Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

This game wasn't what I expected. In the back of my mind I'd heard it was a retread of the original Silent Hill but I don't think I'd ever fully interrogated what that meant before I started playing.

I played my Wii copy of this on my Wii U.

I suppose I should cover the basics of this game before I get into some nitty-gritty almost-spoiler territory. The game is effectively divided into three kinds of sequences (four if you count cutscenes as their own thing): exploration sequences set in ordinary locations, chase sequences set in a nightmarish frozen over world, and first-person sessions with a psychiatrist.

The exploration sequences are enjoyable. They're pretty standard Silent Hill; you walk around an abandoned environment with your flashlight and do some light puzzle solving to figure out a way forward. There's radio static, but here it's used to signal when you're close to a "memory"; a brief audio or text snippet of some event that happened in that location. These are pretty mundane snapshots but they build on previous "memories" and help flesh out the town. You have a cell phone that you can use to listen to or read these, and you can also take pictures or call phone numbers you find out in the world. The game doesn't pause when you pull your phone out, which is neat in theory, but it becomes annoying in the next bit I'll discuss.

There are chase sequences and these are... less enjoyable. Here, you hear scary music start to play and freaky fleshy monster things start pursuing you. You need to run to an exit or waypoint but, because you can't check your map easily when enemies are nearby, it's incredibly easy to get lost. To help alleviate this all interactables glow blue during these sequences (like Faith's Runner Vision in Mirror's Edge) but without a clear idea of which direction you need to head it can still get frustrating fast.

The third pillar of this game is its one-on-ones with a psychologist (therapist? psychiatrist? some sorta doctor). These play out so much like the Peter Stormare bits of Until Dawn that I have to imagine this game was an inspiration for that. In these sessions you'll usually need to complete some sort of task (arrange these figures from most to least guilty, assign Rorschach tests to one of two categories, color in this drawing of a house, etc.) and the game, in some way or another, may adapt to how you answered those questions. It can be as straightforward as seeing a real house that matches the one you colored in, or it can be more complicated (which dialogue you'll hear in memories and even character and enemy designs can change based on how you answer these questions, and also how you play the game, apparently).

With all that out of the way, I suppose I should talk about how this relates to Silent Hill 1. In the absolute broadest strokes, it's kind of a retelling of the first game. You play as Harry Mason, a man who has a car crash on the outskirts of Silent Hill and who roams the streets of the town looking for his young daughter Cheryl. You'll meet a number of characters including a nurse named Lisa, a cop named Cybil, and a mysterious woman named Dahlia. You'll visit Silent Hill's apartments, hospital, amusement park, and docks. The rough arc of the story in a sense is the same as Silent Hill 1.

They've even got the spooky staircase.

The actual content of that story, though, and the roles its characters play is significantly different. This game is ultimately a different kind of story to the other Silent Hill games. It's less of a horror, generally speaking, and more of a thriller, if that distinction makes any sense.

That shift away from the straight horror of the others translates to the gameplay as well. Without the persistent threat of combat the atmosphere can be spooky and tense, sure, but until the world freezes over you know you're safe from jumpscares and monsters. I get why they wanted to make a Silent Hill game without combat because the combat is generally one of the weakest things about these games so the idea, in theory, is good, it's just that the execution was imperfect. There are still tense sequences interspersed with slower exploration bits, but the chase scenes generally have hard start and stop points that make it easy for you to feel "safe" when you're outside of one of those sequences.

There wasn't a results or clear screen at the end, so instead I'll leave you with some of what the game had to say about "the patient" at the end, based on how I played the game. According to my Wii menu I played for 6 hours and 56 minutes.

The story is solid, if a bit of a departure from the rest of the series, and the music and atmosphere are still great, so even though the chase sequences ultimately didn't work for me I ended up liking this game a decent amount.