PSP Review: Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
Hooray! It’s been half a year since my demo and Konami interview at San Diego Comic-Con, but I finally sat down to play Shattered Memories. So … did I enjoy it? Well, that’s a tricky number. The game is quite a mixed bag of good and bad, but ultimately one lone feature redeemed the entire game for me. Find out what over at OneMetal.
Silent Hill has dramatically evolved since the original game, presently a decade behind us. Now Shattered Memories lifts the ashes and exchanges the rust-colored decor for a colder touch. Put down the chainsaw and stop running—the latest installment dares you to revisit the classic town and remember everything you, and Harry Mason, tried to forget.
Shattered Memories logs a relatively short length, and the gameplay and story elements are profoundly redesigned. In fact, fans will recognize the changes before they even start pressing buttons. The game invents more personality for characters, polishes familiar locations with fresh attributes, and incorporates the depth absent in the first run-around. Borrowing the first-person technique utilized in The Room, the psychologist sessions allow the game to profile you by translating various exercises, like coloring a picture or answering intimate questions, into Harry’s adventure. The characters and locations might remain, but this isn’t the game you remember. Shattered Memories molds to your unique personality and develops a new and engaging spin on an old story.






But four different years inspired movies with the same title: first a 1924 silent film; then a 1935 loose interpretation remembered for its depiction of hell rendered by director Harry Lachman, an established post-impressionist painter; a 1967 television film about another Dante (Gabriel Rossetti) and his relationship with Elizabeth Siddal; finally a modern update in 2007 complete with paper puppets. Inferno saw its days as a Coney Island ride, an album by Transmetal, and a song by Iced Earth. Now the fiery hell Dante so vividly unraveled is being cemented as a next-gen video game by developer Visceral Games. Dante’s probably sick and tired of rolling over in his grave, so we might as well bring on the heat!







