So a while back, I posted about this Wii exclusive “re-imagining” of the original Playstation One classic from over ten years ago, and how the game mechanics and crappy Upchuck controller pretty much made me give up on the game and sell it online.
Well, I was determined to get through the game since it’s so short and would have been the only game in the Silent Hill canon that I didn’t complete and keep in my collection, all on account of the “Nightmare” scenarios. During a Nightmare scenario, the game’s environment turns to ice (as opposed to the bloody and fiery changes in the other titles in the series) and you are forced to RUN from the creatures of Silent Hill through dark locations, using just neon blue borders that mark doors, wall and ditches as guidance to a possible way to escape the nightmare. If the creatures jump on you, you have to wildly gyrate with the Wiimote and Upchuck to get them off before continuing. There are no weapons to fight back in this game, but once in a while you run past a piece of furniture you can knock over to slow the pursuing creatures. Health and a health gauge are also a thing of the past. As you continue to get attacked by creatures, you start to run slower, then limp, and eventually die and there’s nothing you can do about it. There are only six of these Nightmare scenarios in total, but if you read back to my old post, you’ll see how incredibly infuriating they are. That is unless you figure out a way to beat the system.
Nightmare scenarios are not linear—you have to find the correct route to escape this hellish maze yourself. Pulling up your map doesn’t much help because it does not reveal any of the obstacles you’ll run into, nor does it pause the game, which means that while you are standing there trying to read the map, you can easily be attacked by creatures. In order to stay alive, you’re basically never going to reference the map at all. Which means just running around randomly through environments and blue-glowing doors that all look the same after a while when you are in such a panic, causing you to run in circles while being assaulted regularly by evil inhabitants of the Nightmare world. The environments are extremely dark unless you keep your flashlight turned on, but this is Silent Hill, so keeping your flashlight on in this hellish environment is the same as going to a football game wearing a cut-off shirt and Daisy Duke shorts. In both situations, you become a prime target for a beat down by a bunch of monsters.
Instead of this situation creating an adrenalin rush of fear like all the other games in this series and others like Resident Evil or Fatal Frame, games in which you want to be immersed in the experience, the Nightmare scenarios in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories are all about just wanting to get OUT of them as quickly as possible and back into the scare-free and danger-free experience that is the rest of the game. There is no even pacing of the horror rush in this game. You are either skipping carefree around the daytime town meeting other characters and collecting clues to the game’s story for stretches of time, or you are racing through the horror as fast as you can to return to the dull parts of the game!
The basic plot outline of the re-imagining is the same as the original. You are Harry Mason, you get into a car accident, your daughter is gone when you awake, and then you have to roam the town in search of her. Other than that, this re-imagining is completely rewritten. An interesting aspect of the game is the way your responses to questions and tests by your therapist to some extent affect what you see and do as well as the ending you get. That’s right, you have a therapist in this game: a very distinguished and attractive man who can be somewhat aggressive in his analysis of you. If you are honest in your answers to his questions, at the end of the game you get one final reading of how he profiled your personality. It was very much on the mark in most cases for me. However, even though I spent most of my time on his couch just staring at his crotch, the game didn’t conclude that I was gay (although it will label you as a pervert if you stare too much at the breasts of any of the female characters during the game). So the game is entertaining the first time through, but it doesn’t seem worth a second play because it simply doesn’t deliver that constant edge-of-your-seat experience the original game did. The dread you feel throughout the entire original game is gone, replaced with the dread you feel having to get through the clumsy mechanics of the Nightmare scenarios.
So how to smoothly get through these moments so you can at least complete the game once and learn the whole story? For starters, crank up the brightness on your television all the way. By doing this, when you enter a Nightmare, you can actually keep your flashlight off throughout the entire Nightmare without having any problems seeing where you are going! Keeping the flashlight off drastically reduces the amount of creatures that actually find you and chase you, which is a huge relief. Next, go to YouTube and search for a video walkthru of whichever Nightmare you are about to enter—the way to know one is coming soon is to follow an online written walkthru and read ahead to see exactly when you are close. Next, carefully watch the entire video walkthru of the Nightmare. If you are a longtime player of horror survival video games, you’re most likely good at memorizing environments and paths quickly, so the layout of the Nightmare will be fresh in your head when you move back to your Wii to start it. Add to that a navigator—a friend who starts the video walkthru just as you begin it and basically DIRECTS you as you run the path (“turn left into the next door,” “run straight to the set of double doors ahead,” “Climb the wall to your right”). You must communicate with each other, and you should basically repeat the navigator’s directions as you accomplish them so you know you’re both on the same page. This way, if the navigator’s video gets ahead of your progress or vice versa, the navigator can pause the YouTube clip or move it ahead a little to stay with you. Using this process, we managed to get through each Nightmare in about five minutes with barely ever a need to redo them because of a death.
Sounds like fun, right? And there you have it. That’s how you cheat your way through Silent Hill: Shattered Memories so you can at least say you played it once. Now let’s hope that Konami gives up on this horrible new format of a classic series and returns to form on the next installment. Because if we get another game like this one, there will be no more returns to Silent Hill for anyone.
