I was at Konami Gamers' Day a few days ago, where Climax unveiled a lengthy demo of their upcoming Wii "reimagining," Shattered Memories. It wasn't playable at the show, and I was unable to interview the game's producer, but they showed off ten minutes of footage detailing the game's new exploration-based gameplay. You can't fight at all in Shattered Memories; instead, any time monsters show up, it's time to run like hell. Most of the game is centered around exploration, using an intuitive system where your Wiimote hand controls Harry's flashlight.

Here's where I start getting cynical, though. One of the things that's always characterized the Silent Hill series up to this point is that when it leaves the hands of its original developers, the Konami studio unofficially called "Team Silent," everyone involved immediately starts missing the point as hard and as often as they can. The movie is a toxic stew of generalizations, gender stereotypes, and a thirty-minute info dump; the comic books mischaracterize Silent Hill as a generically Bad Place where just any story involving horrific themes can be set; and last year's Silent Hill: Homecoming on the 360 and PS3 played like it was created by people who were told about the preceding games by somebody shouting the Wikipedia summarizations at them from across the room.

Climax is the lone qualified exception to this rule. Their previous experience with the series is 2007's Silent Hill: Origins, a prequel to the original game. Since it was so steeped in the series's continuity, they immersed themselves in the setting from the word "go," and while the game isn't flawless by any stretch of the imagination, they're still the closest of anyone who's tried to what the series is supposed to be about. The fact that they're behind Shattered Memories is probably the best sign possible for the game, short of Team Silent getting back together or Ken Levine deciding to give it a go.

To summarize the series for Nintendo fans who've never before had the chance to play it, the original Silent Hill is a notoriously convoluted game that nonetheless is one of the first truly groundbreaking survival-horror titles. You play as Harry Mason, a widowed single father and professional writer who's taking his foster daughter back to her birthplace, an isolated American resort town called Silent Hill.

As Harry drives into town, a woman runs into the road in front of him, forcing Harry to swerve and crash. When he wakes up, his daughter Cheryl's gone missing, his car's totaled, snow's falling out of season, and the town's deserted except for demon creatures. Harry's job is to find Cheryl and get out of town with her, guided by obscure clues that Cheryl herself seems to be leaving for him, and hindered by some unimaginable destructive force that's torn up most of the town's roads.

The game's story takes a turn for the deeply weird about halfway through, as Harry reveals secrets about Cheryl and her connection to Silent Hill, and as you find out more about the people you've been running into. Harry's attempt to find his daughter abruptly becomes a race against time to stop the rebirth of a dark god, and does so subtly enough that you don't notice that's what you're doing until you're staring down a rifle sight at it.

The big innovations of the game, though, were its atmosphere and sound design. Silent Hill excels at creating what feels like a genuinely hostile environment, where the monsters are just the most obvious method by which you're getting attacked. Harry's a clumsy combatant at best, but he can still win one-on-one against any monster you actually choose to fight. The problem is that it's rarely one-on-one, and even if you win, that's a drop in the ocean. You're still in Silent Hill, stumbling blindly through the darkness, and you can't shoot a town dead.

Later games raised the ante. In SH2 and SH3, Silent Hill displays a new unnerving ability to zero in on its protagonists' weak points. SH2 is a psychological deconstruction of James Sunderland's guilt and shame; SH3 is, on one level, about a teenager's fear of her own body. One of the ways in which other developers and creators have missed the point is in underplaying this psychological factor, or in not using it at all; for example, the infamous Silent Hill nurse monsters are in all of the original games for a reason other than brand-building, and have no reason to be in Homecoming at all.

The pessimist in me wonders if the reason Climax is "reimagining" Shattered Memories is to redefine the series as something more franchise-friendly. Konami's clearly been wanting to turn Silent Hill into a cash cow for some time, but they keep handing the series over to people who screw it up. If Climax "reimagines" Silent Hill into the generic Bad Place that the spinoff media want it to be, Konami may get their wish after all, but they'd do it at a high cost to anyone who liked the games before now.

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Lynxara

I still can't decide if the "no combat" mechanic is gutsy, pandering, or just plain dumb. (Maybe all of the above?)

Wanderer

It's a good mechanic for a horror game, but it's not a terribly good mechanic for a Silent Hill game. Horror games where you're helpless against the monsters, except via flight, are truly frightening but also somewhat frustrating, depending on how they handle the ability to escape; Clock Tower 3 was a balancing act between the two, and was rarely an unqualified success.

The thing about Silent Hill, though, is that combat is winnable but pointless. It does nothing to advance your overall goal, that of escape from the town, and the better games in the series also advance the idea that combat in and of itself is one of the town's traps. There's the notion, introduced as a little brain teaser in SH3, that there are no monsters in the town at all, and you're delusional enough to be killing ordinary people, or maybe you're not fighting at all.

The absence of combat from Shattered Memories is an experimental idea and I'll be playing it to see how it works. If I had to point to one thing that worries me more than anything else, it's that the "puzzles" they showed off at Konami Gamers' Day are shit like shaking a key out of a cup with the Wiimote. That's not a "puzzle" by any stretch of the imagination, and calling it one betrays a certain lack of respect for the audience.

Einherjar

I have to say, what has me most fearful about the game wasn't the lack of combat, but the half-baked "puzzles" that they seemed to be pushing. I couldn't help but roll my eyes when I hear about the "shake the can" puzzle, which just sounded frankly embarassing. It reminded me a lot of the "we have to use this feature!!" crap that people put out on the DS. The concept of interactive puzzles is fine, but the best puzzles in Silent Hill were the ones that made you think... not the ones that made you perform mindless repetitive tasks. (Looking at you, Homecoming.)

Lynxara

... how can you even pass off Wii Remote waggling as a puzzle? Is Climax assuming that there may be members of the Wii audience who have not yet mastered the fearfully advanced process of shaking their controllers?

Einherjar

Lynxara wrote:

... how can you even pass off Wii Remote waggling as a puzzle? Is Climax assuming that there may be members of the Wii audience who have not yet mastered the fearfully advanced process of shaking their controllers?

I don't know! I can even understand them putting crappy puzzles in, but they were apparently ADVERTISING this particular crappy puzzle.

DJKennethA

Hmm not sure I like this idea. I read a preview that said you could climb fences and so could the monsters and that they could pull you off fences. The person writing it said that by the 12th time this happened it looked like things could get slightly annoying.

That's what worries me. With no way to imobilize or kill the monster, how are you supposed to explore? In stuff like SH2 exploration ( at least for me ) seemed like a huge part of the game. Still though, this could add to the tense factor of the game, or it could totally suck.

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