During a hands-on demo of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Konami’s Wii “reimagining” of the 1999 Playstation survival horror game Silent Hill, I saw some very promising things and some stuff that worried me. I wish I’d had the opportunity to ask some questions of someone who had answers, but while publishers sometimes fill their press events with people who have worked on developing the games being shown, Konami’s event was run by PR flacks who only knew the basics. So I can only go by what I saw, and what I read in an interview with the game’s producer in Destructoid.
The Story: Like the Original, But Totally Different
The game begins with a therapist asking the player to fill out a short yes/no questionnaire (“I make friends easily”, “I enjoy role-playing during sex”, etc.). Presumably your answers influence the situations you face in the game. The game is said to watch you as you play and change based on your actions. That’s a cool gameplay idea, but starting with a therapist worries me from a story standpoint, because the original series never stated explicitly that the games were really an exploration of the protagonists mind (although analysts have suggested the possibility), and this beginning would seem to erase some of the game’s mystery.
In Shattered Memories, you are Harry Mason, a man searching for his missing daughter Cheryl in the deserted town of Silent Hill. According to the interview, very little of Shattered Memories conforms to the original game’s story, (thus they use the term “reimagining” instead of “port” or “remake”). I was disappointed to learn this, since I have never played the first game and have always wanted to check it out.
Gameplay: Exploration and Fleeing
The game demo began with Harry getting out of his car, after which I wandered around rather aimlessly. The game is quite good looking, and I found it interesting that every time I pressed the A button, Harry would call out “Cheryl?” I also liked the technique used to open a latched door, in which you press the A & B buttons to “pinch” and then manipulate an object.
I was less thrilled with the way you open doors by pressing the A button to grab the doorknob and then shoving the analog stick forward to open it. Perhaps there’s a gaming reason for it (the PR flack didn’t know of one), but there wasn’t in the demo and it just seemed like a bother.
After wandering around for a while, I was allowed to skip forward in the demo to the part where everything gets weird. As in other Silent Hill games, players explore the normal world and then explore an eerie alternate version of that world. In this game, a phone call from Cheryl (like No More Heroes, the game has you use your remote as a cell phone) triggers a change in which everything in the town is suddenly covered in ice. It’s a cool effect, in that things change a little at a time, not in a cut scene, but in a way in which you can look around and see the changes happening.
It’s a cool effect, but the resulting icy world is less creepy than the bloody pools and rusty equipment of previous Silent Hill titles.
In the alternate world I was attacked by naked, featureless, humanoid creatures. The first one I saw could be seen through broken planks in the room above me, skittering across the upstairs floor, which was pretty creepy.
In an interesting design decision, Harry isn’t able to kill these creatures, but can only throw them off him with a flick of the remote and run for it. As you run you can tip objects over behind you, which I assume is meant to slow down your pursuers. I wound up getting swamped with creatures and killed without any idea what I was supposed to be doing, but the controls seemed solid and the fleeing was rather exciting, so I felt that part had potential.
Ambience: Dreading a Lack of Dread
What worries me about the game is that the alternate world didn’t feel nearly as spooky as those I visited in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. The game does use the Japanese composer who created the music for the first four games, but everything else is done by the Climax Group, who developed the first non-Japanese game in the series, Silent Hill: Origins. I only played a little of Origins, because it simply lacked the spooky ambience and compelling intrigue of the Japanese games.
That’s not the only time I’ve been disappointed with Climax, whose games seem uninspired. A sense of overpowering dread fueled the Silent Hill games (including the original, judging by this clip), and the little I played of this game lacked that dread. Although to be fair, it’s hard to be scared in a room full of gamers playing sports and singing games.
I hope they prove me wrong. There are certainly studios that manage something great in spite of a weak resume. And Shattered Memories is a good looking game with some good ideas. In fact, if it was a new IP (which means “intellectual property,” a term game publishers use for their game series) I would probably be more excited about it. The problem is it has “Silent Hill” in the title and I feel the game is likely to fall short of the brilliance of its predecessors.
For all my worrying, Shattered Memories still looks to be one of the most promising Wii games coming out this year. We’ll see if my fears or hopes are justified when the game is released this October.
