Review | Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
Format: Wii/PS2/PSP | Genre: Survival horror | Publisher: Konami | Developer: Climax Group | Release date: 05/03/10 | RRP: £34.99
Shattered Memories is clearly divided up into two different forms of gameplay. The first is the normal puzzle-solving mode. At first, you may be led to believe that Harry is in some kind of danger, due to the fact that he can slowly open doors, or peek inside before opening each one. The truth is, during normal sequences, Harry is never in any sort of danger. There are never any monsters that suddenly appear to accost him, nor is the environment itself of any danger. Silent Hill quite obviously freezes up into an icy landscape every time monsters appear, and doorways and ledges are lit up in a bright blue colour to indicate that you can move there. This “ice mode” replaces the traditional rust, blood and darkness that the “otherworld” in previous Silent Hill games featured.
Whenever the ice landscape appears, you’ll receive a waypoint on your phone’s GPS map. Your goal is to reach the waypoint to escape the nightmare sequence. This is usually a difficult task to accomplish, since Silent Hill blocks off all the obvious paths, as usual. It forces you to run absurd distances into all kinds of buildings, and you’re always pursued by a large number of enemies. Since combat has been completely removed from this iteration of Silent Hill, you can only run for your life.
There are only three things that your can do, besides running, to evade the monsters. You can tip over shelves or vending machines to stall the advance of the demons. You can hide in certain spaces for a short amount of time, although the monsters are able to eventually locate you if you stay for too long. And you’ll occasionally stumble across the flare. When lit up, the heat of the flare repels the ice-based monsters for a short amount of time, making you essentially invulnerable for about 30 seconds.
Although these nightmare sequences are a great idea, and the idea of a chase scene instead of bland combat might seem exciting, it quickly becomes something close to a chore, or 
even torture. The monsters occasionally grapple onto you to suck away your health, and the only thing you can do is to fling the monsters off. While monsters that grab onto the front and back are easy to shake off, ones that grapple the side of the body are made difficult by the Wii’s problematic motion sensing. Oftentimes, the throw won’t be executed in the right spot, or could take several tries. By this time, the monsters have usually swarmed you to the point where you can no longer move. And sometimes the monsters gather around so close that, even if you do somehow manage to fling them all off, you simply cannot escape due to the fact that the monsters cannot be pushed out of the way, remaining “solid” and blocking any chance of escape. You’re likely to find yourself swarmed in some of the harder chase sequences, to the point where you might end up starting over instead of dislocating your arm in a futile attempt to escape. Fortunately, there’s no penalty for dying.
SPLIT IN TWO
The problem with the two different gameplay modes is that they are simply too different from each other. Halfway through the game, it becomes apparent that there are certain times when you’ll never be in danger, which takes away a lot from the atmosphere that the puzzle sections deliver pretty well. The game quickly becomes a routine, and you know you’ll follow the same pattern of solving some puzzles, being plunged into a nightmare, and then ending up at Kaufmann’s office again. That said, Shattered Memories is generally interesting enough that suffering through the nightmare sequences is offset by the urge to see what happens in the next cut-scene or puzzle sequence.
[Continues...]
