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Dec/0932
Dec/0932
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Follow-Up Rant
SPOILERS SPOILERS
SPOILERS SPOILERS
SPOILERS SPOILERS
Yeah. Spoilers. For this and other Silent Hill games.
So you know what? No. I’m not done bitching about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. In my review I tried to avoid spoilers but now, now I want to rant a bit about the story as a whole and why it just doesn’t work.
So if for some reason you were planning to play this game and don’t want its stupendously stupid ending ruined for you, well… don’t read this.
So Harry’s dead all along. Yeah. He’s Bruce Willis. Well not quite, he’s not even a ghost, he’s a delusion of an adult Cheryl who is actually the one in therapy (as I said I sensed a bait and switch early on.) Cheryl couldn’t accept that her father died in a car accident after her parents divorced so she created an imaginary perfect dad. What is Climax trying to say here? That the original Harry Mason was too devoted to be real? Anyway, a story where a delusion comes to life/effects reality I have no problem with, I did mention Satoshi Kon in my review, whose work I like, and that’s kind of his shtick (Perfect Blue, Paranoia Agent, Paprika.) But like I also said Satoshi Kon Climax ain’t.
It seems to me that American companies making these new Silent Hill games are desperate to make the Silent Hill 2 lightning strike twice, thus the constant “blah blah was dead all along” theme. Developer Double Helix’s Silent Hill: Homecoming, while a decent game, did this so obviously that I guessed the ending from the trailers before the game even came out. Climax seems to have attempted to subvert this creative bankruptcy by simply switching the roles in their plot twist (The person you’re seeking wasn’t dead all along, the player character was!) But this creates a host of problems with the plot.
Hello? Yes I'd like to order some plot continuity.
For one, if Harry has been dead for 18 years why the holy hell does he have a high-tech cellphone? I mean did Cheryl actually create this detail as part of her delusion? Sure it plays a vital role in the gameplay as your map, a device to drive the story, and a way to find ghostly residue and mementos (though going around a dark, abandoned city with a flashlight finding ghosts and items of emotional significance sounds alot like the Wii game Fragile which is coming State-side soon, and will probably be better than this malarky) but if Harry isn’t real and was a delusion all along why does he have this thing? Depending on when this game takes place it can’t even be a memory from the real Harry because goddamn iPhones didn’t exist 18 years ago.
I'm like, Dahlia, cha.
Then there’s Dahlia. Dahlia is a punkish, kinda slutty teen or early 20-something that shows up out of nowhere, replacing another person you were traveling with and only has a brief time in the game where she reveals Harry is spacey, they’re sleeping together, and he named her tits. Charming. We find out later that Dahlia is Harry’s wife. Okay. But it seems to me this Dahlia you meet in the game is what Dahlia was like in High School or her early 20’s when she and Harry first met seeing as she doesn’t know he’s dead and doesn’t look, dress or speak like this in Cheryl’s home videos. So she can’t be a real person, she must come from Harry’s memory, but since Harry is a delusion of Cheryl… how the hell does Cheryl know what her mother was like in her youth? How would she know intimate details like the aforementioned tit-naming? Unless she’s re-imaging her mother as a whore, which I guess is possible because she hates her, but still. Or maybe she could be a memory from the real Harry that the delusion possesses (making her the delusion’s… delusion? Augh.)
Maria. More dangerous than Pyramid Head.
But there’s a problem here. That isn’t possible because this game completely eschews the Silent Hill mythos. Silent Hill is a normal town in this game, there’s no ancient Native American sacred land, there’s no cult throwing rituals and occult magic around, there’s nothing supernatural happening to anyone but Harry and it isn’t stemming from the power of the town itself. Look at Maria from Silent Hill 2 for example: Maria is also a delusion, or quite possibly an extraordinarily complex monster (seeing as she transforms into one in all but one of the endings) and she has memories she seemingly shouldn’t have. Basically the power of the town feeds her, mixing the subconscious desires and memories of James with the memories of Laura causing her to manifest the way she is and sometimes switch personalities. Maria herself may not even understand what she is at first, similar to Lisa Garland who only transformed into a monster when she realized she was one. Lisa of course was a human transformed by the town, or she could have been a monster based on the real, long-dead Lisa.
And that’s the thing about the original Team Silent trilogy, they were subtle, they were ambiguous. No one outright points out Maria is a delusion, you only find out Lisa was Alessa’s nurse if you examine videos and diaries and even then it’s only implied. In fact what I said above is only my interpretation, though the basics tend to be agreed upon by fans the details aren’t. Shattered Memories basically has your therapist (who I realized later is Michael Kaufmann which is admittedly pretty clever) lay out everything in the end leaving no room for speculation from the viewer.
Well there’s room for speculation about the monsters and the Nightmare world, I guess, but my only thoughts on that is they have fuckall to do with the plot in the end. Well, I understand that it could represent the therapy Cheryl is going through, that the monsters are trying to destroy Harry only to free her, but really what the hell is with the snow and ice theme? There is nothing, nothing to indicate that Harry’s car accident happened in snow. The video where he’s leaving shows him in a short-sleeved shirt on a sunny day with full, green trees in the background. Silent Hill is supposed to be located in New England, I live there and I’ll tell you our winters ain’t like that. Sure there’s snow in the game, but the snow storm is happening in the present time. Harry the delusion is just running around the real world with real people in a real snowstorm 18 years after the real Harry died, this isn’t even the Fog World because the Silent Hill mythos don’t exist in this game, it’s just a normal blizzard. Some people say it’s because Cheryl’s memory of Harry is “frozen” in time, but i’m not buying it, and even if that is the case not very freakin’ subtle is it? Some people also say the whole town was in Cheryl’s head but there’s snow on the ground at the end, and what reason would she have to make up Michelle, John, Cybil, Lisa, the bridge operator and everyone else you can call? My point is the Nightmare world could have had some variation, I’m wondering if the snow and ice wasn’t just a choice because of the Wii’s limitations.
Then there’s the oft-praised “psychology” aspect, slight changes to the monsters and game and slight variations on the ending depending on your answers to psychology tests and what you make Harry stare at. The problem becomes that in the context in the story this is nothing but a whole lot of fourth wall breaking, and it’s distracting. Really, think about it, why would the appearance of real people change depending on what the real Harry Mason was like according to the player? Instead of crafting various models for minor characters they could have spent more time on the monsters, but like I said in my review it’s not like you even have time to get a good look at them anyway. The game thinks it’s shocking or mature because it mentions sex and has racy posters but goddamn, Silent Hills 2 and 3 had some of the most phallic and disturbingly sexual imagery, and it was all in the monsters and environments.
I will praise this game on one thing though: its UFO ending is hilarious. If you don’t know, a joke ending called the UFO ending is a running gag in Silent Hill games, usually only able to be achieved on a second playthrough (though Homecoming made the mistake of having it available on the first playthrough.) In Silent Hill 1, Harry Mason is abducted by aliens. In Silent Hill 2 Harry Mason returns along with the aliens and they abduct James Sunderland. In Silent Hill 3 Heather returns home to tell her father what happened and he and the aliens go and blow up Silent Hill. And well so on and so forth. However the infuriating thing is Shattered Memories’ UFO ending shows that the creators do have a detailed knowledge of past Silent Hill games, which they chose to ignore.
This game was so bad even composer Akira Yamaoka seemed to be phoning it in. I can’t remember any distinctive tracks from the game, and especially the music that plays when the monsters chase you sounded pretty generic.
All and all I still don’t understand the praise and high review scores for this game. It’s like the writers read a Psyche 101 book and decided they knew everything about psychology. It’s not a psychological thriller if you’re literally making the player do art therapy and Rorschach tests, that’s just blazingly stupid. The reason why Silent Hill 2 was so psychological is everything was subtle, implied, and left to the player to put the pieces together. It could have been that the town was literally transformed, it could have been that it was just a metaphor and the reality was that shortly after killing Mary and wracked with guilt and denial, James fled to the last place the two were happy and worked through his demons (or, in one ending, committed suicide.) More than likely it’s something in between, but again that’s for the player to decide. And that’s the thing Climax doesn’t seem to understand. Silent Hill isn’t just about “freaky shit happening” and until these American companies understand that, or Konami hires a better developer, Silent Hill will never be anywhere near as good as it was.
The only other entertainment value? I can’t wait to see what Yatzhee has to say about this.
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- Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
- Dante’s Vs Darksiders
- My 5 Top Year-End Games (With Bonus Rant)
- Dead Rising
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12:31 pm on December 17th, 2009
Huh. I find it kind of weird that the UFO ending has more to do with Silent Hill 1 than the game itself. Still hilarious an ending though.
Though I still think shattered memories would have been a pretty neat game if it wasn’t trying to use SH1 as a base. I bet if it was it’s own story with it’s own characters things would have worked out better. Oh well. At least no one can take away old school Harry Mason away from me, he’d set everything straight! ;D
1:25 pm on December 17th, 2009
@ Dezfez Exactly. I think I said in my review I would have been easier on it if it was an original story. Though these plotholes would still stand.
1:46 pm on December 17th, 2009
………………… They actually pulled a Sixth Sense ending? God damn it all t’ hell *headdesk* You’re not yanking our chains, are ya?
1:58 pm on December 17th, 2009
@Two I swear I didn’t make it up. It really does feel like a summer generic horror movie that got a script rewrite halfway through production and no one bothered to fix the plotholes.
2:01 pm on December 17th, 2009
D: This makes me sad over the future of Silent Hill games… it also makes me hope someone else will start making them, to be honest…. and no remakes/”re-imagenings”(crap spelling is crap DX).
2:49 pm on December 17th, 2009
@Two I don’t care if people want to do new things with the concept of Silent Hill… but this game, you know, completely ignores the concept of Silent Hill.
7:43 pm on December 17th, 2009
Dude, you have completely and totally missed the point of what this game set out to do. This was never supposed to be a remake of the original game, but a REIMAGINING. That word alone should have clued you in that there were some major changes taking place…this was not going to be your old school Silent Hill (anyways, how do you know what it’s like, you claim to have never played the original).
First off…the plot. You have missed so many vital points in your plot analysis that it isn’t even funny…and if you want me to chop it up with you, I’ll be more than happy to, I don’t feel the need to do an entire plot analysis right here though.
Secondly…I find it very sad that you have missed the point of this game. For years, Silent Hill as a series has been caught in between a rock and a hard place. Anytime a new game in the series gets released that is too much like one of the original two games people bitch that nobody wants to do anything new with the series…whereas when a game like Shattered Memories is released, people bitch nonetheless because they are pissed that this game is a radical change. Newsflash: THAT’S WHAT IT WAS MEANT TO BE. You complain that this game ignores the concept of Silent Hill. No, sir, it doesn’t. The concept of Silent Hill is VERY much intact in Shattered Memories if you take into consideration that the game takes place in Silent Hill, which continues to be the setting for a person’s worst nightmares to be realized. Dig a little deeper, go to GameFaqs and read a few more plot analyses before you pass judgement and start saying this game isn’t Silent Hill.
BTW, the nightmare monsters that have nothing to do with the plot are called “Raw Shocks.” I interpret them as being representative of Cheryl; they are attempting to stop Harry from learning too much about what Cheryl has been up to since he’s been dead, that’s why they don’t really look like they’re hurting him when they finally catch up to him. They just hug his neck, and when he falls sometimes you can see them gently rubbing his head…something very childlike in quality.
And before you go bashing me, I’ll tell you that I’ve been a SH fan since the beginning. I’ve read the comics, watched the movie (and the fan movie No Escape), and of course I’ve played the games. And if I were you, I’d give Shattered Memories another chance. This game is not as shallow or horrible as you think it is, and yeah, maybe Climax ain’t Satoshi Kon but you know you won’t see anything nearly as good in western cinema today as you will see in Shattered Memories.
7:45 pm on December 17th, 2009
Oh, and to clarify when I say that the game takes place in Silent Hill…it does, but it’s the version of the town Cheryl sees in her mind. And isn’t that going along with what people see when they’re called to Silent Hill? Their own personal nightmare? Just wanted to clear that up.
8:05 pm on December 17th, 2009
@ Brian “anyways, how do you know what it’s like, you claim to have never played the original”
Have you never heard of Let’s Plays, wikis, plot summaries, forums… stuff?
There’s going somewhere else with the concept and then there’s inventing a new concept and slapping a brand name on it. Without the mythos, themes and atmosphere and pretty much changing the entire setting (as the town has no power, and it isn’t the town causing Cheryl or Harry’s nightmare) what exactly is left of the Silent Hill concept here?
I’d ask you to elaborate what you think the concept of Silent Hill is and how Shattered Memories keeps in tune with this because we seem to have different opinions on what the core concept is.
I dunno, I still would think the Raw Shocks are supposed to be the therapy trying to break through and erase Harry.
And I wouldn’t really consider the comics or movie to be canon to tell you the truth. The movie came so so very close but because of the plot changes they ended up having no real climax to the story, it was just random violence.
I also don’t understand how you think its the town Cheryl sees in her mind. The town itself doesn’t appear to be supernatural in this game and Cheryl is a citizen. Harry seems to be interacting with real people, are you saying Cheryl invented everyone else too? What point would that have? And still how do you explain that stupid cellphone thing?
9:12 pm on December 17th, 2009
This rant is really, really straining to find faults that really aren’t important when there are plenty that are important.
It’s not a Jacob’s Ladder story. A person is not dead seeing the world nor is he dying and imagining a story, it’s all – hint hint – a false Memory of a living person that will be Shattered. If anything, this is a Pan’s Labyrinth story.
Is the phone really something you can’t figure out? After all, these are the memories of a disturbed woman that stabbed someone as a teen. It’s such an unimportant point that I don’t think 98% of people will notice or care. The game even tells you early on between the two disparate timelines and you should already know the entire game is about navigating memories of the past. Anachronism [intentional] is so common that it’s all to natural in this story of past events [real or otherwise]. The real problem that should have been pin-pointed is how the hell would Harry know about any of the past memories if it wasn’t for the magical phone messages and pictures?
I, too, also knew there was going to be a twist about roles. This is almost obvious if you paid attention to the game. After all, the psychologist asks you if you were a “slut” in high school. The game itself spends hours focusing in on the memories of a girl, not the memories of a father. I didn’t find the ending stupid – I just found the game came to a complete dead stop. As I said, the ending isn’t shocking if you thought even a little while playing the game.
Why are you fixated on the snow? The cold is simple: it’s a hostile environment. It gives a reason for the town to be in such desolate disarray and gives an excuse for the power to be out and to use a flashlight. Having the game take place in a warm 75 degree daytime environment would be daft. The snow happening in the “present time” in the game is the same as the phone appearing in the game as well. A twisted mind is just combining things.
You really passed over the important part of you really never seeing the monsters. That makes the transformations even that less impressive or even noticable. The point of the freezing durring the nightmare sequences is simple – it pinpoints that something is trying to keep you from hearing a disturbing truth. It’s symbolism for Cheryl not wanting to hear the truth about her Father.
Your rant about the psychology really misses the problem of the mechanism completely. It doesn’t break a fourth wall, it tries to personalize the story but fails. The real problem with this mechanism is there’s almost no way to tell if what you did had any meaningful effect on the game. Unless you play the game more than once, you’ll never even know that anything was changed in the game. The worst part is that so little changed, it’s no different than small random changes. I challenge anyone to match the “bull death” story to any change made in the game.
The really, really big problem you didn’t mention was that almost everything you do in the game has NO effect on the gameplay itself. It’s almost like flushing a toilet in Duke Nuke’em 3D. You can skip just about all of the “attached memory” objects and simply look for keys to keep exploring the linear town. When the entire game is about Walking and Running, there’s something a bit superficial about the game that’s little more than “The Sims Horror”.
9:47 pm on December 17th, 2009
@Joe I understand Harry is a false memory but it seemed to me what they were trying to put across was he is a delusion come to life, he seems to have manifested in the real world only in the beginning of the game. Like the delusion’s last struggle to stay alive. Why else is he searching for her? Her mind refused to give him up and she “needed” him. I just don’t understand that if it isn’t the real world he’s traversing, why would Cheryl be making up all these other people and events? They seem to be happening in the present time rather than being fake past memories, especially since Cybil runs Harry’s information and discovers he’s been dead 18 years.
I realize Harry was finding Cheryl’s memories, with all the teenage vapidness and dull “shocking” cliches involved, but he also seems to find memories of other, unrelated, people too (like the kid hanging himself with his belt.) I stand by my opinion on there being plotholes and the phone making no sense beyond an abstract gameplay device. I think Harry would know Cheryl’s memories because he’s a product of Cheryl’s mind. But you bring up a good point.
Well the shrink also says “jock”, but I digress. I suspected it from the “color the house” thing, it just didn’t seem like a test one would give a man in his late 30’s or 40’s.
I’m fixated on the snow, or more specifically the icy Nightmare world, because I don’t see how it fits thematically at all. If the snow was only a design to scare you as you assert and not meant to be part of the story then why no variation? The chase scenes were all pretty much identical, and ice still isn’t scary. If the game was going to abandon the Silent Hill mythos the snowstorm is a suitable device, but the Nightmare world could have had more variation and been psychologically relevant.
Oh no I noticed their transformations, but my point was just you never get a good look at them anyway so it doesn’t really impress.
I still say it’s fourth-wall breaking, its all based on the player’s psychological choices, not the one’s you make Harry and/or Cheryl make, and it only effects things in a non-literal sense, like the appearances of characters and bits of dialogs. I guess it doesn’t seem like fourth-wall breaking if you think the entire town is in Cheryl’s head, but I really don’t think it is or it’s supposed to be. But yes I agree the changes aren’t even significant enough to matter.
As the title says this is a follow-up rant about the story specifically, I already went over the gameplay in my review, which was linked in the opening paragraph. I think the problems I had with it were the same problems most people had with it though, which again I can’t understand the 8 review ratings this game is getting from many places. This game is a 6 or a 7 at the most when taken on its own.
10:05 pm on December 17th, 2009
I seriously have my doubts if you and I played the same game, or if you and I are fans or the same franchise.
First of all, how do you say you know so much about Silent Hill? Are you talking about the same Silent Hill I know? I know a Silent Hill where you can’t be sure of anything. The town indeed has an unnatural power, and this power is what makes it a hell for the people. But because of this power, the series has taught me that you CAN’T be sure of anything. You say you know exactly the meanings of the things in the first three games? I doubt it. You think you know Lisa Garland? You think you know exactly what’s Maria? You think you know exactly what’s Heather shooting at? Damm, you think you know where Silent Hill is located?
Sorry man, I seriously doubt it.
And the myths. Yeah, the town never talks about them, but does that mean that they don’t exist? Well, it’s Silent Hill anyway. And what makes you think that this is a different town? Oh, the fog, my bad. So you say that Silent Hill is a combination of a Fog World + an Otherworld? Well… if the games don’t tell me otherwise (and ignoring the movie and its crappy plot, btw) there is indeed a real Silent Hill with real people dealing with every-day problems of real life.
Have you ever thought that maybe we are explorating for first time the real Silent Hill? Have you ever thought that maybe, the Harry we see is a Marya-like creation by the town? Maybe he IS interacting with real people, some of them are other fakes (Dahlia maybe?) and he is heading for Cheryl – at Dr K’s Lighthouse office?
Ridiculous? Maybe. But the game indeed makes you think. BUt for what I read, I guess that you are one of the people who think that the Silent Hill games has canon endings and stuff.
Psychological meaning? Well… I think that almost everything in the game has a psychological meaning, maybe not for the player (our psycho only affects slighlty the environments and characters, yes) but indeed for the protagonist – not Alessa, as in the first game but Cheryl. I guess you’ve never thought of Cheryl’s feelings for her father… and how everything seems to be related to this. Michelle never mentioned that she likes to date guys that looks like her father – maybe hinting Cheryl’s disturbed view of her father?
I still don’t think you and I played the same game, for me, SM’s Cheryl is one of the deepest characters the series has known to date. You can’t say that you know everything this game is about, because a lot of people will proof you otherwise – a lot of people will support me, others will contradict me. But that’s the Silent Hill tradition, isn’t it?
Oh, well, maybe at the end I was right and you are fan of an entirely different franchise, or maybe we’re thoughts are so differently because… well. It’s Silent Hill after all
10:08 pm on December 17th, 2009
Oh, and btw, I really doubt that a 13-year-old kid will understand the really meaning and the mature theme of the plot. Are you a 13-year-old kid?
10:19 pm on December 17th, 2009
I believe I said that my points about Maria and Lisa were my own interpretation, but my point was also that past games were ambiguous, subtle, implied and left up to the player and that was a good thing. But it’s pretty clear from Silent Hill 2 and Born From a Wish that Maria isn’t real, I don’t think anyone would argue that, it’s the finer details that people have their own versions of.
And hell the Book of Lost Memories outright says Silent Hill is in New England. And that’s straight from the original game creators.
I’m wondering now if you even read my post.
I did say I think Harry is a delusion out there interacting with real people, I said that pretty clearly. However I also said there is nothing in this game that indicates the town itself is supernatural in any way. And since the characters were all changed there is no Fog World, there is no Otherworld, there’s no long history of people practicing a strange cult. This isn’t the same Silent Hill.
Canon endings? No. The endings have no bearing on the mythos established by the previous games.
You find out pretty overtly that Cheryl was going after older men, as girls/women with daddy issues are wont to do. I don’t see what that has to do with ice and screechy naked molerat people. Look at Cheryl in Silent Hill 3, all of her monsters had pretty overt symbolism about fear of sex and fear of pregnancy. The whole game was practically a metaphor for puberty.
We all have different opinions, I don’t mind a healthy debate, its pretty fun actually. Though on reflection your second post is a bit immature. Are YOU 13 years old?
10:18 am on December 18th, 2009
I was actually referring to your comment in the review saying that “this game is ridiculously rated M”. Seeing how you didn’t get the game, I’m asking: are YOU a 13-year-old-kid?
I’m not, btw.
PS: The original creator of Silent Hill left the series after the first game =/
1:10 pm on December 18th, 2009
@ Escapist What I said it almost seems ludicrous that it’s rated M because it used so many stock PG-13 horror movie tropes. It just feels like a PG-13 rated horror movie is all I was saying, the kind that try to be scary, shocking and mature but can’t go far enough.
What didn’t I get exactly? I actually agreed with you that Harry is a delusion interacting with real people. I just disagree that the town itself is supernatural in this game because there’s no indication that it is.
The original creators were a whole development team dubbed “Team Silent”. It takes more than one person to make a video game, you know. Besides I think the first Silent Hill’s instruction booklet also says the town is in New England.
1:46 pm on December 18th, 2009
The only Silent Hill game I’ve ever played was the first SH on PS. Never played the rest mainly because I never bothered to buy newer consoles. I never had enough time to play them anyway, so let’s just talk about SH1 and SHSM.
Movie? Forget the movie.
Anyway, you do have a good point on how the game was presented. Unlike SH1 which left more questions than answers, SHSM was more straightforward when it came to the end. Well at least that’s what I’ve seen through numerous gameplays over the net (yeah, I’ve spoiled myself. Like I said, I don’t have time or the console to play SHSM). I do, however, adore how you achieve the multiple endings in SHSM. Gameplay-wise, it was more interactive given the fact that the game analyzes the seemingly minor actions of the player (like looking at pinup posters), which was not present in SH1. Based on this observation, SHSM does deserve an above average score. After all, the gameplay IS what makes a game a “game”. Major factor there.
As for the game timeline, I don’t think you should even be mixing it up with the other series or SH1. As the developers put it, SHSM is a re-imagining NOT a remake of the first, so it’s plausible that the game varies entirely off SH1.
By the way, I just watched the SHSM UFO ending on YouTube. I give it 5/5 stars.
2:45 pm on December 18th, 2009
@K.I. Well it isn’t like a past Silent Hill hasn’t done that before. Minor actions determined the In Water and Maria endings in SH2, the difference is it was much more transparent and that game didn’t try to make it a selling point gimmick. Silent Hill 1 hinged on more major plot points for the endings though (mostly surrounding Cybil and Michael.) Silent Hill 3 didn’t have much ending variation because the story was actually pretty straight-forward, but it had a ton of unlockables.
Oh I’m not trying to fit it into the timeline (and when you think about it 2 isn’t directly related to 1 and 3), I’m just saying that Silent Hill games are largely about the town’s mythos (the cult, the Otherworld, the Fog World, the monsters) and to remove all that… it just doesn’t feel like a Silent Hill game at all. The town itself plays no role in this game. And it isn’t really as psychological, scary or mind-fucky as the older games. And also I don’t understand why they used the characters from SH1 if they were going to write a completely different, unrelated story anyway.
9:17 am on December 19th, 2009
Hmm.. maybe so. At first, I was skeptical with placing characters from SH1 to an alternate universe and changing their history and personality (sort of). However. if reviewed by itself without connecting it to the past games, I’d say it’s pretty good. Sadly, the only reason I could think of why the developers chose to recycle characters from SH1 and the game title, was to boost sales.
Now that you’ve mentioned the other games, I might look into them as well. They sound pretty good (at least SH2, as praised by many fans).
I finally got a chance to play SHSM a little (via a friend of mine) just hours ago, just to get a glimpse of how the game felt like. The interaction variations were interesting. My friend, who had played the game earlier, was shocked to find several small details (dialogues and such) from my gameplay differ from what the game threw at him.
The downside, SHSM nightmare mode seemed repetitive. Sure the town was frozen, but other than that, there wasn’t much variation, unless I missed it. It’s hard to explore the frozen town with creatures you can’t kill endlessly running to get you until you reach the safe point, only to find out that getting there reverts the town back to normal. Also, the monsters weren’t creative enough for me. Skinless humanoids, and? That’s just it. There is no “and”. Different gameplays show small variations of these skinless humanoids, other than that, they’re pretty much the same. No ghost children, undead dogs, freaky monkeys, distorted mannequins, sword-wielding pyramid heads or faceless nurses. I’m not saying the developers should put these creatures into the game. I was hoping there was more variety to them that’s all.
That concludes my review on SHSM for now. It might change. Who knows? Till then, I’ll be playing more of it (and perhaps the other games too, if I ever get the chance to do so).
1:17 pm on December 19th, 2009
@ K.I. Sure if reviewed by itself it’s decent, I’d still only give it a 6 or 7 personally. But think about it, would it have sold as much as it has if it didn’t have the Silent Hill branding on it? And if they hadn’t used the characters’ names and hadn’t called it Silent Hill I’ll bet no one would even think to compare it to a Silent Hill game.
Silent Hill 2 probably is the best, I really like 3 too, I think it gets alot of undeserved smack. It did have a different tone and a more straight-forward plot than the previous games but it kept in that Silent Hill goodness. Also the graphics were amazing for PS2 and the player character is actually well voice acted lol.
I got to the fourth or fifth Nightmare sequence, the one in the hospital, before I finally threw up my hands and quit (I had to return the game the next day anyway) and watched the rest online. There is never any variation. Ever.
Again I wonder if the ice theme and even the running itself was there only to hide graphical limitations. If so that’s a stupid thing to torture the player over.
The naked molerat people, as I like to call the monsters, DO change slightly. But like I said there’s no motif or symbolism. The real people I encountered were the vanilla models, not overtly sexy but not frumpy either. My monsters had segmented bodies and heads in diamond and other sharp, geometric shapes. What the hell did that have to do with anything?
7:48 am on December 20th, 2009
Yeah, I do realize the monsters are different depending on how the player chooses to act in the game, yet for some reason, they still look quite bland to me… I dunno.
As for motif or symbolism, I’m unsure where all that geometric shapes, etc. fit into your profile. Maybe someone else has a theory for that. I’ll check some forums.
1:42 pm on December 20th, 2009
@K.I. They are bland really. And that’s just my point, there seems to be no symbolism, besides the big-titted monsters if you choose to be a pervert I guess.
3:06 am on December 25th, 2009
Y’now I do think Shattered memories is a good game but I have to agree with Sai. It was really its’ own tale entirely and claiming to be a re-imagining of the original SH is misleading.
The game uses familiar names but even the characters are so far removed from their original source material they might as well be different people.
Sure, SH is about psychology but it is also about the occult and the paranormal as well. SH 2 which was the most psychological still kept the town’s history and the spooky vibe to it.
As bad as ppl think Homecoming was at least it didn’t disregard all the previous games while shouting “I know Silent Hill better than team silent does!” You could actually find references to the other games in Homecoming. There is even a letter about Douglas’s private investigation helping to stop The Order.
At the end of the day Shattered memories is merely the arm chair therapy session of a troubled insecure person letting go of their past to move on. Yes, that is a positive message but finding out everthing is only in the mind sort of disenchants me.
I play videogames because they dare to ask what if instead of stating what is. Shattered memories is a good game but it’s not Silent Hill.
3:13 pm on December 25th, 2009
The problem (or well, part of it) with the game’s plot twist being described to you at the end, at least as I see it, is that it pretty much obliterates any tension earlier in the game. Like a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie (like Signs or The Village), once you know that the aliens are ZOMG TEH REALS AND WANT TO INVADES or that ZOMG THE VILLAGE IS JUST ISOLATED AND RUN BY JERKS none of the scares or tense moments earlier can be scary *or* tense because they were completely reliant on you not knowing the twist.
9:42 pm on December 29th, 2009
@ Ohma You know that’s a really really good comparison. Signs overall was just.. labored, but The Village could have been decent. I felt ripped off cause it was such a Twilight Zone episode ending. Good if you’re telling a half-hour story, abysmal if you’re doing a two hour film.
And not only is the village just crazy Amish people but the monster was just a retard in a suit. Great.
And again take Silent Hill 2, you can play that game again every year or two and still feel the same tension and mystery, and you’ll keep noticing new things each time. Sure it’s not a flawless game by any stretch of the imagination (gameplay and retarded-key-puzzles wise) but it’s eons more compelling than this drivel.
12:21 pm on January 3rd, 2010
The psychology test thing has little to do with the story itself, just so you know. It’s not part of the story other than the fact that Cheryl is in a psychiatrist’s.
The whole point of the psych system is that it is evaluating YOU. Not Harry. Not Cheryl.
The game is basing itself around what you chose and the only thing it effectively determines about the story is the ending. It doesn’t change the fact it’s Cheryl or that you’re dead. It is for the purpose of watching how you played the game and tailoring the experience to you. All it does is effect what things look like, the ending, and very minor character quirks. It’s a reflection on you as a person for what you choose to look at and what you choose to say in the psych tests, and then it evaluates YOU at the end. I thought that was pretty damn clear months ago.
But all of the mementos, echoes, made-up characters and stuff are static things that always occur and they are there for the actual story and explain the things that happened to Cheryl both when she was younger with her family, and as she grew up without her dad.
And be honest, if Dr. K didn’t explain what happened, you’d have raged even harder that the ending didn’t make sense. Even though, the whole thing makes sense if you actually payed attention to most of the stuff going on in the game.
And Ohma does bring up a great comparison about the story. But the replay value is riding on the psych test changing the experience, not the story itself.
1:01 pm on January 3rd, 2010
@MoldyClay: I realize that, but again the problem is I’m not playing ME, I’m playing as Harry. If this was an open-ended game with a blank slate of a main character then it would make a little more sense to have such a system, but as it stands it’s just a whole bunch of fourth wall breaking and cold reading.
I mean a game like Fable or Fallout does the whole “tailoring your experience to your behavior” better than this game, primarily because you aren’t playing a set character. It brings nothing new to the table and the things it does try to do are executed poorly.
Not all the static is related to Cheryl. What about the guy molesting his daughter or the kid hanging himself in the locker room? The fuck did any of that have to do with Cheryl?
No I got the ending, I guessed it pretty early on. (at least the fact it was Cheryl in therapy, I began to suspect it from the “color the house” exercise.) Though maybe the lack of blatant explanations in the first Silent Hill games is what makes some reviews say this game isn’t a “head scratcher” or doesn’t make you go “huh?” at the end, and that’s a little sad.
11:11 am on February 8th, 2010
okay, so I just finished the game. can someone explain to me what cheryl did? like was she the one who killed the guy in the mall? and the pictures of her in the shower and in the car, like why did people pick on her?
5:34 pm on February 8th, 2010
@ Tay: The gist of it seemed to be that she had daddy issues so she got involved with older men etc. And those issues caused her to act out, as far as the mall goes I think she was just a shoplifter.
5:29 am on February 28th, 2010
Ironically, if you take this laundry list of “plot inconsistencies” and actually think them through, you will even learn something about the plot.
Although somethings are better left out. Such as your ridiculous rant on Delusion Harry’s cell phone. Here’s a hint: Because it’s also a DELUSION CREATED BY CHERYL.
4:20 pm on February 28th, 2010
@ Lisa I do believe I also asked WHY would she make that part of her delusion? Why would she even think of such a detail?