari's 1982 game sends you into a dark mansion to collect three pieces of an urn, lighting matches to see what you're doing. Orbit Studio keeps the urn hunt and rebuilds the house as an isometric stealth game. The rooms and enemy placements change between runs, so recognizing a room only gets you so far when you need a safe way through it.

This return to Pokémon Yellow sets wild Pokémon loose where you can see them on the map. For most catches you aim and time a throw instead of wearing the Pokémon down in battle. The hills, caves, and routes of Kanto feel different when you can decide which creatures to approach before an encounter starts.

The PSP remake lets you revisit decisions on two scales. The Chariot Tarot rewinds part of a fight so you can try a different move. The World Tarot later lets you return to a point in the story with your current party and see where a different decision takes you. It makes the branching history of the original something you can explore in a single save.

The 1992 game and the 2024 reimagining both take you to Derceto with Emily Hartwood or Edward Carnby. This version expands the mansion and uses it to tell a new story drawing on the original trilogy, with different scenes depending on whose side you play. The familiar house gives returning players a point of reference for a mystery they haven't solved before.

The original ActRaiser divided its time between side-scrolling action and growing settlements from above. Renaissance makes defending those settlements a strategy game in its own right. Placing forts and deciding when to use miracles during real-time raids gives you a reason to think ahead about the land you've been helping villagers build on.

Capcom's PSP version of the first Mega Man pulls the old stages apart and builds a new arrangement, with two additional bosses. You can also play as the boss robots, whose individual moves change what a jump or obstacle asks of you. A mode based on the original layouts makes it easy to see how much the remake has changed.

Sega's 2013 version brings back the Genesis game's trip through Mizrabel's castle and lets Mickey move into the depth of some stages. In stretches of the adventure you still read the jumps in profile. When the game opens up into three dimensions, you have to judge where platforms and obstacles sit in the room as well as how far away they are.