Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
Score: 77% ESRB: Mature Publisher: Konami Developer: Climax Entertainment Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 Genre: Survival Horror/ Adventure
Graphics & Sound: I have a strange relationship with the Silent Hill series in general. On the one hand, I love the atmosphere and mature storytelling that each game uses, but on the other hand, it always feels like an unfinished mess to play. Taking a strange, new risk, the people at Konami decided the next entry should be on a totally unique system, the Wii. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is the first time a Nintendo console has seen the horrors of the foggy town, and its first outing clearly establishes two things: it is unconventional and always intriguing. To accurately capture the mood and feel of an abandoned mining town, veteran composer Akira Yamaoka returns and quite honestly delivers his best work to date. A clever mix of silence, chaos, and eerie tones genuinely gets under you skin and starts making you ask why you decided to play in the dark. The voice acting is okay too, but the real character is the town and the only way it communicates is with white noise, loud doors slamming, or guttural wails of demons and nightmarish creatures. So it is a shame that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories can't keep up that momentum with its visuals. Silent Hill certainly has an art style that is consistent in each release, and that is still present here. The problem is that there isn't enough attention to detail outside of set pieces. Cutscenes and pre-rendered screens of interactive objects like snow globes and jackets look fine, but they exist in the best light possible. When main character, Harry Mason, is trekking around town, it never looks bad, but it isn't remarkable either. A bland hallway followed by a jagged, powder white playground eventually leaves a bad taste, especially after leaving several rooms filled with little details like honeymoon photos and children's drawings. It is never to a point where it breaks the illusions because the story and atmosphere always make up for it, but it seems like it was lower on their list of priorities than it should have been.
Gameplay: Instead of creating a new story from scratch, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories decided to re-imagine an older story with a fresh perspective. Harry Mason, protagonist from the original Silent Hill game, has crashed his car outside of the small, winter town of Silent Hill. He wakes up from the crash still in his car, but his daughter is missing. Harry braves the cold, and the horrors of the creepiest town in America to search for his daughter. The entire adventure is told through the perspective of Harry's recollections during a trip to his therapist. The shrink, Dr. Kaufman, asks Harry to re-live his time in the town and the rest of the game is split into time spent in therapy sessions and inside Harry's memories. This divide is the most fascinating thing Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has going for it. The best moments of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories are the times when the game profiles you, the player, and adapts the game around your behaviors. When you insert the disc, a disclaimer pops up warning of the psychological effects that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories can have. During the therapy sessions, Dr. Kaufman issues short analysis tests. Your answers to these tests affect many different aspects of your experience with the game, such as enemy and creature design, dialogue sequences, and even entirely different routes that you take through the town. Some tests ask about sexual history and past relationships, while others test your perception of the world, like when it asks you to separate photos of people who are dead and people who are sleeping. These psychological profiles go hand-in-hand with the Silent Hill's tradition of mental gameplay and getting inside the main character's head, except this time the main character is you! Each entry into the series has always favored a more personal and disturbing sense of connection to the player. In Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Harry wanders around town solving clever puzzles and uncovering mysteries while occasionally coming across clues and messages left behind from some seriously messed up situations. From the eerie remnants of a camping trip gone horribly wrong or the abandoned car from a terrible prom night, every set piece in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is incredibly unsettling and has a serious commitment to "mature" story-telling. It actually works too. Often, the player enters a first-person perspective while Harry is talking to different characters, including his doctor. While speaking to different characters, the aforementioned profiling system tracks if you look people in the eyes, search around the room, stare at female character's cleavage, etc. The effect is definitely immersive and the intense scenes with Harry inside cars are the ones that will stick with you well after the game is over. Unfortunately for Shattered Memories, as great as the new story-telling techniques are, it still has to abide by the other tradition of Silent Hill, which is awkward and terrible combat. During Harry's memories, he regularly slips into nightmares and the entire town becomes encased in thick ice and shapeless monsters chase Harry around town. The only way Harry can escape the nightmare is to find the level exit which is usually a puzzle of its own. While being chased, he has no way to defend himself other than throwing the creatures off of his back or throwing obstacles in their path to slow them down. It really is a shame, because as impressed as I was with story elements, it always felt like a chore actually playing the game in order to get more of it. Once again using the profiling system, the enemies in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories can have drastically different appearances and even behaviors depending on your psychological profile. Some monsters will be more aggressive if you have a confrontational personality, while others will attack in groups if you have unresolved family issues. It is interesting to see how many permutations of the creatures you can have in one playthrough, but the result is always the same; an awkward exercise in Wii-mote waggling until the horde of monsters gets the best of you.
Difficulty: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is probably the shortest game in the Silent Hill series. Depending on how thorough of a player you are, the playtime is around six to eight hours. Aside from the nightmare sequences, Shattered Memories is essentially an adventure game. There is always a sense of progress because it keeps funneling you forward to the next story point. The only problem is that the pacing becomes repetitious and predictable. The checkpoint system is good, but there is not an auto-save feature at all, so be sure to save often or risk losing all of your unique progress. I only mention manually saving because during my personal game, an annoying gameplay bug sealed me inside of a room without any way of interacting with the environment. Because there was no auto-save, I was forced to reload the last save, which was three hours prior. Although it is partly my fault, it is always frustrating when a game doesn't cover your tracks when you become engrossed in its world.
Game Mechanics: Choosing the Wii as the debut for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was a wise decision. The unique control of the Wii-mote provides interesting ways for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories to present puzzles. With most interactive objects, such as locks, doors, and other small objects, the player extends the Wii-mote and presses (A) and (B) to "pinch" the objects and then twist the remote to turn locks the right way or shake keys from empty containers. These gimmicky puzzle sections are well-executed and there is enough variety to not make it feel old, but the best way Silent Hill: Shattered Memories makes use of the Wii-mote is its use of an in-game cell phone. Harry carries his cell phone everywhere. His incredibly versatile and small piece of tech becomes the most important pillar of the gameplay. Characters sometimes call Harry with updates of their condition, new routes to take, or most often just to freak him out. There is an option to have all of the incoming phone calls play through the speaker of the Wii-mote, which you will have to put next to your face in order to hear, which makes it that much creepier and unnerving, but ultimately really immersive. The most useful features of Harry's phone are the mini-map and the camera. The camera becomes a way for Harry to make quick notes of clues in the environment by taking pictures and the map is essential because it is certainly easy to get turned around during nightmares and the map becomes the only way to find level exits. Unfortunately, not every implementation of the Wii-mote is flawless. The majority of the game, Harry is lumbering through Silent Hill with his flashlight. The player moves Harry with the Nunchuck and points his direction with the Wii-mote which is acting as his flashlight. The navigation controls feel very similar to another Wii-exclusive, Metroid Prime 3 and aside from the first and third person perspectives, the aiming controls are almost interchangeable in their execution except that Silent Hill: Shattered Memories sometimes suffers from occasional Wii-mote recognition issues which will cause the Wii-mote to drop out and instantly make Harry spin in circles. When the cohesion of all the control elements works, it works remarkably well, but a little too often it becomes a struggle and contradicts what Silent Hill does best, which is absorbing you into its world. Conceptually, this is a far better game than 2008's Silent Hill: Homecoming, but the technical limitations and awkward controls force it back into tradition with the rest of the Silent Hill lineup. There are definitely some good ideas and clever tricks that more games need to see and use, but Silent Hill: Shattered Memories should have traded a little more on substance over style to make it more fun. If you beat it, you are left with good memories, but like Harry's psyche, these memories are faded and warped beyond reality.
-HanChi, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Hanchey
Related Links: Game Vortex's Review of Silent Hill: Homecoming PlayStation Illustrated's Review of Silent Hill PlayStation Illustrated's Review of Silent Hill 2 PlayStation Illustrated's Review of Silent Hill 3 PlayStation Illustrated's Review of Silent Hill 4
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