Long, long ago, in 1999, Konami released a game called Silent Hill. That game cast the player as everyman Harry Mason and followed him as he groped his way through the decrepit, fog-drenched titular town in search of his young daughter Cheryl, who he finds to have disappeared from his side following an unfortunate car crash. Eleven years, five games and one feature film later, and Konami is right back in the driver’s seat. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a unique horror game which recycles the set-up of the 1999 original while changing just about everything else. Some characters and set pieces are re-imagined while others are replaced or discarded altogether. The series’ well known otherworld of ruin and rust is replaced by a hell of ice and snow, and the game jettisons the clunky combat of its predecessors for a quieter, cleaner style of play. It’s not the Silent Hill players are used to. It’s a bold new vision for the town with its own cache of new ideas. It can still scare players sleepless, though; welcome back to Silent Hill.
I became a fan of the Silent Hill games in 2001 with the release of Silent Hill 2 for the Playstation 2. The moment I began a long walk down a quiet hillside and into a dense blanket of fog, something was different. Most horror games, Resident Evil, Fatal Frame, and more recently Dead Space among them, are content to startle the player. Every time you walk past a window, or a broken door, or a rickety grate, you know something foul and ferocious with teeth like razors is going to burst forth and start to claw at your face, and that’s scary. But it isn’t haunting. From the very beginning, Silent Hill didn’t just want to startle the player: it wanted to stick with him. The series was never shy about fucking with the player’s head, unleashing its unique brand of nightmare imagery right when it was least expected and making the player wonder whether any of it was really happening. It doesn’t just yell out “boo” and call it a day. Silent Hill wants to get to know you before it scares the shit out of you.
Shattered Memories takes that idea and runs with it. Most of the game plays like other entries in the series, with the player exploring the town of Silent Hill in all of its crumbling glory. But Shattered Memories adds several new wrinkles, not the least of which is when it literally subjects the player to psychotherapy. During these interludes, the player sits in a chair and stares immobile at the confines of a comfy office while a therapist wanders about talking of death, guilt, sex, and more. You will fill out questionnaires, play with a coloring book, answer personal queries and otherwise reveal yourself to the game. Or not. There’s no requirement that you be honest with your therapist, but the game keeps closer track of your answers than you might think, and it becomes quickly apparent that what you do in the doctor’s office is reflected outside of it. It’s an interesting layer, it’s not something games usually do, and it underscores something that has always been unique to the Silent Hill games: the horror here is personal.
That’s something Harry Mason learns the hard way, and his quest to find his missing daughter will take many a horrific turn before it concludes. Narrative has always been an important part of the Silent Hill games, and the best ones consist of slow but sure pacing, an atmosphere thick with uncertainly and a steady descent into the surreal. Shattered Memories keeps pace nicely with the best of its predecessors, presenting the town not so much as a damned place infested with Hell-spawn than as a mirror for Harry’s own fears. The series has always located horror in the familiar, in side-streets and shopping malls, in hospitals and family homes. We're not in a Gothic mansion or on a derelict spaceship; Silent Hill is a small town the likes of which many players might recognize, and that allows it to slide under the skin in a way that more fantastical games cannot. The plot unfolds elegantly, circling around questions never quite answered until the player has sunken deep into the mystery. Harry will interact with other characters who aren’t quite right; their identities merge, fall apart, and reconstruct themselves before Harry’s eyes. If the game weren’t paced so swiftly all of this ambiguity might begin to wear thin, but the developers are always nudging the player on to the next area or scene. When answers finally do come, and they do, time has passed quickly.
It also passes easily, thanks to some well-conceived and implemented gameplay ideas by developer Climax. It goes without saying that the game controls better than early entries in the series, which had characters that moved like broken tanks. Shattered Memories smartly locks the camera behind the player’s shoulder, allowing him free range of movement and the ability to look around the world at will. It is the innovation of this game to keep the player very firmly planted in that world. The game makes excellent use of the Wii Remote Controller, letting it stand in as the player’s perpetually useful flashlight. Want to see what’s in that dark corner? You need merely point to it. Want to read that sign? Wave the Wii-Mote at it and zoom in. The implementation is so natural and practical it’s a small miracle more developers haven’t tried it.
Also adding to the sense of immersion is Harry’s handy cell phone, which allows him to do everything from calling other characters to checking his whereabouts on a GPS map to saving the game. Like the flashlight, it’s a natural inclusion which both serves a vital gameplay purpose and makes sense within the context of the narrative. Thanks to smart design decisions like these, navigating through Silent Hill has never been easier.
Of course, the lack of any combat may have something to do with that. In a major break from Silent Hills past, Shattered Memories features absolutely no fighting. There are no monsters stalking the town's snowy streets, and for the most part Harry's only task is to weave his way through the haunted town on the lookout for new passageways to plumb and fresh puzzles to solve. Atmosphere takes center stage here, as the player is given ample opportunity to take in his lovingly detailed surroundings. The developers have filled their world with an assortment of eclectic clutter that gives the town real presence. Harry will come across ghostly visages he can reveal with his camera-phone. He can call up numbers scrawled on walls, manipulate objects with well-implemented Wii-controls and collect mementos left scattered across town. All of this interaction gives the town a wonderful sense of place that is indelibly creepy, monsters or no.
And then there are the moments when Harry has to run away from screeching, faceless terrors that want to rape him to death. Like past Silent Hill games, this one has an otherworld, a nightmarish mirror of what was already a pretty eerie area. Unlike past Silent Hill games, the player’s visits to this frightening realm are the only time when they will have to deal with any kind of external threat. They’re also one of the few times that the game stumbles. Because the angry creatures populating the otherworld are invincible, Harry has no choice but to run from them until the town regains some semblance of normalcy. And make no mistake: running in a blind panic from a horde of lumbering monstrosities is pretty damn scary. The problem is that the player too often doesn’t know which way to run and can only find out through trial and error. When that happens, fear can give way to frustration. These sequences don’t take up too much playtime and ultimately do what they’re supposed to do, but at their worst they feel like a chore.
One wonders if the game would have benefited if it were divided less discretely. When the otherworld takes over, you’ll know it. The music drops off, ungodly creatures begin to crawl out of the walls and the whole town is enveloped in sheets of blue ice. It’s a scary effect, but it lets the player know all too clearly that danger has arrived. The merely creepy town of Silent Hill begins to feel like a safe haven. Perhaps blending the two worlds a little more at the edges would have made both feel like more of a whole.
But considering how successful most of the innovations in this game are, I’d rather the developers experiment with new play styles than fall back on what has (and hasn’t) worked in the past. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a rousing success of a video game. It finds ingenious new ways to lock the player into the experience while staying firmly rooted in the world of the series. If the developer chooses to make another Silent Hill title in the same style as this one, I will eagerly await it. And yet if this is the series’ swan song, I think I’ll be just as pleased. Shattered Memories delivers on the central metaphor of the series more effectively than any game since Silent Hill 2: Silent Hill isn’t just a sleepy town infested with demons. It’s a dizzying nightscape sucked right from our heads and oozed onto a disc. It can scare us because it knows us and we it. You are now leaving Silent Hill, but you’ll be back. You’ll always be back, new game or not.
