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Silent Hill: Shattered Memories - An interesting retelling of a classic horror story
When it comes to horror games, two franchises essentially dominate the genre: Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Every now and then, a different title comes along, and sometimes they’re pretty good, but it’s usually these two juggernauts that people pay attention to. Resident Evil is known for being cheesy with likeable characters and more focus on the action, especially lately, and Silent Hill is known for being evenly paced, artistic, disturbing, beautiful and disgusting all at once.
Unlike Resident Evil, however, Silent Hill hasn’t been remade, re-released, rebooted, reworked and regurgitated since its inception to suit a variety of different platforms and control types – until now, that is. Avid Silent Hill fans might panic when they hear this, but it wasn’t Konami themselves who developed this interesting re-telling of the original story, but the team that made for the excellent Silent Hill Origins, the Climax Group. Originally made for the Wii, but ported to the PS2 and PSP also, Silent Hill:
Shattered Memories is a completely different take on the original story. Put aside everything you might know about Silent Hill, because if you cling to any bizarre hope that this is going to be the original game all over again, then you’re heading for disappointment.
The initial premise is unchanged: Harry Mason is out driving with his seven year old daughter, Cheryl, when his car spins out of control and crashes into the highway barrier outside Silent Hill. When Harry regains consciousness, he finds his daughter missing, and wanders into the town to find her. Sounds familiar, right? Well, that’s where the similarities end. Along the way Harry will bump into other disturbed characters fans of the original will remember, but in wholly different roles and circumstances. Another notable change is the absence of the disturbing grime, rust and blood-encrusted alternate reality Silent Hill is known for. Instead, Harry is periodically thrust into a world of ice and frozen time where he is pursued by deformed, fleshy creatures until he can find a way out. That leads to another difference: This time, Harry cannot fight – at all. Instead he must run, hide, throw down objects to slow his pursuers and occasionally keep the creatures at bay with flares, which they seem to dislike intensely.
I can imagine a few die-hard Silent Hill fans are either crying or spitting in disgust right about now, but give it a chance and you’ll find that there’s plenty of atmosphere and a compelling and disturbing story on offer. Silent Hill has always had a psychological edge to it, and Shattered Memories is no exception. There is a reason for every change, a reason for the ice instead of the rust and blood, a reason for each of Harry’s trips into the frozen world, a reason behind each of the seemingly unrelated disturbing scenes, and a reason behind each choice the player is prompted to make. From time to time, the player is pulled out of their quest to find Harry’s daughter and placed into a first-person view of a psychiatrist’s office.
There the therapist, one Dr Kauffman (remember him?), interviews someone who we assume to be Harry about the whole experience. He will usually ask Harry to complete some kind of psychiatric exercise, like colour in pictures, arranging words or answering yes or no questions before the tale of Harry’s search for his daughter resumes. Each of these choices has a subtle impact on the game and can affect the entire outcome.
While exploring Silent Hill, Harry has two main tools at his disposal, his phone and his torch. His phone allows him to call people, access a GPS map, take photos and save the game. Taking photos seldom has anything to do with the game, but Harry can use it to find evidence of disturbing past events by taking photos of areas which appear distorted. These events don’t really have anything to do with the game either, but if you want to send a few good shivers down your spine with tales of murder, tragic accidents, abuse and incest, then you’ll want to seek them out. Every time Harry successfully photographs one of these areas, he’ll be rewarded with a voice mail or text message shedding some further light on the incident and helping the player to paint a mental picture of the overall story.
Along the way Harry will have to solve a number of puzzles. Most of them are pretty easy, but there are one or two head-scratches in there, like the one in the high schools art studio – certainly nothing close to the level of Silent Hill 2 and 3’s hardest puzzles, though. Manipulating items in these puzzles and interacting with items in the game world is done with a gesture interface where the player logically mimics the action on screen with the controller. The game was obviously designed for the Wii, but it works well enough on the PS2 and PSP, making it feel not altogether unlike Fahrenheit or Heavy Rain in the way it works.
As an avid Silent Hill fan, I can say that I was both surprised and impressed by Shattered Memories. As a remake, it’s a good deal more worthy than the lightlyaltered Resident Evil rehashes we’re used to, and it’s a great example of a psychological game where the story is the most compelling factor and the ultimate reward.