
In this new game, Harry may or may not have been a good dad or loyal husband. So much so, that I wrote a Father's Day tribute to him a while back. Harry Mason was depicted as a tremendously-loyal father and upstanding human being in the original game. On top of all that, the redesigned characters aren't particularly likeable. But hey, at least Double Helix kept the game about occultism, even if it completely shifted tones and lost its connection to real-world occultism.

What I meant was that Double Helix made Homecoming into a splatterhouse, American horror flick, and Climax at least knew better than to do that again.
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They definitely understood the whole "lonely" aspect, but completely missed how to make a game subtly disturbing and creepy.
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They clearly dont' know what the series is about because they threw out the entire canon and stripped out all of the plot elements that were common to the old games. So when I said that "the people at Climax clearly understand what a Silent Hill game is all about", I sort of misspoke. Shattered Memories completely refutes all of that and changes the game at fundamental levels. That game provides back story details about the history of the town and subtle clues about the origin of the cult's god and the history of persecution, death, and corruption that tainted the god and made it malevolent. Silent Hill 2 deviated from this plotline, but that game was still sprinkled with the influence of the cult story. The entire overarching plot of the game as created by its original designers was about a cult trying to rebirth its god. The original games - like it or not - were very cult-driven.

This game is kind of disrespectful to its origins. Just one of many pieces of backstory that Silent Hill 2 presents. He’ll proceed to explore the town of Silent Hill to find her, and along the way, meet several interesting characters including a police officer named Cybil Bennett. Harry Mason gets in a car crash in the outer edge of the town of Silent Hill and wakes up to find his seven-year-old daughter, Cheryl, missing. Developers Double Helix and Foundation 9 completely dropped the ball with Homecoming, but Climax did a passable job with the story of Origins (even though the gameplay mechanics weren’t all that great).Īs you’re probably already aware, Shattered Memories is a re-imagining of the first Silent Hill game. I was very bothered to hear that Konami had disbanded the team that had worked on the first four games after the mixed critical and fan reception of The Room, and gave the development to a new team. I started with Silent Hill 2, which is my favorite console game to date, and eventually made my way through the first game all the way up to the PSP’s Origins and last year’s craptacular Homecoming. Excessive static and screeching is very off-putting.Ībsolutely no threat except in the Otherworld chase sequences. Akira's soundtrack seems phoned-in but passable, with a few memorable tracks. Basic premise is interesting, but the writers willfully disregard the entire history of Silent Hill and fail to maintain any of the element's of the series' overarching story. Door-peeking mechanic is a novel, but useless feature.īranching paths and multiple endings are superficial, and once you've beaten the game once, any mystique the story might have had is gone. The puzzles are a bit simplistic and dumb, removing some of the game’s credibility.īetter voice acting than previous games in the franchise, and the return of series veteran composer Akira Yamaoka are a huge plus, but the irritating shrieks of the enemy creatures might make you want to turn the volume down in the Nightmare scenes.īranching levels, different psych profiles, and multiple endings add a bit of replayability, but the shortness of the story and fact that it will never have quite the same impact as the first time you play might make it more appropriate as a rental for many more casual players.Įxploration is seamless (but boring) and the game controls surprisingly well. The branching levels, psych profiles and collectible "mementos" add a degree of replayability, and voice acting is better than in many of the previous games. This "prequel’s" story has plenty of intriguing surprises. But some camera problems and the frustrating, maze-like nature of the Nightmare encounters lead to some cheap deaths.

The visuals are mostly good (for a Wii game), but some fuzzy textures and issues with the flashlight keep it from looking as sharp as its PS2 predecessors.Įxploring the town with the flashlight is a blast, and completely throwing out combat in favor of "run for your life!" escape scenes adds genuine terrored panic to the game.
