Review: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
Written By Addam Kearney

There are a rare few games out there which interest me, yet I have no desire to play them. This is usually due to the way that the game itself plays. The single best example of this is the Silent Hill series. For me, Silent Hill was always something interesting from a story perspective. A town that represented psychological torment was clearly one of the most brilliant ideas to come into the genre of survival horror.

Yet after the couple of hours I spent playing Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 4, I was immediately turned off by them. Combat was frustrating and the story seemed fairly convoluted. Even after the release of Silent Hill: Origins, I had little desire to jump into the series.

So naturally, when I heard of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, I was fairly uninterested. A “Wii-imagining” of the original Silent Hill, Shattered Memories would just be another Silent Hill game that I didn’t play. Slowly, I began to see gameplay footage and, eventually, I was actually excited to try out this new game. How did my first venture into the demonic town fare?

Shattered Memories rids the Silent Hill series of much of its often confusing plot points and concentrates on telling a rich and unique story that is gripping until the end. The game starts with the protagonist, Harry Mason, awakening from a car crash. He finds that his daughter, who was travelling with him, is missing. He travels throughout the town of Silent Hill searching for her and interacting with a few other characters. Eventually, this reveals a much more intriguing truth about Harry and his family.

Between these sequences, players interact with a virtual “psychiatrist.” He will ask yes or no questions and perform psychological tests on the player. These responses will change the way that the game plays. For example, in one of these tests I was asked to use colored pencils to color in a house and a family on a sheet of paper. When I resumed play, I found myself at a house that was the color I drew, and the family there wore the same color shirts and pants that I drew. While it may not seem like much to the casual eye, these little details could, presumably, prolong replayability.

The choices you make can also have a dramatic impact on the characters in the world. My first playthrough, I met a nice female officer, who clearly wanted to help Harry. In subsequent playthrough, the officer was, for lack of a better term, Helga, She-Devil of the S.S. In other games, I might not even meet her until a later point.

Choices can also affect the world around Harry. In one game, I found a small Irish pub. In the next game, it was a sports bar. In one game, I might see a can of beer and in the next, I might see a can of cola. Small details like that really help to sell the idea that you should play the game multiple times.

The biggest difference that I found, however, was in the way that Harry interacted with the world. In my first run-through, Harry, while well intentioned, was a bit of a…well, there’s no other way to say it but, pervert. Every so often, I would examine something in the world and Harry would make a sexual comment about it. In other playthroughs, he would remain silent. In Shattered Memories, it’s the little details that make every game feel so unique.

After I finished the game, I took it upon myself to actually see what the ending for the original Silent Hill was like. While neither are what one would call “realistic” on any level, Shattered Memories seemed, at least to me, to be a much more understandable ending. Without spoiling anything, Shattered Memories leaves a lot of questions, but thankfully never indulges too much into insanity to leave players extremely confused.

All of that is good and well, but it’s the gameplay that was really interesting to me. The first thing you notice is how Harry moves in the world. You use the nunchuck to move forward and backward, and aim in the direction you want to go with the Wii-mote. You will simultaneously use the Wii-mote to aim your flashlight in dark areas.

There are parts of the game where you will enter into a first-person mode. These are usually followed by interesting conversations with the various characters in the world. I feel it’s important to note that, thankfully, the game never gets really tangled up in its plot at these moments. All the people who interact with Harry are fairly normal, and they never notice the strange things in the world. More than that, though, is that the characters are believable. Konami and developers Climax Group have taken a realistic turn of a fairly unrealistic world and made it believable, and for that they should be commended.

Most of the game plays similarly to a point-and-click adventure game. You will use the Wii-mote to grab objects and move them around to solve puzzles. Almost all of the challenges in the game require using some fairly clever thinking in order to find a way into the next room. It should be noted, though, that some of the puzzles aren’t as responsive as one would hope. In one case, I needed to get a phone number from shining light onto various objects to make their shadows take the form of numbers. I had all but one of the numbers figured out, but no matter how I moved one object, I could not get a correct shadow. I gave up and had to resort to guessing the final number.

Pressing the minus button will bring up Harry’s cell phone. From here, he can do any number of things. Obviously, he can make calls on it. He can call up most of the main cast of the game at almost any time. He can also use it to call up numbers he finds around the world on things like billboards, similar to The Darkness. One of the most interesting touches, though, is that whenever you make a call or answer one, you will hear the voice of the speaker through the Wii-mote speaker, in much the same way as was done in No More Heroes.

He can also take photos of ghostly apparitions, similar to Fatal Frame (though it should be noted that the ghosts don’t attack you as they do in that game). He can also bring up a map of the town, which I found to be crucial at times due to the game having no “hand-holding” whatsoever. All of it feels very organic and natural to the world.

All of this wouldn’t matter if the game’s combat was bad, though. Thankfully, Shattered Memories all but removes all of the combat in favor of a mechanic which has you running from danger. Every so often, the world will mutate into a frozen-hell version of Silent Hill. At this point, monsters will come out and chase you through the world. You learn that you can’t fight them, so you can only run away.

These sections will have you running though various corridors and having to choose the correct path out. You can throw objects in the way of the monsters or use flares to ward them off, but this is only a temporary solution. If you are jumped by them, you will have to fling your Wii-mote and nunchuck in the correct direction to throw them off. However, there were plenty of times where this just didn’t work as well as it should have. While I died only once in the entire game, I honestly feel it could have been prevented if the game had simply recognized my movements better.

In general, the gameplay can be a bit formulaic at times. You will solve a puzzle, enter a room, it will transform, you’ll run away, and then return to the therapist’s office. Though its formula does become predictable, the experience is short enough that it doesn’t feel too repetitive at any given time. In my five hours with the game, I barely noticed the trend, but when I did, it took quite a bit away from the game. I should also mention that, like every other Silent Hill game, this game features several different endings. While I got what would be considered the “good” ending, none of the endings are particularly positive. After seeing all of them, including the obligatory “UFO ending,” it felt like there was something missing, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

The sounds of the world also help build up a true unnerving feeling. There are points where there is no sound whatsoever, save for Harry’s footsteps as they thud on the wood floor. At other points, you almost feel like something is in the room, waiting for you, even when it’s not one of the sections in which you have to run away. Veteran Silent Hill soundtrack composer Akira Yamaoka returns in full form, providing truly compelling music to throw over the already unnerving world.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories doesn’t have me wanting to play any other Silent Hill game. All that I really want is for each of the other games to get this loving treatment. While not perfect, Shattered Memories was, for me, the only Silent Hill game that was truly compelling on all levels. It’s just a shame that the rest of the series can’t do the same for me.

Final Score: A-


source: Review: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories | 01/01/2010