A game simply shouldn’t look this detailed on the Wii, with marvelous lighting, high-poly assets, and sprawling levels where almost every door opens to somewhere new. I’m not kidding here when I say that the facial animations and mocap are often better than most of the game’s peers on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, including its sibling Silent Hill: Homecoming. That tense, spontaneous decision-making gets you in the heat of the moment far more than just beelining to the nearest closet.Īll of this sings thanks to Shattered Memories’ amazing presentation. In fact, they’re part of what makes survival horror great. It’s a design philosophy I frankly think most modern combat-free horror games could stand to learn from. It treats running and hiding like most horror games treat combat - thinking ahead and being observant is more than enough to get you through. There are no cruel dead ends or insta-kill monsters chasing you. Isolation engulfs you, making every time you finally meet a friendly face a momentary relief before the town rips you away, back out into the cold.ĭanger is always licking at your heel, but you still have agency even when out of flares. That’s when it starts to seep in under your skin, subtly, while Shattered Memories’ fantastic sound design leaves you often with nothing but crunching snow, howling winds, and Akira Yamaoka’s haunting piano chiming in. An aura of paranoia enshrouds you, maybe even a little annoyance when it prods you over certain choices. Once you know the game’s constantly watching you and taking notes, you start to reconsider how you explore the world. It’s not a profound change mechanically, but executing this much variable storytelling on what’s effectively a single trait is an intense amount of effort, something that can be said about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories as a whole. Say you’ve cheated, and you’ll hear references to divorce. However, if you do this and assure in a personality quiz that you’ve never cheated on a partner, it leads to more discussions on passion in conversations and phone logs. Some of these character-molding moments are obvious, like staring lasciviously at pin-ups on the wall. That disconnect is intentional, however, and a key part of what makes Shattered Memories work. Dahlia still plays a key role in the story, shaping past and future events, but instead of a crazed fanatic, she’s the town’s teen pariah. For example, you’ll have to navigate an abandoned high school plagued with pint-sized ghosts like in the original, but none of them are charging at you with knives, instead luring you deeper into the grimy halls. It still follows the overall pace and flow of the original game, only to offer wildly different interpretations of those familiar elements. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Is a bold reimagining of the first game, thoroughly retooling several core plot beats, characters, and elements. It also makes motion controls on the Wii work better than some modern VR games. It eschews combat in favor of fleeing in terror, tosses out the series’s cult for more cerebral threats, and is easily the closest to the original games when it comes to its adventure game sensibilities. Yet Silent Hill: Shattered Memories defies so many aspects its peers were criticized for. While the Silent Hill fandom is a bit harsh on the later sequels, I will agree that most of these would-be successors have fallen short. There’s more divisive sequels to Silent Hill than you can shake Pyramid Head’s cleaver at. I’ve been wanting to get to the Silent Hill series for a while, for obvious reasons.
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