Silent Hill: Shattered Memories would rank pretty high on a list of bad horror games.
Now that I have your attention (and either your bile or accolades to go along with it), let's refine that statement a little bit.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a very good game and probably one of the best and most engaging gaming experiences I had in 2010. It just so happens to also be a terrible horror game. Funny how that works, right?
Anyhow, let's get the basics out of the way. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a reimagning of the original Silent Hill. You play as Harry Mason, a pretty average guy driving around with your daughter. Being an average guy, you have absolutely no clue how to drive in adverse weather conditions, so, as a result of some snow, you careen violently off the road and crash. When you eventually regain consciousness, you find your daughter is missing and you conclude that you are a bad enough dude to go find her.
So, as you can see, we start with something that is, conceptually, identical to the original Silent Hill. From this point though, the game diverges heavily from its predecessor, hence being touted as a reimagning rather than a remake. This isn't just a graphical overhaul of the original game with some Wiimote wiggling thrown in. This is a completely different game.
The majority of the game is spent wandering around the town of Silent Hill looking for your daughter and occasionally solving strange little puzzles. Well, that is, the parts of the game that take place in the real world.
Occasionally, something goes horrifically wrong, the world distorts, becomes coated in ice and hideous abominations known as Raw Shocks come out to hunt you. So, you grab your trusty pistol and-
Er, wait. I don't have a gun? Well, what about my board? I mean, the board served James pretty well in Silent Hill 2! Not the greatest weapon but-
I don't get a board either? You're telling me I don't get any weapons? Well.
Yes, in this game, you don't a single offensive tool. The only way to survive your encounters with the Raw Shocks is to run. Run, shake them off when they grab you and hope you can find an exit before you're overwhelmed. Its honestly a pretty cool idea and I do love to see horror games strip you of the ability to fight back against the things that go bump in the night. It really does diminish the feeling of dread and imminent disaster when you can just shotgun the legions of hell in the face.
Unfortunately, though, its really the application of this concept (the Nightmare World chase sequences) that causes Shattered Memories to stumble.
The whole of the game is really atmospheric. The environments are well done, the music is fantastic (to the long time Silent Hill fans: does this really come as a surprise?), sound is well used and the lighting is perfect. There are some amazingly designed areas (Nowhere stands out to me) and there are a couple of excellent surprises. Even a few of the notes/audio files really do manage to deliver and intensify the experience.
The game's psychologist sequences (where you are sitting in the room, rehashing your adventures to Dr. K and being psychoanalyzed because it sounds pretty damn crazy!) are absolutely phenomenal. I could rant for hours about the character of Dr. K, who is perfectly realized and acted in a completely stellar fashion, but I'm pretty sure I'd lose you all around page four or five. Suffice to say he is an appropriately unsettling individual who serves as a fitting antagonistic force throughout the game.
The problem is just that, for all the atmosphere, the game never really delivers any meaningful scares and you quickly realize the what the game's fatal flaw is: so long as the world around you is not a horrific, frozen landscape (which is always telegraphed), you are never in any danger. Monsters only come out once you enter the nightmare world. This safety is what really brings the game down, because you can't have terror without some real and constant sensation of danger. You need to think that something deadly is lurking around every corner, that every dark shadow could contain something positively dreadful.
Unfortunately, with the way the game is structured, there really isn't a good fix for this. My basic instinct would be to say that they should have just had a sequence where monsters ambushed you in the real world and, from that point on, no longer had the barrier of the real and the nightmare world as an indicator for when you're in danger. With the way the escapes are actually designed though, this is a bit of an impossibility, because the two chunks of the game are actually pretty heavily divided.
In the period before this game came out, I was really defending the choice to remove clunky, old Silent Hill combat from the game and replace it with this type of sequence. I thought it would do a lot for the game to really emphasize the normality of the PC and really make you dread monster encounters. In fact, I still do think this kind of approach (or at least a more gritty, visceral, in your face style of combat) is exactly what Silent Hill needs. What we got really doesn't cut it though.
The chases just aren't scary. They're fast paced and provide a nice contrast to the rest of the game, but more than anything they end up as annoying. The monsters aren't a major threat unless you take a very long time to escape, which makes the surreal landscape the real danger and, being difficult to navigate (largely on the basis that you don't know where you're going), you'll find yourself a little more prone to anger that you've looped around than panic at the hordes right behind you. They needed to be sudden, short and dependent on quick reactions, not on just having the endurance to weather an irritating maze while being opposed at every turn by the Wiimote refusing to register that I really did throw that damn monster off correctly.
So, that's where I'm coming from with this game. As a horror game, it just doesn't cut it, since being scary is kind of an essential part of the genre.
Now, if we dispense with that classification and refer to it as something like, say, a psychological thriller instead? I will unabashedly shout the glories of Shattered Memories from the rooftops. It is a very well designed game, fun to play and possesses one of the best endings that I have witnessed in my long career as a gamer.
Seriously, if you haven't played this game, you should check it out. Worst case, just rent it. It clocks in at a pretty breezy 8 hours or so if you have no clue what you're doing, so it shouldn't be too hard to get through in a single rental.
I would have suggested you buy it so that Konami would let Climax do the next installment of the game as well, but they annoyed me by handing Silent Hill 8 off to another studio anyway.
So there.
