They relied far too much on fetch quests, obtuse puzzles, lackluster combat, and stressful resource management. I’d enjoy the aesthetics, rich metaphors and lucid atmosphere, but always found the experience of playing them something of a chore. While I’d always been intrigued by the Silent Hill series, I’d never found it games much fun to play. Shattered Memories makes the player observe its environments to great effect. To its credit, I found the simple act of trying to comprise what the hell was going on to be as thoughtful and engaging as any game I’ve played this year. The new Silent Hill does away with conventional notions of what it means to be a game. It’s not enough that those games tell a story, they have to let you shoot stuff too, lest people complain that they’re not gamey enough. It’s a design philosophy that can be found in even the most story driven games like BioShock and Half-Life 2. If games don’t tease my mind in such ways and want only to tell a story, they can be handled best as movies – at least that’s what I thought. My feeling was that if a game aims to tell a linear tale with no win or lose condition, what’s the point of it being a game in the first place? Action games reward dexterity and skill, whereas puzzle games reward keen intellect. In this sense, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is more of an extended interactive cutscene at times, a concept I once scoffed at. Instead, the gameplay mostly lies in searching around you for clues as you try to piece together the game’s tragic and mysterious tale. There’s no combat, seldom few puzzles, and exploration is kept to a minimum with little room to stray from the beaten path.
It is memorable for a variety of reasons, but ithe game’s most unique design choice sees gameplay limited to analyzing environments for the vast majority of it. This week marks the release of one of the strangest games to come out of a major studio in quite a long time: Konami’s and Climax Studio’s Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
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