Silent Hill: Shattered Memories: Negatives
Normally it is tough for a reviewer to look at a game with a fresh pair of eyes as long as it’s part of a beloved franchise. Fortunately for you I’ve invested no more than an hour and a half in Silent Hill 2 before playing Shattered Memories, so I don’t really have much to compare it to. All I even remember of the original game was a television commercial featuring fog, a playground and limping silhouettes in the distance. I have no choice but to analyze the game as if I’m unfamiliar with its origins.
There are two flaws with this “re-imagining†of the first game. The Nightmare world and the lack of divergent paths based on your choices. Neither element is terrible, but there are some issues with execution that hinder the game significantly. Just not heavily enough to make this a poor game (to skip ahead: it’s actually quite a good game. Not excellent, but it sure felt that way at times).
First to cover the Nightmare world. The general theme of Silent Hill, at least the first one, is there are two sides to the town. One that resembles the real world with creatures walking about, and then a rust-covered and twisted realm of horror. In Shattered Memories, this mirror world takes on a frozen shape populated with twisted featureless creatures. At least, they are featureless early on, gaining more and more characteristics based on how you play the game.
They are also the only threat in the game. This keeps Shattered Memories from being a truly frightening game as its moments of danger are isolated to the Nightmare world. Any other time is merely a chance for exploration, the occasional puzzle solving and plot progression. It is no longer accurately described as a survival-horror but more of a thriller instead.
The real terror comes in wondering when the next Nightmare world is going to pop up. The first time you play the game you’ll probably come to hate this alternate realm as it tends to be a bit confusing while giving little time to breath and get your bearings. The second you are spotted by one of the creatures they will chase you down and try to grab on, with your only defenses being the environment, the occasional flare you can pick up and knocking them off. As with most Wiimote sensitive controls, trying to swing to the side doesn’t always register and won’t guarantee throwing these creatures off. Simply moving the remote also adjusts your vision, easily turning you around and making things worse as more of these creatures dog-pile on.
The best hope you can have for getting through these worlds in one shot is to check where the waypoint is on your map as soon as it pops up and try to keep that spot in your mind as you dash through halls and wide open areas. Unfortunately you rarely have time to double-check the map as the pursuing creatures can run faster than you and will hastily catch up. This is pretty severe as you may often find sections that resemble areas you just passed, and since the world is designed in a maze-like manner you can never be too certain as to when you got turned around or not. This leaves it either to a guessing game or one of chance as you pop open the map to figure out if you’re getting close or not.
There are some tricks available to make outrunning the monsters easier. Climbing fences and walls, ducking under small openings, knocking objects down behind you and even hiding in closets or beneath beds can give you a brief moment to breathe free and catch your breath. Unfortunately hiding from the monsters will simply send them in the direction you need to go and the more time passes the more likely it is you’ll be sniffed out. Knocking something down behind you will only cause them to pause briefly. Even the flare, which knocks foes back as long as it is lit, prevents you from checking your map, meaning you may still get lost. Once that flare goes out you could be caught in the middle of several creatures with no proper escape.
What the Nightmare world needed was a few more defensive options. Take cues from games like Assassin’s Creed which allow you to tackle foes ahead of you at the cost of speed and maneuverability. Monsters from behind and the side could still leap on you in such a state but those at the front could be knocked down. Or even allow the flashlight to give them a moment’s pause so as to buy you some time to run past or startle them if they are catching up.
Of course, making the motion controls work a bit better when swinging them off would have helped as well.
This isn’t to say the Nightmare world is absolutely horrible and the worst part of the game. There are many ways in which it is implemented in a clever manner in order to keep it from being too repetitious and properly gets the blood pumping and heart pounding. It also helps that being taken down by the creatures doesn’t end the game, merely send you back to the beginning of the nightmare (or in some cases a checkpoint). As the nightmare world doesn’t take much time out of the game this means not much has to be replayed, but the adrenaline and atmosphere have suddenly been broken by failure. It’s no longer as fun and borders on tedious. The only guarantee of success is to play through the game once so you have a better concept of what to do the second time, and even then you can still get turned around with no clue where you are.
Perhaps more frustrating are the two maps that force you to return into the Nightmare world after finally reaching safety in order to complete a puzzle. Once you’ve made your way through you don’t want to spend anymore time in the Nightmare. This is compounded by one of the puzzles having different audio based on how you play the game. For some players the hint will be obvious and clear while others it will be a garbled mess of static (thank you, Climax, for thinking the Wii remote speaker was a good idea even though it’s a piece of crap that generates the worst audio quality in the world).
This makes a semi-decent segue into the next topic, choice. Rather, the attempt to profile you psychologically based on play style. The game actually does a pretty decent job at concealing some of the more subtle behaviors tracked, but most of the time it will deliver questions directly and use your responses to modify the game a bit. Unfortunately these are typically superficial, rarely making a major change except to the ending.
This happens to be the more disappointing aspect of the game. It generally tries to figure out if you’re a dependable, lawful-good natured person, more of a sleaze, womanizer or slut, a drunkard or even a worthless nothing without any self-esteem. Many of these can cross over, but these primary traits effect the ending. If you focus on someone’s face and eyes for most of a conversation then you are dependable, lawful-good. Focus on breasts and you’re a sleaze or slut. Focus on alcohol and you’re a drunkard. Pay attention to just about anything else and you’re a worthless nothing.
The result is that some of the conversations and interactions will change, and if they do the modification is rather minor. Most of what the character Harry Mason speaks is the same. If you manage to play any character aside from the dependable one, then none of the other endings really make sense in context of the rest of the game.
It’s unfortunate that I can’t go into the level of detail I’d like without giving so much away. Suffice it to say, the game’s got a lot of areas it tries to track your personality, but until it tries to summarize the sort of person you are at the end it never really pays off. There are also plenty of other moments that they could have used to help determine what sort of personality you have. For example, the first major location you visit is either a bar or a diner. Which you get depends on some of the answers you gave at the start of the game. Both locations are present but one of them will be locked forcing you into the other location. This was a poor choice of game design and either location should have been available. If a player chooses to check the bar first it could reveal something about who they are versus checking a diner. If they choose one and then immediately head to the other afterward only to find it locked, that also says something about them being a completionist. By giving players such subtle options it could have truly analyzed them a bit more deeply yet chose to go for a more superficial and forced route.
The game manages to change a lot of little details throughout, there’s no doubt about that. Certain conversations do play out a bit differently, but on the whole little impact is made based on your personality and perception of the world. Considering how tight and claustrophobic the game world tends to be, it feels as if the developers could have easily created a lot of other modifications to give it that much more life.
This isn’t to say the game isn’t worth going through a second time, or perhaps even third. It’s actually worth revisiting in a manner similar to Fight Club. You just want to comb over the story and see how all the pieces fit once you know what the solution will be. Yet not enough changes occur to make you want to return a third or fourth time unless you really liked the story.
Shattered Memories did a decent enough job with the Nightmare world and choices that could be made throughout the game, but unfortunately there isn’t enough done with them to push the game into true greatness. The options taken are instead relatively shallow. Climax has proven they are a studio with great potential, they just need to take a deeper plunge and make the extra effort.
