Silent Hill Shattered Memories

I am going to let you in on one of the dirty little secrets of videogame reviewers (and we have many of them, let me tell you). More often than not, we do not finish the games we review before we review them.

Man, I hope I’m not breaking something akin to the code of honor that magicians have. But, damn. I feel like I’ve just unburdened myself of the hundred-pound weight that’s been hanging around my neck for so long.

Review of Silent Hill: Shattered Dreams
By X-34 minus 5R1-6X36
Hours played: 14-16

Man, I hope I’m not breaking something akin to the code of honor that magicians have. But, damn. I feel like I’ve just unburdened myself of the hundred-pound weight that’s been hanging around my neck for so long.

OK, not really. I’m probably not telling you anything you didn’t know already. I mean, the completion of some of these games requires multiple days’ worth of gameplay, and while I try my hardest to project the image of an International Man of Leisure, I just don’t have that kind of free time.

This is all to say that I made time for Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which I enjoyed a great deal and recommend without any major reservations. It’s a fine game with a very engaging story, pleasing and fairly realistic graphics, and a genuinely creepy sense of dread that sort of seeps in from the seams.

I’m aware of the other games in this series, but have not played any; nor have I seen the movie. (Though I intend to, because I find Radha Mitchell exceedingly cute.) Neither had I ever played any “horror” games before this one, though Shattered Memories is not the kind of game that’ll make you jump out of your chair in terror. Rather, it’s the kind that gives you little cold shivery prickles at the back of your neck, even as you stare at a small screen as you ride a subway train. The mood it conveys is effectively creepy and grim; moreover, it sustains this mood for nearly the entire duration of the game, which I take to be no small achievement.

You play the game as Harry Mason, an everyman who, in the game’s opening scene, loses his daughter, Cheryl, in a car crash. Here, “loses” does not refer to Cheryl’s death, but to her disappearance: Harry cannot find her once he extricates himself from the wreck. It’s this quest that motivates the main action of the story: Harry walks through the eerily vacant town of Silent Hill in search of his daughter.

One of the things I like about this game is that Harry’s only tools in his quest are a flashlight (which casts impressively realistic shadows) and a cell phone, a multi-use tool that contains a GPS-like mapping system, a camera that features into gameplay, and the ability to make and receive calls, tasks without which the game would be uncompletable. Apparently, the Wii version of Shattered Memories incorporates the use of these devices in exceptionally naturalistic ways, given the nature of that platform’s controller. And that may be the case. But I found that the control of these devices has been assigned very logically and fluidly to the PSP controls.

There are two basic modes of gameplay: exploration and creature-evasion. In the former, you search any and all accessible buildings, woods, streets, vacant lots, amusement parks, malls, and other creepily people-free places. In so doing, you interact with an impressive range of objects in order to gain access to spaces, recover “mementoes” (objects of cryptic significance), find necessary phone numbers, and gather evidence that relates in tantalizingly opaque ways to Cheryl’s disappearance. It’s not just the standard locks, keys, closets, etc., that Harry must manipulate: he also encounters a pawnbroker’s revolving security device, slot and gumball machines, cigar-store Indians, and a planetarium projector (!), to name a few. It’s fun to interact with these diverse devices, and to piece together the clues, even if they don’t always amount to what you think they will. Overall, the “exploration” phase of gameplay is far more enjoyable than the other phase.

That other phase, dubbed by the good people of Konami as the “nightmare” portion of the game, is some sort of weird alternate reality in which the world (and its inhabitants) ices over, and creepy, faceless, pinkish, slender, unidentified demon-people emerge from every cranny to chase and terrorize Harry. There’s never any real explanation for what these things are – not even the game’s unusual and much-discussed ending (addressed below) entirely clarifies it. These creatures are annoying, frankly. Harry can’t kill or fight them – all he can do is run from them, and shake them off of his person should they attach themselves, as they are wont to do. If they hang around too persistently, they will put Harry out of action, and you’ll have to return to an earlier stage of the “nightmare.”

The creature/nightmare phase of the game is by far the weaker, precisely because you can’t fight or defeat the creatures – all you can do is run. But that running is itself frustrating, since the geography of the nightmare-space is indeterminate. Through every door is a series of two to four subsequent doors, and there’s never a clue as to which makes the most sense to open. It’s exceedingly difficult to build up a sense of the space in these scenes, which I understand is a design choice, but, still, it’s annoying, since you pretty much navigate by trial and error, if not by blind chance. (The creatures are always too hot on your tail for you to bust out the GPS, if even it works in Nightmareland.) The fact that some of the creatures sport whimsical, Nefertiti-shaped heads does not compensate for the frustration one experiences in this portion of the game.

Actually, there’s a third phase of the game: several scenes take place in a psychiatrist’s office, where you are given a series of tests by which the game “analyzes” you and, allegedly, adapts to your psychology. This is a bunch of hooey, of course, but the scenes in the doctor’s office are important and intriguing.

So, yes, the game’s story has a “twist” ending that, in retrospect, casts all previous elements of the game in a new light. It’s a good twist: it emerges organically from the story and the tone of the game, and, for that, is surprisingly subtle. I am bound by a blood-contract with Konami not to reveal this ending, and wouldn’t do it, anyway, even if they hadn’t threatened to subject me to an endless video loop of the performances of the alleged comedian known as “Carrot Top.”

It’s tough to call Silent Hill: Shattered Memories fun per se, since it really is quite dire and grim. But it’s an unusually well-conceived game that I enjoyed – despite the somewhat annoying monsters-are-chasing-me scenes – quite a lot, and that I recommend highly.