Silent Hill: Book of Memories

Coming off the heels of the other stuff I've been playing, I can see why survival horror fans are so bitter about this time period. This sure doesn't feel like Silent Hill.

I played this on my Vita.

For some context as to what exactly this is, it's a Vita-exclusive dungeon crawler developed by WayForward, as odd as that sounds. The series has had some combat improvements and changes in the past but this is just... a weird direction for it to go. It makes use of the Vita's touch screen pretty extensively and I can't help but wonder whether this was a different game that got the Silent Hill brand slapped onto it at some point in development.

The game opens with your classic rusty Otherworld.

I will say though, the story is barebones but feels Silent Hill enough. You start by customizing a young person of one of a few "classes" ranging from Goth, to Rocker, to Bookworm (and a few others) and the game opens with them receiving a visit from the mailman from Downpour. He delivers you the titular "Book of Memories" which appears to be a chronicle of the protagonist's life, and your character decides to start rewriting things in the book to change their life. The setup is solid enough and things take a Silent Hill-y turn from there. The actual presentation of this story is pretty weak (notes scattered around the map and bits of audio that play over TVs you come across in your travels) but the content of it's fine, I suppose.

These sure are the apartments I know and love at this point.

There's a karmic alignment system that, weirdly enough, kind of reminds of Demon's Souls' world tendency mechanic, at least superficially. There's this global meter that moves between red and white, with every enemy killed giving either red XP or white XP, but it's a bit counterintuitive because white enemies drop red XP (and vice-versa), so even when I could see which color the enemy was through the poor lighting it wasn't necessarily immediately obvious which karma I'd be getting. Most of the time my karma stayed somewhere in the middle because you'll be fighting both kinds of enemies and it's very easy to pick up both sets of XP if you aren't specifically avoiding it.

The gameplay, if it wasn't already apparent, is pretty different from the rest of the series. You've got this overhead camera and a much more video-gamey take on progression, with formulaic rooms and challenge pop-ups that have you fighting enemies to clear areas. You'll also run into special rooms that range from places filled with weapons, to shops manned by the mailman from Downpour,  to puzzles that sort of reminded me of the hauntings from SH4. Generally speaking, your standard "video game dungeon rooms".

It was fun seeing this guy again, I'll admit.

These areas are split up into seven or so unique environments that cover your typical Silent Hill bases. You've got a rusty Otherworld, some apartments, a gross fleshy meat dimension, and a few others. Even though the game doesn't necessarily play like Silent Hill I liked that it at least picks up the aesthetics. You've got all the classic sound effects I've come to love, too. I realize that's kind of the bare minimum for this sort of thing but I have to give it credit for something.

They've also got characters and enemies from the series sprinkled throughout. You'll fight nurses, Schisms, Cancers, and other monsters from the games, as well as mini-boss fights against foes like Pyramid Head (named as such in this game) and the Bogeyman from Downpour. There's also an enemy that mimics the appearance of another player, and in my time playing the game I've seen it take on the visage of James Sunderland (from SH2) and of Heather (from SH3)

There are still puzzles, though these are relatively simple. Each level consists of you picking up "puzzle pieces" that you then put together at the level exit. There, you'll run into some variation on the same theme of "there are five or six objects that need to be sorted in a particular order and placed on the board in one of a few discrete ways". If that sounds confusing, it really isn't and you should easily understand what each puzzle wants you to do relatively quickly.

Translation: Using these rabbits, make a backwards rainbow (broken up into rows working downwards), with each row going from left-to-right

Based on some (very rough) estimates of how long each session was, I think I spent around twenty-four hours on this game. I don't have a game-end records screen to share with you (and I don't feel like taking the, like, twenty-something screenshots to highlight each level) so I'll leave you instead with this.

OK, the series may have jumped the shark a bit.

This isn't necessarily an awful game, and I found myself enjoying it at times, but it also isn't an incredibly memorable or unique game. It's a mediocre-to-alright dungeon crawler that's only noteworthy because of the Silent Hill skin that's been grafted onto it and it's probably doomed to forever stay an oddity on the Vita. I didn't "hate" it but it was long and absolutely the low point of the series.