Garrett AnthonyActually, after 2 games out of 4, I’ve come to the conclusion that the post-Japanese parts are not so much bad Quiet Hills as they are simply crooked and bad games. Let’s fix that in our heads and move on. Despite all the controversy, Silent Hill Homecoming is more often than not considered a piece of software code instead of a continuation of the legendary SH part (Which, I personally think is only partially fair, but come on). Konami, having understood that, promptly folded their partnership with Double Helix, after which Helix slowly wringed its neck, remembering the old days and making games based on movies (movies weren’t very good there, so I’m not going to say anything about games). Along the way Double Helix managed to get into the Front Mission universe and Killer Instinct.
That’s how one story of the studio, which had stolen the great and terrible Silent Hill, ended and another one continued. In fact, Double Helix was once again replaced by Climax, which in its respite from Foggy Town made three games with a score of 60 out of 100 on metacritic. These games are probably hidden industry masterpieces, and you don’t even know their names. Such a masterpiece seems to be Shattered Memories, well, or not. Let’s refresh our memories and figure it out.
Climax did manage to make a remake of the first part of Silent Hill, but this time it looks like the developers really wanted to make an unusual game and not even on the most usual platform. A strange vibe was felt from the first trailer, this time, indeed, snow-covered Silent Hill, Harry Mason running in the dark, looking for his daughter Cheryl again. The city’s backside was no longer covered in rust, pockmarked with tight pieces of flesh, and there was no longer a sense of horror in it all. Rather a kind of melancholy, sadness, that’s the mood that hovered throughout the game, it was influenced by the music, the environment, and the storytelling.
Shattered Memories has the most distinctive music of all the past parts of the series. Akira Yamaoka and Mary Elizabeth McGinn seem to have stayed true to what we’re used to and have come to love, but there’s a chill and slow lingering expectation of the exceptionally bad from their compositions. The atmosphere puts you in a trance and there’s a kind of special vibe when the out-of-town guys open up their snowy expanses. Of something similar, the Coen Brothers Fargo and Fear X Refn come to my mind.
Since the game came out on WII with its beautiful, interactive nunchucks, most of the puzzles here are just built around the fact that we have to open some lockers, twirl objects in our hands, unscrew bolts and do these kinds of interactive tasks ourselves. The game had a segment I particularly liked, where you have to hack into the school computer by answering secret questions to reset the password, we actually have the computer and two rooms at our disposal. All the information you need is just in these rooms, and you have to look for it yourself, not by pressing a separate button to examine a specific item, but straight with your own eyes to examine the surroundings. And, as I understand it, the objects to look for change depending on the results in Kaufman’s tests.
In Shattered Memories, there are sort of two kinds of astral trails of some kind. One we track by radio interference and when we catch up, something in the environment changes, conventionally speaking, if the interference led us to a picture, there will be a flash with a nasty sound, the picture will fall to the floor and we will remotely hear a dialogue between people who are not really there, which carries optional creepy stories, sometimes you need to find 2 or 3 such traces for the complete picture. I won’t give you examples so as not to take away from the content if you do decide to go through this part. I’ll just say that such mini-stories are very addictive. The second type of astral trails is the same search for radio interference, with the only difference that the tracking leads to ghostly silhouettes, which must be photographed on Harry’s phone, after which he will receive an audio message with the same, not particularly encouraging content.
Unlike the wimpy, triple-chewed Origins here, Climax actually made for an interesting experience, referencing the original first part. Yes, the gameplay came out controversial, but the game is also pretty short, so the occasional run-through just begins to tire and lo and behold, the adventure comes to an end, beautifully revealing the final twist. Shattered Memories proved to be a more personal story, while Origins and Homecoming tried only to mimic one, as if to cram the main characters’ woes with their heads for a tick, trying to flirt with the second Silent Hill. The game deliberately places the player in a seemingly familiar world and plot, then immediately begins to confuse him and throw in completely wild things that neither the player nor Harry can believe. The metagame works, the experiment is rather successful, its place in the heart of the game clearly deserves.