The Haunted Hoard: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Wii)
Despite the terms remake, reboot, and reimagining all having different meanings, they can so often bleed into each other or overlap that it can be a bit hard to determine what is meant by using the words. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is billed as a reimagining of the original Silent Hill game, but it certainly feels like it takes things further than just putting a different spin on a few familiar elements. In fact, besides starring Harry Mason and taking place in the city of Silent Hill, many parts of Shattered Memories feel like such a departure that the game could almost stand as a completely unrelated game if you removed the recognizable names.
Once we get out of the set-up of Harry Mason searching the town of Silent Hill for his missing daughter Cheryl, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories starts to really feel like its own beast. The town is eerily empty and covered in a heavy blanket of snow, Harry’s exploration out in the cold of night revealing the place to almost be a ghost town. The people who he does end up encountering are mostly women, and while characters like the police officer try to help him, his single-minded search for his missing daughter means he isn’t often invested in the conversations he has with them. Many of them hold a greater importance than just people encountered along the way, their relationship to Harry or their own personal strife meant to help you better understands the amnesiac Harry Mason’s history and personality, and while you get some footage of his past to start off the game that seems idyllic, you quickly come to realize he’s a more troubled man than he lets on.
Psychology is a major part of this horror game, and not just in the sense it’s trying to creep you out. There is a complex system at play behind the scenes in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories that determines the course of various events in your playthrough and the details that spring up during them. While the only huge tangible impacts you’ll influence are the ways the ending manifests and which extra scenes you see after the finale, it still has some fascinating elements to it. As you explore the city of Silent Hill you are free to observe your surroundings with the Wii Remote’s motion controls, the process a little awkward since Harry takes some nudging to turn but there are plenty of details to find in the environment. Something as small as looking at certain objects can add to a hidden rating system that will determine what you as a player are interested in and value and the game starts tailoring certain aspects towards it. If you stop to gawk at a poster with a scantily clad woman, the game will add points to Harry’s libido. If you show an interest in alcohol, the theming of a bar you come across can entirely change to match. Whether you’re a family man or a friendly person can influence how you get along with others as well, and while the changes are often small, this profile it builds for you certainly makes you wonder about your own behavior and how it might be subtly altering this city that is already a mix between reality and a mind-bending other realm.
The most clear moment the game is gathering info on you are the psychologist sections often placed between major moments in the story. The doctor will ask you yes or no questions about your life, wax philosophical in your direction, and even whip out little tests to see what you’re really like. Whether it’s something like asking you to make moral judgments like who is most guilty in a girl’s death or do something meant to unnerve you like sorting pictures based on whether you think the person in the image is sleeping or dead, this segment is both meant to add an unnerving break from the often quiet city exploration and allow the game to fast track it’s understanding of you. The game can even pick up if you’re just giving answers with little thought so it is unfortunate the psychological profile usually doesn’t manifest in more extreme ways than characters in different clothes or the exact wording used in a message on your phone.
Speaking of your phone, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories features its use heavily to the point I’d say it basically uses the same ideas featured in a different Wii horror game released around the same time called Calling and actually delivers on them successfully. Your old-fashioned cell phone is used heavily throughout the adventure, and considering Harry never gets any weapon or even picks up any items he finds around the world, it is basically your only tool for interacting with the game world. Puzzles in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories are often rather simple and involve you needing to use environmental clues to learn phone numbers, and while some are very straightforward and barely count as a puzzle, there are some interesting ones. These usually do involve more than just finding the right number such as when you instead need to look around a school principle’s office to help answer his password security questions or learn the right song to play on the radio during a request hour. Your Wii Remote’s speaker handles a lot of the sound effects for most things involving the phone, this adding a nifty layer to using this device and is how you experience the many ghost stories you encounter around Silent Hill.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has many tales hidden across the town it takes place in, and while the main plot helps you to understand Harry Mason and his family better, Silent Hill is full of little vignettes to uncover through cell phone shenanigans. Sometimes the faint flicker of an image can be spotted, and if you capture a photo of these spiritual remnants, you can start to build up one of the many sidestories that tell the dark past of the town you find yourself in. Most of these are short, self-contained, and honestly aren’t too involved or terribly relevant, but coupled with the voice messages you can pick up by approaching the sounds of static with your phone up, they do tell some interesting and dark tales about the wicked, depraved, tragic, and foolish citizens of the town. While following the noises can be a little hit or miss in certain areas, these hidden narratives do add a lot more to getting around town since otherwise you’d mostly just wandering through some place like a mall, snowy forest, theme park, or the city streets without much to do.
The openness and multiple buildings you can enter can sometimes make Silent Hill: Shattered Memories feel freeing and open even when it’s carefully designed to funnel you forward. The light puzzle elements are one of the few things that set this apart from being a borderline narrative exploration title, and with how much of it is banking on you following your curiosity and uncovering the histories of lost souls, it’s good the game has areas that are often conducive to a little sniffing around for spooky stories. While the late game begins to crank up the surreal and psychological scares as things start to unravel and truly make sense, there is one important action element to discuss that crops up again and again: the chases.
When emotions run high, Harry heads somewhere strange, or the character interactions reach a fever pitch, Silent Hill tends to respond. The city can suddenly freeze over, large walls of ice barring navigation and the player finding the accessible parts of the city now turned into a labyrinthine maze they need to escape. The player can’t afford to dawdle though, as this otherworldly version of the town is inhabited by the game’s only monsters. These fleshy humanoid beings want to latch onto Harry and drag him down, Harry’s only recourse once they’ve jumped onto him being to shove them off with the motion controls in a maneuver that takes some getting used to. Most of your experience with these portions will just be blindly charging forward, and while this can be risky since you don’t know where the enemies might be in the dark, you’re mostly well off so long as they aren’t lurking behind that door you’re heading for. Many of these segments are just a mad dash to find your way through now twisted version of familiar locations, and while the game tries to slip some puzzles in here, it once actually got tired with my failures to do a school paparazzi task and opened the way onward to ensure that not too much time was lost with it. Seemingly, the game doesn’t want you to lose too much time running from these nightmare beings, but even as it cooks up new ways you need to navigate your way through this other world, it still feels like the game overrelies on its one monster type and misses out on what could have been an interesting avenue for more creativity.
THE VERDICT: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories may deviate from the original so much it barely feels like it, but it still manages to bring some of the psychological horror and eerie tone the series is known for all the same. The town itself is an eerie place filled with small character stories to uncover, and while they don’t have much purpose beyond fleshing out the town, the game gives you plenty of opportunity to explore as it essentially completely avoids combat. You could find yourself shoving off the monstrous humanoids you encounter during the tense chase portions, but outrunning them is key as the game does a good job of making you feel helpless but not outright feeble. The cell phone’s impressive degree of integration makes up for the puzzles often being logistically plain, but the personality profile system adds such a fascinating second layer to most of your actions that it’s easy to get swept up in the atmospheric story of Harry Mason’s mind.
And so, I give Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for Wii…
A GOOD rating. The original Silent Hill has a leg up over its reimagining when it comes to things like having a an interesting monster menagerie and making a more layered plot, but Silent Hill: Shattered Memories actually seemed like it was a bit prescient in spotting the emerging path horror games would take where you stumble across a lot of the frights and story details just by digging around the environment. Your cell phone is a multi-faceted part of how you engage with the world and a pretty interesting tool for the puzzles that can utilize it interestingly, but the psychological evaluation elements are certainly one of the game’s standout features. As you uncover Harry’s tale and how it connects to Silent Hill and the strange things you’ve been seeing, the game makes itself a bit more intimate by asking you personal questions and judging your behavior as you think no one is watching. Its impact is interesting but maybe not as interwoven much as players would like, but having this extra layer to every interaction hanging in the back of your mind can influence how you behave in an already engaging world. Spice up those chase sections with more than just a mild puzzle or challenge cropping up during them and maybe Silent Hill: Shattered Memories could be about on par with the game that kicked off its series.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories plays quite differently from the game it drew inspiration from, and it is definitely a different type of tale as it embraces setting the player out to explore as they please and find out more about the ghost stories they like. The chase portions can be high octane even if they could benefit greatly from more variety, but Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is still the type of horror game that keeps your interest with its narrative twists, unusual sights, and consistently haunting atmosphere. By stripping away combat and involved puzzles, Silent Hill: Shattered Memores is able to focus pretty closely on the aesthetic, personal psychology, and story so that they all can serve as a strong driving force for pushing forward in this eerie adventure title.