Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Review
In the quiet, snowy town of Silent Hill, Harry Mason awakens in front of his car after a crash and finds that his daughter, Cheryl, is missing. Now Harry embarks on a desperate search for his absent daughter, leading to some shocking revelations about his plight. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories re-imagines the original PlayStation game with an entirely new story and gameplay, dropping you in the middle of a psychological thriller. The resulting game is a brilliant story-driven title that supplies mystery and chilling intrigue at every turn.
At first, the game’s story may seem cut and dry: after a car crash, Harry is looking for his missing daughter. But gradually, piece by piece, the questions of the game piles up, and an authentic horror mystery develops. It becomes clearer and clearer that Harry’s situation in Silent Hill is far more dire and eerie than it originally seemed, and he will have to get to the bottom of the puzzle. The game does a fantastic job of maintaining the mystery of the game until the surprising twist at the end; even if you think you can predict the outcome, you’ll most likely find that the game has thrown you off the trail, preserving the impact of the revelation. The best part is looking back on the game after finishing the story; it becomes clear that all of the odd and mysterious scenes in the game really are connected, so that the story is actually a carefully planned and intricate web that all comes back to the end.
The truly unique aspect of the story, though, is that it never remains static. Through a number of psychological evaluations and an evaluation of your choices in the game, Shattered Memories profiles you, analyzes your personality, and alters the game accordingly. Some of these changes are blatant, but many of them are subtle and smartly integrated–in fact, most are impossible to notice until you replay the game. The game’s final analysis of you can be frighteningly accurate, and the realization that much of the game has been catered specifically for you adds another level of eeriness to the already ominous game. As with the big reveal in the end of the game, you realize that the entire time you’ve been playing the game, the game has been playing you, the result of which is an amazingly complex, detailed, and wholly spooky experience.
Officer Cybil's appearance is just one of the many details that can change based upon your choices.
While so much care and forethought has been put into the story and its presentation, Shattered Memories’ gameplay is reduced to a fairly simple set-up of walking where you need to go. Oftentimes the path before you is linear (though you might see different paths as the game adapts to your answers and choices) and some scenes can feel like you are merely moving from one cutscene to another. There are some puzzle sequences, but the solution is often obvious or otherwise basic, so you aren’t likely to be stuck at any single scene. Most puzzles revolve around Harry’s phone, which acts as his one tool throughout the game, featuring a variety of functions such as taking pictures or receiving creepy messages from unknown origins. The phone is a fun and clever item, but it feels underutilized; like the puzzles themselves, the phone’s uses are rather sparse. The most action the game sees is during tense chase sequences where Harry has to run from disturbing nightmare monsters. Since he cannot fight these creatures, his only option is to run as quickly as possible. These portions are definitely panic-inducing, but they’re also disorienting and tiring when you can’t find the exit.
Instead of elaborate gameplay, the crux of the game is becoming immersed in the ambiance. Even though the gameplay lacks a lot of action, the environments that Harry has to explore are chillingly creepy, pulling you into the tense mystery of Shattered Memories. The game doesn’t rely upon many pop-out scares or a lot of gore to set the ominous mood–instead it’s the quiet, the isolation, and the cold that press upon you as you play, making you nervous because of the lack of action. The visuals and subtle sound effects create this ambiance wonderfully, setting the mood for Harry’s peculiar and forbidding journey.
The camera may reveal more than your eye; watch out for suspicious scenery.
The controls are pretty basic, and they function about as you would expect: you point at the screen to move the flashlight and look around, and Harry moves with the typical slow, tank-like controls that define so many other survival/horror games. It’s not much of a problem during nightmare chase sequences, though, which is the only time the movement controls really matter. The game also features a lot of motion controls, ranging from simple actions to shaking off attacking nightmares. These are a little hit and miss: some are clunky, but most are well done and feel fairly natural.
The graphics and music do a fantastic job of developing the tone and ambiance of the game, often through the details such as small items scattered throughout a room, or soft sound effects as you move something around. The Wii remote’s microphone is used extensively since it functions as Harry’s phone, and the effect is great. It mimics the sound of a phone and makes the situation feel a little more immediate. Unfortunately, the graphics can be a little glitchy at times, ranging from mild frame rate drops to severe cracks in the game, and through the flashlight is a huge part of the game, the shadows are really bothersome. They aren’t quite cast correctly; rather than appearing natural, the shadows are often too bold, so that the lighting effects seem off as soon as you see them. The presentation does a great job of pulling you into the game, but these little issues can easily pull you out of it as well.
Flares are the only way to keep the nightmares at bay.
Shattered Memories isn’t a long game; approximately seven to eight hours will take you through the entire game, and even less if you don’t stop to enjoy the scenery. Yet when you finish, the game taunts you by suggesting that there’s more to see. There are a ton of small to large choices you can make throughout the game to affect the flow of the narrative and the outcome, resulting in five different endings. If you want to experience everything this game has to offer, you simply cannot play it once–it has to be replayed multiple times to really see everything, and the effort is worth the chance to re-experience the story.
You won’t find copious amounts of blood or gore in Shattered Memories, you won’t be slaying demons, and there are few pop-out-scary moments. What you will find is a genuine psychological thriller, one of the best seen in this medium, that twists the reality of the game into your reality, pulling you into Harry Mason’s desperate quest. The game may be light in the gameplay department, but to be engrossed in the sinister ambiance of the game, the isolation, the mystery–this is what makes Silent Hill: Shattered Memories well worth playing.
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