Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Review
By Matt Keil – Posted Dec 08, 2009

While it started strong with a trifecta of three of the best horror games ever made, the Silent Hill series has struggled to find its footing in recent years. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is not that game, but at the very least is an interesting use of the series concept in conjunction with the gimmicks offered by the Wiimote.

The Pros

* Flashlight mechanic works well
* Psychoanalysis framing device cleverly implemented
* Changing locations/characters offers replayability

The Cons

* Chase sequences repetitive and pointless
* Very short playtime
* Wonky shadows in places
* Really no reason to be called a “reimagining” of the original
* Extremely simplistic puzzles

While it started strong with a trifecta of three of the best horror games ever made, the Silent Hill series has struggled to find its footing in recent years. The abysmal Silent Hill 4: The Room gave way to the better-but-still-sub-par Silent Hill: Origins and Silent Hill: Homecoming, and fans have patiently waited for the true return to form the series needs so badly. I am sorry to report that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is not that game, but at the very least it’s an interesting use of the series concept in conjunction with the gimmicks provided by the Wiimote.

Shattered Memories is touted as a “reimagining” of the original game, and inasmuch as it follows a guy named Harry Mason looking for his daughter Cheryl in the town of Silent Hill, it is. Beyond that, the story bears very little resemblance to the first Silent Hill, aside from some characters with the same names and occupations milling about. A cop named Cybil Bennett makes an appearance, but you’d never confuse her with the leather-clad hardass of the first game. A nurse named Lisa has an entirely different personality and character arc than the confused — and possibly long-dead — character with the same name in Silent Hill.

Tell Me About Your Mother

The characters are the same, but different…or are they? The most notable hook in Shattered Memories is the psychologist who confronts you in the first-person framing device. The action of the game involving Harry seems to be the recollections of a patient sitting in a shrink’s office, played by you. Over the course of the story, the psychologist has you complete simple personality tests that conform to the Briggs-Meyers model, the outcomes of which can alter the course of the game in minor ways. You may run into drastically different versions of Cybil, or maybe you’ll end up going through a greeting card shop instead of a fashion boutique. Perhaps a certain combination of answers and behaviors in the game would result in a Lisa very similar to her counterpart in the first game.

It’s an interesting way to change up the action, and adds a compelling reason to play the game a second time, if only to see what someone who gives answers opposite of yours would have encountered. Replay value is also very important due to the fact that the game can be finished in five to six hours. It wasn’t especially how answers given related to changes in the game and a few replays of certain sections resulted in dissimilar paths even without different input from the psych tests. Still, it’s unique, and keeps you guessing as to the nature of the events in Harry’s portion of the game. To Shattered Memories’s credit, the psych profile it drew up at the end credits for me was strikingly accurate.

So My Only Option Is “Or Flight”?

The other major change to the usual formula is the complete elimination of combat. Harry has no weapons, no health items and no way to defend himself outside of running away and lighting the occasional flare. He has his flashlight and his cell phone and that’s it. The phone serves as a handy map device as well as a story conduit, as finding certain locations and taking pictures of phantom people on the phone will unlock messages that fill in parts of the story. The only enemies in the game are weird skinless child-creatures that shriek and gibber as they pursue Harry through the Dark World, this time rendered as an icebound wasteland rather than the usual rust-covered industrial hell. If they catch Harry, they’ll jump on him, and you’ll have to shake the controller in the correct direction to throw them off. Get snagged enough times and Harry will go down, forcing you to redo the section.

These chase sequences offer very little in the way of compelling gameplay. You’re mostly just trying to run to a predetermined location on the map before you get hit with too many skinless children. It’s not particularly scary or tense, and your primary foe is actually the maze-like map design coupled with the fact that Harry walks like he’s out for a Sunday stroll as soon as he pulls out his cell phone to check the map. The reset after death means there’s no real penalty for running around to scout the area, dying, then beelining to the exit on your second try. It’s hard to feel any terror when there’s nothing at stake.

To make the game more enjoyable, it may have been a wiser idea to eliminate combat and the chase sequences completely, because the exploration elements of the game are much more successful. The path through Harry’s troubles is linear, but the use of the Wiimote to directly control the movement of his flashlight is an inspired touch. The main character’s light source has always been a key element of Silent Hill, and turning it into the primary game tool makes for a satisfying way of interacting with the world. The Wii isn’t quite powerful enough to fully render shadows particularly well, as many freestanding objects project weird floating shadows that seem to hang in midair in a very unnatural manner. It could be argued that the town of Silent Hill is just weird like that, but it definitely looks more like a mistake or a technical limitation more than an artistic choice.

Puzzles, long considered he hallmark of Silent Hill’s cerebral side, have been horribly neutered in Shattered Memories. A surprising number of them consist of finding the key to a locked door, and often the key is less than ten feet from the door. In one instance the location of the key is actually written on a note posted on the locked door. It runs the gamut from silly to insulting and every one of them involves some kind of gimmicky Wii remote motion. There are one or two clever ones, mostly incorporating the cell phone, but anyone hoping to be challenged by Shattered Memories’s puzzles will be sorely disappointed.

It’s curious that Konami felt compelled to make Silent Hill: Shattered Memories a “reimagining” of the original game. So little of it is connected to the first title in the series that it seems like it would have been far more creatively liberating to simply tell a story about brand new characters. This would have freed the game from the need to pay homage to the original 1999 characters instead of having them enter and exit the narrative with nothing to relate them to their predecessors but nomenclature.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories isn’t a disaster so much as a disappointment, mainly in the “lost potential” sense. There’s the kernel of a interesting story here, and one much more psychologically-focused than most of the other games in the series. This could have been the most interesting character study in a Silent Hill game since the masterpiece that was Silent Hill 2, but it just never gets there and is constantly dragged down by gimmickry in the same way Harry is harangued by the shrieking skinless children in so many filler chase sequences.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Review
Wii Review by Kristan Reed

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories wants to get to know you. Do you make friends easily? Do you work best to a plan or schedule? Have you ever been unfaithful? Have you ever used role-play during sex? Are you a private person? Do you prefer friends over family?

Placed in an analyst’s chair, the game begins with the first of many such psychological evaluations. There’s no ‘wrong answer’ as such, but part of the fun in this intriguing re-imagining of the original 1999 Silent Hill is that the experience is designed to shape itself around the kind of person – and therefore player – that you are. Being a misanthropic loner, of course, the resident shrink had a field day with me, but I guess that’s the point.

Controlled through the eyes of the subject, you can either sit and focus intently on the thoughts and demands of the stern-faced evaluator, or point the Wiimote elsewhere, avert your gaze and let your eyes wander around his wood-panelled office. Eventually the headmasterly figure gives you your next test. You tick the appropriate box, grab pictures and place them in the desired location, or simply respond with a nod or a shake of the head by moving the Wiimote.

Then it’s onto the action, and the almost-immediate realisation that Shattered Memories is, by some margin, the most creative and engaging game to emerge in Konami’s horror series since the perversely unsettling Silent Hill 3 back in 2003. Indeed, by the end of it, you’re left mulling over the highlights of one of the most compelling and sure-footed offerings the genre has ever seen.

The first thing to stress is that Shattered Memories is a whole lot more than a remake. While it retains some of the main characters and basic premise, developer Climax has changed so much along the way that calling it a ‘re-imagining’ is more in line with the end result. Gone is the obsessive-compulsive map-checking and handle-turning trudge as you establish a route through festering, dimly-lit corridors in abandoned asylums and schools. Gone is the hapless and ungainly combat, and out goes the need to check every empty room in the search of anything not nailed down too. Gone, in short, is all the tedious stuff.

As with the seminal original, the game focuses on Harry Mason’s desperate search for his young daughter, Cheryl. Having crashed his car one night on an icy road on the outskirts of Silent Hill, he wakes up in a blind panic to discover her missing. Grabbing a torch, he ventures out into the snowy night, scaling fences, checking nearby buildings for clues to her whereabouts and hollering her name at the top of his lungs.

Holding the Wiimote like a torch, you point the beam around the gloomy environment, and move with the nunchuk stick, holding Z to run. Obstacles are scaled by simply going up to them, while doors can be opened by moving to them and pressing A. There’s a satisfying intuitiveness to basic movement, making the environment all the more interesting to roam around.

The tactile nature of the puzzle design works particularly well on the Wiimote, too. Initially it tasks players with manipulating objects, lifting latches and pulling locks back, but you’re soon asked to be more imaginative. Discarded empty drinks cans can be picked up, rotated and shaken. With a bit of patient manipulation, eventually your search yields a key rattling around in one of them, and simply tipping it upside down and shaking allows it to drop out. As simple as that example is, it demonstrates thoughtful use of the Wii’s controller, which we so rarely see.

But these initial good ideas are nothing compared to some of the excellent ones implemented as the game progresses. After meeting police officer Cybil Bennett for the first time, you get a phone, revealing a whole array of new actions including taking photos, retrieving voicemails, texts, making calls and even using a GPS map. As you wander around, strange feedback noises emanate from the Wiimote, and when you eventually reach the source of the static a voicemail pops up and you hold the Wiimote speaker to your ear like a real phone to hear the messages – most of which add to the generally tragic back-story, fleshing out the previous inhabitants of these deserted locations.

Sometimes, calls and messages come in out of the blue from Cybil, or even Cheryl as the search intensifies, and the role of the phone during your adventures grows as you go along. Elsewhere, you can also use the camera function of the phone to take snaps of ghostly ‘apparitions’, which fully reveal their origins once captured, both in terms of the image captured and accompanying voice message chillingly transmitted to the handset.

Other interesting narrative devices allow players to zoom in and read posters, pictures and any items of interest at their leisure, rather than picking up discarded notes and journal fragments in traditional fashion. More often than not, Harry also delivers his thoughts on these items, all of which infuse the environment with a credible sense of place. Any phone numbers you come across in the game can also be called up – mostly just to add a bit of intrigue to the game, but sometimes to help you solve specific puzzles. The phone implementation really is fantastic, and quickly becomes an integral ingredient in the game’s appeal.

A Silent Hill game wouldn’t be complete without the usual dosage of nightmarish apparitions and otherworldly scares, of course, and Shattered Memories delivers on that front too. This time around, rather than turning the world to filth and rust, the developer literally freezes the walls around Harry, who has to rush through a mazelike environment dodging faceless ghosts until he finds a predefined exit.

With no weapons to wield, one option is to try and tip bookshelves and statues into the path of pursuing enemies to slow them down, or occasionally you might find the odd flare lying around to help ward off their attentions. Alternatively, you can simply hide from the monsters and wait until they’ve wandered off elsewhere, but for the most part you’ll be left with no choice but to throw them off in the appropriate direction by hurling your Wiimote and nunchuk.

Although it doesn’t feel like it when you’re caught in a blizzard of panic, throwing them off is also intuitive. If they come at you from the front, throwing the controller in a forward motion flings them off, while the opposite is true if they climb on your back. As soon as the penny drops, a lot of the stress of these nightmare sequences dissipates and you can focus on things like checking the waypoint on the map, or charging forwards in search of an exit. To help make the process of barrelling along at top speed easier, the game allows you to move through a door in one swift motion as long as you’re running and holding forward at the same time.

Then again, that’s of limited help if you get lost, which you easily can. You can also feel like you’re going around in circles. Sometimes this is because you are going around in circles, with environments designed to be disorientating and make you double back on yourself if you just keep going in a straight line, and it’s clearly meant to heighten the sense of panic, but it’s also potentially frustrating if the process continues without success, and many players are likely to find these sequences frustrating and protracted.

More often that not, though, simple trial and error wins the day, and before long you’ll find yourself faced with a mid-level puzzle to solve too. In common with most of the game’s tasks, these are some of the most enjoyable bits of Shattered Memories, designed to make you feel quite clever in the process of solving them. Beyond these, the nightmare sequence continues for a few more minutes before you emerge to the relative safety of ‘normality’.

What actually is normal is increasingly difficult to fathom as you progress. New characters appear in the oddest of circumstances, and it’s not ever clear whether any of this is actually happening. In between the madness, the game switches back to the relative calm of the analyst’s couch as you face another round of probing exercises. Some come across as trivial and innocuous, but at some point you realise that your responses have a subtle bearing on how the game plays out too. Characters may respond differently to you, or their clothes and the decor of their house may reflect the results of a colouring-in test.

As intriguing as these tests are, and as satisfying as the exploration and puzzling can be, some of the real standout moments are reserved for one-off interactive sequences where, for example, you find yourself trapped underwater in a sinking car, desperately fighting for survival using only quick thinking and motion controls. The panic this inspires is almost unparalleled, and even casual observers reported feeling unsettled as I grappled furiously with the controls. Being trapped in a sinking car appears to be a unifying nightmare.

Another thing to celebrate throughout Shattered Memories is the pacing. What it lacks in terms of length it more than makes up for in how well it holds your interest. By switching regularly between analysis, puzzle exploration, one-off set-pieces and nightmarish escape sequences, nothing ever outstays its welcome. As soon as you’ve seen enough of one particular location, you’re off to the next, and, crucially, without any of the tedious backtracking and laborious map-checking that characterised all previous entrants in the series.

Shattered Memories also pushes the technical capabilities of the Wii to the max. One thing Silent Hill was particularly good at in its heyday was striking facial detail, and Climax has evidently worked hard to come up with techniques that recapture that style. At first glance during the psychological profiling phase you might have trouble believing it’s a Wii release, and it’s a standard that’s maintained once you start wandering the snow-ridden world outside.

The flashlight effect is also mightily impressive, as well as being exceptionally intuitive to control via the Wiimote. Comparisons to Alan Wake spring to mind as you roam the detailed, gloomy environments admiring real-time shadows and recoiling from the menacing atmospherics. The importance of the audio conjured by Akira Yamaoka cannot be overstated, either, and if it does prove to be his swansong it will be a worthy one, demonstrating an understanding of exactly what’s required to build tension. Excellent voice work and characterisation back this up, with Climax doing a fine job of creating a credible cast that does justice to the series.

It has been a rocky road getting Silent Hill back on track after the unexplained decision to remove development duties from the original Team Silent, but with Shattered Memories, Climax has found its feet in some style. Packed with inventive ideas and one engaging sequence after another, it’s a spirited, poignant and unsettling game that not only delivers a long-overduereturn to form, but reinvigorates horror adventures in the process.

9/10