Developer Climax Studios calls Silent Hill: Shattered Memories a “re-imagining” of the original Silent Hill, but that’s a bit disingenuous. The only thing that ties this game to Silent Hill, the series or the game, are the characters’ names, a few of the location names, and the fact that you start out by searching for your daughter. Otherwise, Shattered Memories could have been set anywhere, and called “Icy Ghost Journey.” It’s a good-looking game, and it makes great use of the Wii Remote, but it’s not scary or challenging enough to make a real, lasting impression.

The game is very short, which speaks more to excellent pacing and a streamlined approach rather than a lack of gameplay. My first playthrough didn’t take more than six hours, and I appreciate how Shattered Memories abandons fetch quests (a staple of other Silent Hill games). But the few puzzles the game contains are childishly simple. Keys are always “hidden” practically in plain sight right next to their respective doors, and the answers to the rudimentary puzzles you find are clearly spelled out in text messages and voicemails you receive on your in-game cell phone. The game could have done something at least mildly difficult that didn’t break with the world’s setting.

Challenging puzzles aren’t the only thing missing from Shattered Memories though; the game also completely eschews combat. Danger is contained to times when you enter a frigid “other” world — a cool effect where ice inches over the landscape, covering and subtly warping everything it touches. The nightmares you face in this twisted place look like the freakish ghouls of past Silent Hill games, but this time around you can’t fight back. That actually makes sense — it always seemed weird that anything physical could harm the ghoulish denizens of Silent Hill’s underbelly. However, they can still attack you. Your only defense is to shake them off and keep running away, and that’s where the game hits its weakest point.

Throwing enemies off when they jump on you involves jerking your remote and Nunchuk as if you were actually trying to cast the them off of you. But it usually takes several throws to get even one enemy tossed, and they gang up and surround you very quickly. Pair that with the fact that it’s too easy to get lost in the game’s frozen, nightmare sections, and it just sets you up to die over and over again, in frustrating succession, until you’ve learned the path the game wants you to take. You have a useless map that doesn’t show you the inside of any building, nor impassible routes. Plus, when you have the map pulled up, you can only walk, and not run, at the same time (unless you let it fill the whole screen, in which case you can’t move at all), and putting it away takes a few seconds too long. This ensures you won’t have time to check where you’re going when you most need it. These areas didn’t have to be strictly linear, but it would have made me feel a lot better if I had some way of knowing where to go, instead of blindly running in circles.

You quickly learn that the only times you’re in danger are these nightmare levels when the world’s encased in ice. While that provides you with plenty of time to explore unhindered, it also makes you feel pretty safe most of the time. You might see an occasional creepy shadow, or the wisp of a person who only appears when you take their picture, but when there’s no chance of harm befalling you, what’s there to be afraid of?

Despite these frustrations, after finishing the game once I was still eager to jump back into the world and find out just how much my psychological profile changes the game. From the very start, the game is intercut with a therapist who asks you questions about your personality, the answers to which affect different parts of the game (like how other characters respond to you, what they’re wearing, and which buildings you can access). My second time through the game, I took the opposite tack in every way… and found out the game doesn’t significantly change. I want to point out that the voice actors do a wonderful job with their characters, and even the slightly altered lines read just as convincingly on second hearing. But by the time I reached my slightly different ending, I didn’t feel any more satisfied (nor less confused) than I did the first time.

The sexuality in the game is also strangely overt. Your counselor who dominates the game’s frame story constantly asks about it and you see ghosts killed in the throes of autoerotic asphyxiation. I don’t mind the content, but I don’t understand the context. And it’s even stranger when it refers to characters the game has never introduced. While Harry seems to be the focus of most of the game’s memories, you’ll also get texts from Steve and Michelle, but what connection they have to you and your journey is woefully unexamined, even when you take the time to delve into the game’s dark nooks and crannies.

Altogether, Shattered Memories presents something that will drive away Silent Hill veterans, who could care less about the plot that completely redefines what Silent Hill is, while newcomers will find a confusing, muddled tale with frustrating chase sequences. It’s praiseworthy that Climax tried to take the franchise in a new direction and created such a beautiful world, but Shattered Memories’ faults stand out too starkly. If the developer had tried to keep anything from Silent Hill, they should have ditched the faux plot relationship to past games and gone after what makes Silent Hill truly unique: the psychological scares.