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Reactions to this opinion ranged from enthusiastic consent to incredulity. I don’t want to write a full review of the game; my friend Casey has already provided a great review<\/a>, which I am happy to endorse. I have, however, spent some time thinking about why<\/i> Shattered Memories is such a good Silent Hill game. It’s certainly not an orthodox game from the series; if alignment to the precedent was the requirement for greatness, Climax’s earlier attempt, Silent Hill: 0rigins<\/a> should have been a masterpiece (it’s not). Mechanically speaking, Shattered Memories is really different than anything else in the canon; if anything, the mechanics it has are closest to Silent Hill 4<\/a>, which is clearly the biggest departure from the norms established by earlier games.<\/p>\n No, even though Shattered Memories is mechanically very different than its cousins, there has to be a reason that it feels<\/i> more like a Silent Hill game than any other attempt in recent memory. In fact, it feels<\/i> more like Silent Hill 2<\/a> than any other game in the series. I pondered this for a while. What makes a Silent Hill game feel like a Silent Hill game? Part of it is certainly visual cues, but all of the Silent Hill games share those (and in fact, Shattered Memories joins Silent Hill Homecoming<\/a> in eschewing the camera system that defined the look of earlier games). It clearly doesn’t have anything to do with combat, or item collection, or the sometimes-relevant plot elements involving The Order and their cultist activities in the region–those things are all thrown out by Shattered Memories. There’s the town of Silent Hill itself, but that too differs from game to game; in Shattered Memories, it’s large snow drifts that block streets rather than the series’ signature roads that end in gaping abyss. So no, “Silent Hill-ness” isn’t necessarily structural, or visual, or mechanical; those are just the “parts” of Silent Hill games, and they revolve around a central core. Some sort of key DNA that identifies the experience.<\/p>\n They key, I think, is the focus of the narrative: what is each Silent Hill game about<\/i>? Let’s consider the series (spoilers ahead, beware):<\/p>\n
\nA good character for a good game. But not the best.<\/p><\/div>As you might have been able to tell from my last post, I recently finished Silent Hill: Shattered Memories<\/a>, and it was fantastic. It was fantastic even though it features some of the must frustrating sequences ever in a Silent Hill game, namely the Otherworld chases. But the rest of the game works so well that I’m willing to forgive Shattered Memories and declare it one of the best Silent Hill games ever.<\/p>\n\n
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\n“…myself.”<\/p><\/div>the way we learn that there’s an evil cult involved, and as part of sealing the evil of all eternity or something, the founding families of Silent Hill have to keep killing their children. So each descent into the Otherworld is a visit to a little corner of hell controlled by a dead child. And, we finally learn, Alex’s brother being missing is a serious problem.<\/p>\n