He’s Looking For His Daughter, Cheryl
While reviews (in the strictest sense, anyway) are something I plan on avoiding for this here blog, occasionally I’m going to write about a recent release that I’m into. You’re never going to see me give a game a numerical score or a letter grade or any of that, because honestly if I don’t believe reviews other people write, it’d be kind of hypocritical for me to start writing them. I do have much better taste than everyone else, though.
Anyway, Christina got me into the Silent Hill series not too long after we moved in together. It’s her favorite series, and while I had always heard great things, the only experience I had with it before playing through them with her was when me and three friends tried playing Silent Hill 2 in the dark when we were 16 and no one wanted to be the one holding the controller. I think it was the bathroom scene (you know the one) that did us in.
But as I’m an older now and my unbridled masculinity and toughness has made me impervious to the effects of survival horror, I’ve come to really enjoy Silent Hill. Silent Hill 3 is my favorite, even though I know Silent Hill 2 is the better game. Don’t ask me how that works. The series has hit a major snag lately, with both Silent Hill Origins and Silent Hill Homecoming failing to deliver and doing everything short of completely killing the franchise. When we started learning about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for Wii, though, our hopes rose again. Thankfully, we weren’t disappointed.
Shattered Memories is a “re-imagining” of the first Silent Hill released on the PlayStation. Harry Mason, Cybil Bennet, Lisa Garland, Dahlia, the name “Silent Hill.” There, I just named everything the two games have in common. It’s a completely different monster, and while it’s really unfair to compare the two games, especially since Shattered Memories doesn’t fit in with the rest of the series’ plot, it stands on its own as not only a fantastic game, but the best Silent Hill since 3.
The best part of the game is how at certain points during the story, the game cuts away to a psychiatrist’s office, where he will ask you a series of questions or ask you to arrange objects a certain way in order to fill out a psychological profile on you, and the game will adjust accordingly. The game warns you that it will be playing you just as much as you will be playing it, and it means it. Within the first 20 minutes of the story, Christina and I each had completely different experiences. Cybil doesn’t even look the same for both of us. Even the “memories” you encounter while wandering the town, which take form as voicemails or text messages sent to Harry’s cell phone, will tell the same event a variety of different ways depending on how you answer the questions.
There’s no combat, replaced with several “chase sequences” that aren’t scary, but they are pretty intense. It kills the atmosphere of solitude and tension for the rest of the game when you know that there won’t be any monsters chasing you, but honestly for the kind of game they were making, it works.
It’s worth playing through just for the psychological profile the game creates for you, and if you and someone else play through it back to back it’s really crazy to see how different the game will be for each of you. As the credits roll, the game reads your “analysis” back to you, and it’s really creepy how accurate it is. The game’s big plot twist is quite a surprise, too. The UFO ending even makes a return, with a surprise cameo.
It’s a worthy addition to the franchise, and definitely worth checking out.
One Comment
As a huge fan of the older games in the SH series, I have to say that I really enjoyed this. The only real problems I had with it were continuity – I was expecting it to tie into the timeline of SH1 & SH3, and it didn’t, it was a seperate universe – and the awful chase scenes. They were far too chaotic, and not really scary, just frustrating.
I understand that was probably a choice to make the player feel stressed out since the rest of the game was really so mellow and not-at-all-scary, but I feel like they really sold themselves short. If the monsters had been just the slightest bit slower, I would have been able to appreciate things like the GPS map, the hiding places, the things you can knock over to tell which way you’ve gone/slow down the monsters a bit, etc. As it is, I just wound up running full speed most of the time and didn’t notice half of the aforementioned stuff til the end of the game!
Criticism aside though, I’m not sure I can call it a favorite, but I think it is a worthy side-story to the franchise, and I hope they do another like it.