Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

I was genuinely excited when I heard Silent Hill 1 was getting the remake treatment on the Wii. I never played the first one, so the idea of getting to play it with updated graphics sounded good to me.

Sure American companies have been making terrible Silent Hill games lately, but how can they screw up just taking Silent Hill 1’s gameplay and script and making the game again?

Well they could screw it up by deciding to make this a “re-imagining” rather than a remake, and by being developer Climax Studios the people behind Silent Hill Origins. Great. And like always, Climax has friggin’ missed the point of Silent Hill.

And the first point they fail on is the idea that “Silent Hill is psychological.”  True, Silent Hill games do have that reputation, however it was Silent Hill 2 that set that precedent. And their definition of “psychological” isn’t the subtle, nightmarish Freudian imagery of Silent Hills 2 and 3, no no, it’s making the player take a laughably rudimentary psych test at the beginning of the game. And to add to the fun every time you boot up the game you’re greeted by an obnoxious bright red screen that warns you that it will psychologically profile you and use this information against you. Woooo scary.

There’s a problem here though. This is not some open-ended game where the person you’re playing is a blank slate of an avatar for you to put yourself into. It’s a very linear game with a very specific story where you’re taking on the role of the legendary Harry Mason. And that’s a problem too, Harry Mason is not James Sunderland, he was never characterized as a mental train wreck, he was just a widower and a good father desperately searching for his daughter in the face of an occult nightmare summoned by a crazy cult. The monsters and atmosphere didn’t stem from his psyche, but Alessa’s, the girl lying in the basement of a hospital purposefully kept in alive in agony so that she would birth the cult’s god. In fact the entire Otherworld was an extension of her suffering. Silent Hill 2 kept the Otherworld theme but introduced the idea that people with painful secrets could now shape the town and see different things depending on what was in their own minds. Futhermore I don’t see how you’re supposed to notice the “psychology” aspect of Shattered Memories at work unless you play through at least twice and try to spot the differences. Which would be interesting if this were a stronger game.

And if you’re a Silent Hill nerdtard like me it gets worse: this Harry Mason’s catchphrase is now “I was in a car accident” rather than “have you seen a little girl”, tsk, unforgivable! Oh and he also has amnesia, but it doesn’t resemble amnesia as much as it does Alzheimer’s disease. Really, Climax? An amnesiac video game protagonist? You’re really pushing the envelope here, huh? So yeah, this character doesn’t sound like Harry Mason at all, so for the remainder of this review he will be referred to as Barry Lason.

Oh and not only is Silent Hill a normal occupied town, but Barry Lason is a citizen. Enjoy your nerd rage, SH fans.

Anyway we open with a very sinister and condescending therapist, later in the game he forces you to do degrading art therapy and some of his actions and things he says makes you wonder why the hell anyone would pay for his services. Therapist man is talking to someone, presumably it’s Barry Lason but I suspected immediately this could easily be a bait and switch. Barry Lason was driving around in some insane blizzard that has caused all the roads to be closed and convenient 3 story tall banks of snow to act as invisible walls. Just like in the original game he crashes his car, gets out, and starts desperately searching for his daughter Cheryl. Unlike in the original game you can clearly see Cheryl wasn’t even in the fucking car. So great, I could take a good guess at the ending within the first 15 minutes. Good jorb, guys.

When the game isn’t being extraordinarily boring it’s incredibly frustrating. It’s hard, but not in any challenging way, mostly in unfair and cheap ways. First the boring parts: most of the time you’re just plodding around ridiculously dark rooms finding no clues, no mysteries, no monsters, just walking. The game attempts to creep you out in these sections with loud music at times but because you quickly become aware there are no monsters you know there’s no threat. Occasionally you’ll run into a locked door and Barry Lason will mutter the obvious that he needs a key. The key is always right around the corner hidden in some object like a can. In fact, one of the very first key puzzles gives you two blatant clues right in a row, the second of which is literally a sign that might as well have said “THE KEY IS OVER THERE.” Okay, sure, past Silent Hill games have had some pretty ludicrous puzzles (like finding four keys to unlock a box with a piece of hair in it that you can then use to fish another key out of a drain…) but the ones in Shattered Memories are just insultingly easy. There are other kinds of puzzles too, but the solution to them all is always in some obvious location in the same room, usually with an arrow pointing at it. Other times you take pictures of the ghostly residue of things that occurred, presumably, in the past with Barry Lason’s widely ridiculed iPhone. There are a few benefits to the cellphone, however, such as easy access to the map and being able to save any time you want.

This portion of the game operates like an old point and click adventure, including the common issue in that genre where you often can’t figure out what the hell the game wants from you. Many times it wants you to work locks on doors, open cupboards and pick up objects. This is fine, but it wants you to use meticulous Wiimote motion so the game can pretend it’s simulating what it would be like to be REALLY opening cupboards and such with your own hands. It took me almost 10 minutes to figure out how to turn a beer can upsidedown and shake it to get a key out, mostly banging it around the screen like a frustrated gorilla before I got it.

Then there are the “Nightmare” portions of the game. This is our Otherworld proxy. Unlike previous Silent Hills where you’d have sparse monsters in a foggy, almost entirely abandoned town and more dangerous monsters when the blood-and-rust-covered-everything Otherworld took hold, you only get monsters in the Nightmare portions. The transitions are pretty cool, but in the end ice is still boring and not scary.

The monsters as well are extremely underwhelming, they all look like faceless naked mole rat people and are more annoying than scary. Sure the monsters evolve slightly over time depending on what objects and signs you stare at the most, but there’s no rhyme or reason or clear motif here, there’s nothing “psychological” about it. Look at Silent Hill 2’s monsters: from monsters that are just two pairs of women’s legs on either end, to monsters that struggle against a straight jacket made of their own flesh, to a manifestation of one character’s molestation at the hands of her father we’re talking about some pretty mind-fuck level stuff.

And no, Climax, referencing drugs and mentioning sex every now and again doesn’t make a game “disturbing”, unless maybe your target demographic is Amish teenagers or something. In fact Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is such PG-13 horror movie fare it almost seems ludicrous that it has an M rating. It doesn’t help that most of the story pieces you get focus on obnoxious teenage stereotypes.

Anyway, Silent Hill: SM’s monsters are just screechy little bastards who never stop chasing or attacking and since they can jump, climb, and go through doors an entire horde of them could be following you at any given time.  I also found that they slow Barry Lason down before they’re even latched onto him and it’s nearly impossible to just run past them. When you do have these pests hanging on old Barry Lason seemingly humping him to death you have to use very specific waggle motions to get them off, which are kind of hard to remember when you’re struggling to get three of the things away from you before they drain your unseen health. You can get flares to scare them off for a short time, but this makes it even harder to see where you’re going considering the game is so retardedly dark. None of this would be a problem, however, if you were allowed to fight the monsters.

Yeah. No lead pipe. No gun. No rifle. Not even a board with a nail. Why? Who knows, Climax wills it?

Previous Silent Hill games let you decide whether to flee or fight, it was a big part of the gameplay, and many of the monsters would not actively attack you, and even if they did they were not impossibly fast. Here in Shattered Memories your only choice is to run around blindly until you find the exit of the “Nightmare”.  Barry Lason will at least automatically open doors as you run toward them, but this is ridiculous. Although the information on the GPS/map system in your phone states that when a waypoint is set you can see a “faint path” that leads in the right direction I’ll be damned if I’ve spotted it yet. Unless that meant they made all the ledges and doors glow blue for you. You can hide from the creatures, but they can find you anyway, you can throw stuff in their path but it requires a nunchuck waggle which is rather cumbersome since you’re using the joystick to move and holding the Z button to run. I died in these sections mostly because I ended up running in circles with no idea where to go, since everything beyond your flashlight is pitch black you have no peripheral vision and it’s hard to make snap decisions about which direction to go in, you also can’t slow down and think about it or even look around because you’re constantly pursued by screechy hump-monsters, and you can’t look at the map because that makes you stop running and the monsters will get you. The third Nightmare sequence even forces you to take pictures of things while there are monsters afoot. And since they can climb walls and you can’t kill them this is incredibly frustrating. Honestly, this game would have been ten times better if you could kill the friggin’ monsters, even temporarily. I can’t even begin to fathom what made them decide to make the game this way, were weapons too difficult to program in?

And I’ll say again none of this is even scary! These things are just stock jump-scare monsters, and they don’t even do that well.  What made the classic Silent Hill monsters scary was their corpse and insect-like undulating forms. It’s because those games weren’t afraid to truly disturb you and did so by creating creatures and a world based around what repulses the human psyche most. Alot of it was also in the sound design, the classic Silent Hills would feature a bevy of atmospheric sounds that would just crush you with their intensity. When you weren’t hearing disgusting, squishy noises you were hearing nauseatingly high pitched buzzing that made you feel like you just had to get out of there. The only notable atmospheric sound I’ve heard in Shattered Memories thus far is a repeated noise in a dark forest that sounded like someone eating potato chips.

Now, truthfully, this game could be a decent distraction on its own, if it was an original story. The graphics are nice, especially for a Wii game, with good character models and some pretty impressive character animation, especially in the facial expressions. But the fact that it has to castrate Silent Hill 1’s plot and bank itself on the namesake of a classic series is just annoying.  In fact it is so radically different from the plot of Silent Hill 1 I am baffled as to why they didn’t just make an original Silent Hill story, you know, like Homecoming did? I mean Homecoming wasn’t up to par with the original trilogy but it at least kept in the spirit of Silent Hill games and had some good ideas (especially with the bosses.)

Without spoiling too much I’ll tell you right now the ending of Shattered Memories is a plot twist, but it’s a plot twist that renders the whole game pointless and doesn’t make any sense. You can’t just subvert the predictable ending you seemed to be building toward with a random plot twist in the opposite direction, Climax, it doesn’t work that way. It isn’t deep, it isn’t shocking, it’s just bad writing. It doesn’t help that the mysteries are all spelled out for the audience with an ending speech instead of letting them draw their own conclusions and analyze it themselves. It’s like when you can tell a generic summer horror movie got a script rewrite halfway through and no one bothered to fix the plot holes. You are not Satoshi Kon, Climax. This game is worth a rental at least, just to experience it whether you’re looking to throw yourself into a fit of Silent Hill nerd rage like me or curious about it’s much lauded but ultimately shallow gameplay mechanics.

If you want to know more about the game’s story and ending click here to see my spoiler-ridden follow-up rant.

If you'd like to experience the original Silent Hill games without having to play them I highly recommend L0rd Vega's Let's Plays. You get all of the story as well as some hilarious commentary.

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