It’s late, my eyes are bloodshot, my heart is pounding, and I am afraid to turn my light off. Who would have thought that I just got done with a gaming session on my Nintendo Wii? The family friendly console has finally offered up an experience that is anything but, in the new survival horror title Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. Not only is Shattered Memories a good hardcore game for the Wii, and a welcome addition to the Silent Hill franchise, but it also far and away outshines other contemporary survival horror titles with its innovative gameplay, and psychological take on the horror genre. In short, I am now terrified of that little white box that allows my little sister to train her pikachu and my little brother to stomp on goombas, because terrible manifestations of my own nightmares are going to come out of it and eat my face!

Shattered Memories is not an action title in the traditional sense of the word. In fact, it is not even a survival horror in the traditional sense of the word. At no point in the game will you find yourself entering combat. Not even once. Why? Because this is Silent Hill, and you have a horrible dark secret that the town wants to eat you for! Konami took a big risk and made the game totally combatless, something that we haven’t seen in the world of gaming for some time now. Some critics say that with modern technology there is no excuse to have a game without some form of direct combat. Shattered Memories proves them dead wrong … but I am getting ahead of myself.

So if you aren’t going around shooting monsters in the face … what are you doing? Well the majority of the gameplay focuses on exploration. You play the role of Harry Mason, a “normal” guy who gets into a car crash one snowy day on the outskirts of the quiet mountain down Silent Hill. When you come too, thankfully uninjured, you find that your daughter Cheryl is missing, and set off to traverse the dark, snowy, and mostly barren streets of the town in search of her. However, the town is more confusing than most, and you will have to spend a good portion of your time solving cryptic puzzles, finding keys, and navigating your way through the town’s creepy landscapes in order to move forward.

Most of the game plays out like a traditional adventure game more than anything else. With no adversaries to overcome, Harry instead will spend most of his time piecing together portions of a mystery that surrounds him, his daughter, and their shady past. Barring your way forward is nothing but your own fear, a puzzle or two, and horrible nightmare beasts that want to cuddle you to death, but we will get to that later. While you use the Wiimotes surprisingly smooth motion controls to perform many tasks such as latching and unlatching doors, shaking cans to find keys in them, and turning knobs on security camera TVs, bits and pieces of the story will be flung at you either through random notes you find along your way, or through more overt methods, such as a movie theater that plays a horrible scene from your past. I won’t say much about the story because I seriously risk spoiler’s here, but I will say that it is nothing good, and probably won’t have a happy ending. Speaking of endings, the game has multiple endings which reflect choices you made during the course of the game, though what ending is the “good” ending is debatable, because this is a Silent Hill game, and it has to end in some horrible way.

The controls are simple and intuitive. There aren’t many lights on in this city, so Harry will rely mostly on his trusty flashlight. Pointing with the Wiimote controls where Harry is pointing his flashlight, and those controls are very, very smooth. You can press the B button to zoom in and get a closer look at whatever you are looking at. This is useful for viewing everything from creepy scratched messages on walls and gravestones, to random playboy calendars people have pinned to the wall. In fact, the game successfully does away with the whole “press A to read this” convention that has been in games of all genres form the beginning. Instead you just walk up to say a poster or a gravestone and read it yourself by zooming in on it, and your character voices his opinion if he has one.

Harry also has a modern day smart phone, which is way more useful in a horror setting than most people realize. On his phone is a handy GPS map of the city, which can easily tell you where to go next. Aside from the flat out GPS, your phone emits static which slowly leads you in the right direction. If you follow the static, more often than not you will find yourself in the next area of the game, even though that area will probably be horrible in some way, shape, or form.

His phone also sports a camera which can take a picture of pretty much anything in the game. This is useful if say, you find a password or combination on a wall somewhere, and don’t know when you will need it. Simply take a picture and you have it saved for later. A good portion of the game feels like you are a detective solving a mystery, taking pictures of clues and using them in the right places, except this is a horror game, so the phones usefulness couldn’t stop there. Your camera also has the unique ability to take ghostly pictures that can’t be seen by the naked eye. For example, take a picture of an empty swing set and you may get a picture with a crying girl on it. Many of these pictures are pictures of your daughter Cheryl and give you clues as to where to go next, but they are creepy all the same and they seriously fuck with your mind.

In addition to all these other things, Harry’s cell phone is also a … well … a phone. You will find many phone numbers scattered throughout the game and will call them to get clues or just plain old creepy messages. Also, you may receive calls as well, which are almost universally creepy and horrible. The fact that the sound from your phone comes out of the speaker on your Wiimote is a real nice touch. You will find yourself at many times listening to your phone and not paying attention to the screen, only to eventually look back up and find something terrifying awaiting you.

At times, Silent Hill will change from a creepy passive aggressively scary quiet mountain town to a terrifying hell hole made of ice and madness. When this happens you run, and I mean RUN! Harry is just a normal ass dude, and he has no capability to fight the horrible fleshy beasts which hunt him down in the hell world. They will chase you, and you have to either find the exit or die. If they latch on to you, you can shake them off with flicks of the Wiimote and nunchuck, but only so much. If you don’t run your ass off, they will overpower you and you will die.

The beasts might be horrible abstract Lovecraftian lumps of flesh, but they are still smart. They will attempt to corner you, cut you off, and basically bar your path in any way possible. As a defensive measure, you can topple objects over as you run to slow them down, light flares which scare the beasts with the intense light, and duck into closets and crawl spaces in an attempt to hide long enough for them to lose interest. Either way, the nightmare only ends when you get past a certain point and the town once again turns back to its, arguably normal state.

What really ties the game together, however, is its psychological profiling system. You see, the events of the game are actually being retold by some character (not telling who) to a psychotherapist. The therapist, over the course of the game, will ask you to do several things, such as fill out a short questionnaire, tell him what you see in inkblots, or color in a picture of your family, over the course of the game. How you respond to these tests effects your profile, which is information the game uses to tailor the fright specifically to your personality type. For example if you perhaps, admit that you have cheated on a lover in a past, females in the game will dress and act more provocatively, horrifying moments will go hand in hand with romantic ones, and the beasts of the nightmare world will be strangely phallic and sexual in nature. Not only that, but the game also keeps track of your actions in the game as well to alter this profile. So, for example, if you spend most of your time looking at pinup calendars, the game will become more sexual. If, however, you instead focus on violent imagery, the game will be violent right back, in some seriously profane ways. Either way, you will find that each play through of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, tailors its horror specifically to the person playing the game, which is more fucked up than you realize. The game basically asks you what disturbs you most and shoves it right into your face. Not only that, but the game has certain measures to make sure that you don’t lie including redundant questions and the aforementioned in game behavior tracking, so as the therapist says right from the beginning, it’s easier if you just tell the truth.

There aren’t many people in Silent Hill, but the few that are, are rendered beautifully even with the Wii’s inferior hardware. Characters move realistically, and are voiced by professional voice actors that really know how to give a convincing performance. Most important to note, is that the performances of Harry and the cast are believable, very believable. You never feel like someone is purposefully doing something stupid just to put themselves in harm and horror’s way. Everyone acts like a rational human being, which actually makes the game even more terrifying. You are never shouting “RUN BITCH RUN” at the screen, because that is exactly what you are doing and you still can’t get away. Long story short, you, the player, are not more “horror movie aware” than the protagonists. The protagonists are doing everything they can to survive this icy hell hole, and most of the time it still isn’t enough.

The environments are also very believable. The Silent Hill in Shattered Memories feels very real, which is a lot to say considering that the Wii has been criticized for its poor graphical performance in the past. Lots of shadow and lighting effects saturate the game, even to the extent that you can see the shadows of individual snowflakes falling when Harry shines his flashlight outside. The landscape is just beautiful, in a scary way, and really serves to pull you inside the game, which is just all the better when it scares the piss out of you a couple seconds later. The maze like path Harry follows is also decently believable. Gone are the endless hallways of doors with broken locks. Instead, locked doors feel like they have a reason for being locked, a reason other than “this is just another part of the puzzle”.

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is an experimental game that took a lot of risks, but those risks were well worth it. Granted, if you gave me a pitch for a combatless Wii horror game a few weeks ago, I would have laughed in your face. However, Shattered Memories has made me a believer, a terrified believer with pee stained pants. Try playing it alone in the dark on a cold winter’s night and prepare yourself for terror. This game is simply a must have for any legitimate horror fan. The cold snowy environments are beautiful and lonely, the psychological profiling system gives the game tons of replay value, and bottom line is, the game is just damn scary. If you pass this up, you fail as a hardcore horror gamer, even if you have sworn off the Wii. I don’t care how you play it, just play it! Quick! Before the demons come to eat me! Don’t keep reading or the demons will eat you too. GAAAAAAAH!

SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

DON’T KEEP READING! …

SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SERIOUSLY DON’T! …

SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

YOU WILL REGRET THIS! …

SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FINE! …

SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

IF YOU WON’T LISTEN TO ME! …

SPOILER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

THE PERSON IN THE THERAPIST’S CHAIR IS AN OLDER CHERYL. HARRY DIED IN A CAR CRASH 18 YEARS AGO! THE HARRY YOU ARE CONTROLLING ISN’T REAL, AND THE SILENT HILL YOU HAVE BEEN RUNNING THROUGH IS JUST A PRODUCT OF CHERYL’S DELUSIONS! HAH SPOILER DEMONS!

…

Related posts on 30ninjas.com:

• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Freak Beasts Gameplay
• New Silent Hill 8 “Downpour” Details Revealed
• Silent Hill 2 Screenwriter Sent to Jail … Not for Writing Silent Hill 2
• Silent Hill 2 Has a Film Date
• Avary and Hadida Return to Silent Hill
• Silent Hill 2 Update