It was a big weekend for me and my partner in video gaming. First, we had to play the two new side missions in the reissued Resident Evil 5. Despite some frustrating snags in our boss battles, we kicked ass. With that out of the way, our goal was to immerse ourselves in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a ‘re-imagining’ of the original classic PS1 game.
Now, I was totally looking forward to an update on the graphic experience of Silent Hill. What wasn’t appealing to me though was the use of the Wii controllers instead of a standard controller. I am not a fan of horror survival games that require you to wave your arms wildly (see my review of Escape from Bug Island, below). Plus, I HATE the Nunchuck, the worst video game controller ever. It’s at its worst when a game requires the most precise response from it. At just the moment when a game is at its most demanding and challenging, the Nunchuck cops out. Every time, no matter what game. It just stops functioning, and your character ends up walking in jerky circles while being attacked by some hideous creatures. And that was the case with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, which is what made us quit the God-awful game.
From the start, I was not all that enthusiastic about the game having NO combat system, just a Clock Tower 3 type of run and scream dynamic. Initially, after the first minutes of the game walking around in the dark with just a flashlight and finding nothing to fear at all, we began to realize that until we entered the so-called “nightmare” world, we were COMPLETELY safe, with no threats of danger (or chills and thrills). So we walked around collecting things, unlocking doors and solving simple puzzles. As my video game partner prepped me for the coming of the first Nightmare world, I was nervous, but the game was forgivingly easy on us, with it being a short and pretty straightforward run with few monsters. See, what happens when the Nightmare world comes on is, the town suddenly turns icy blue (instead of rusty lava red like the original series), at which point you have ONE goal: escape the Nightmare world as quickly as possible without getting attacked and killed by monsters. Neon blue markers sort of guide you, but just because a door, fence, or path has a neon blue mark on it doesn’t mean that is officially the way to go!
As I said, the first Nightmare world was easy. But when we got to the much bigger second Nightmare world, it was all over. You can check the exit point on your map, but the map doesn’t show you the actual path or the obstacles that are going to detour you and throw you off course on your way there. So basically, the map is useless. What makes it even more useless is that, sure you can pull up the map occasionally (in real time!!!) to check your progress to see if you’re any closer to the exit, but doing so completely slows you down…and that is when the monsters come out of the dark and strike. They latch on to you and won’t let go. Having one on you is rather easy to shake off by swinging your Wiimote and Nunchuck in the direction indicated on screen, but when you get swarmed by three of them, the direction you are supposed to swing the controls differs for each monster depending on which side of your character they’ve attached themselves to, so you pretty much fail in getting ANY of them off! I was dying repeatedly and running in circles in an effort to stay away from the monsters, often ending up right back at the beginning of the Nightmare world instead of anywhere near the exit!!!
Other problems with the Nightmare world include the lack of any health gauge. You have NO idea how close you are to death, and even if you did, it wouldn’t matter because there are NO health packs in this game. That’s right. Nightmare world has one simple rule—either you make it out of the Nightmare world as quickly as possible or you die at the hands of the monsters. It was at the point when I was thrusting, pulling and waving my controls frantically to shake off three monsters at once that my Nunchuck gave up, my character began the infamous uncontrollable meandering (with 3 monsters riding piggyback, no less) and I knew that this game was never going to be a scary-fun experience for me.
Now, I could have blamed my anger and incapability on it being like 1 A.M., but we ended up playing a different video game until 7:30 in the morning and had no problems (this after I made my friend watch Rob Zombie’s Halloween II because I knew she’d hate it and I love when she hates things). So it has nothing to do with lack of sleep. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is simply an awful new way of playing a once classic and frightening series that was evenly paced but now has you skipping merrily along for stretches at a time before being plunged into five minute segments of infuriating hell. I even considered downgrading to the PS2 version of the game so I could play a port adapted to old school controls, but I read the reviews, and those horrible moments when you are attacked by monsters do not require you to shake the controller madly. Instead, the PS2 version uses the ever-annoying game mechanic of random controller buttons suddenly flashing on screen…if you don’t press the buttons in time, you die. HATE that.
I just hope future sequels in the Silent Hill franchise return to the original formula. I thought the Resident Evil series had taken a turn for the worse with its overhaul in game mechanics, but at least the series is still fun if not the horror survival experience it once was. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories has shattered my hope for the series…and leaves me only with memories of when the series kicked ass.
