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Why Everyone Hates It: By popular opinion, every game in the Silent Hill series past the fourth is a pathetic cash grab by talentless hacks who really don't understand what made the earlier games work, and who bring no new ideas to the table.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: While the game is designed largely around a map which can be kept on screen at all times, with notes added by the player, checking it slows things down too much to be practical when it's really needed. There's also a rather impressive AI for the enemies fanning out and searching for the player, which just feels wasted when the player's objective is simply to dash quickly through a fairly straight forward area.
Why I Like It Anyway: In the interest of full disclosure, I should begin by noting that I know the producer of this game. On the other hand, I got to know him by way of reasonably typical game maker-game press interactions, and I have the basic ethical sense that I wouldn't be writing this if the game couldn't stand up on it's own. That said, let's get into it.
A series falling into the hands of a new developer rarely ends well. Either the new developer clumsily apes the earlier games, resulting in mediocrity, or they make radical changes without a grip on what people liked about the series in the first place. In Silent Hill's case, the first of these situations absolutely happened, but after the disappointing Origins and Homecoming, the reins changed hands again, resulting in a game that largely keeps what works about the series, but tries some interesting new things where it can.
Wandering through a deserted small town with poor visibility, holding a flashlight, with a heavy psychological subtext of guilt and alienation, solving an interesting puzzle now and then, that's all maintained. Combat, and for that matter the inventory gets cut out, as do the pulsing walls and rusty metal grates usually found in the "Otherworld" segments. The notion of transitioning to a more hostile version of the same locations is preserved, but in less dramatic fashion. Normally, the entire town is in the grip of a severe snowstorm, with massive snowdrifts blocking off roads, rather than the gaping pits of the original. When things begin to go a bit off the rails and monsters appear, the entire world simply gains a thick coating of ice. It's a welcome change of pace visually.
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While the lack of an inventory is an interesting change, the biggest risk the game takes is with the story. Before it's release, there was a fair deal of semantic debate over whether it was a remake of the first Silent Hill, or a "re-imagining" or "remix" or "reboot" or some other term beginning with "re-" but none of these really give a clear picture. The broad strokes are all the same. We have a protagonist named Harry Mason searching for his daughter Cheryl in a town called Silent Hill, roaming from a diner to a school, a hospital, a quick trip to a junk shop, cutting through a sewer, visiting a run down amusement park, and eventually seeking out a lighthouse. We also have Cybil the cop, Dahlia the local of dubious nature, Lisa the nurse, and a Doctor Kaufman who comes off as a real jerk regardless of his intentions. The specifics however divert pretty strongly, with no mention at all being made of the local religion, or anything supernaturally out of the ordinary observable by the other characters beyond the severity of the snowstorm and the general weirdness of Harry himself.
Largely, this all makes sense in light of the game's framing device. Taking the psychological aspect of the series to something of an extreme, each major segment of the game plays out in response to a conversation held in first person perspective with a psychologist. It's quite easy to imagine, at least for the bulk of the game, that we are recounting the events of the original game with a few choice omissions and changes, so as to avoid being locked away. The lack of combat becomes particularly amusing when viewing things this way, as one can easily imagine the accompanying narrative. "Skulls caved in with a lead pipe? No I wouldn't know anything about that! I saw some vaguely human shapes chasing after me through the snow, but I just ran away before they could get too close!"
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Psychoanalysis is, in general, the central gimmick of the entire game. As you play, the game is constantly picking up details about you and throwing them back in your face later. It's the sort of idea you can't help but expect to be incredibly underwhelming, particularly in an industry flooded with clumsy "moral choice" systems that don't come close to approaching subtlety, but it's actually quite impressive. The obvious overt choices made in the psychologist's office factor in of course, but matter far less than your general conduct while playing the game. Much more significant are things like which objects draw your attention when first entering a room, whether you make eye contact with NPCs, whether you intentionally troll the game by contradicting yourself or actively going against the wishes of NPCs. Trying to force the game into forming a particular profile of your honestly takes quite a large amount of effort, just from the sheer number of ways you can accidentally present yourself honestly.
What's done with this information is also rather ambitious. While your overall profile will of course determine the major components of the ending, there's plenty of payoff as you play as well. Most obviously, the appearances and personalities of the major NPCs can change rather drastically between play-throughs. The monsters will gradually change from being faceless humanoids to one of several alternate appearances representing what's perceived as your most obvious psychological flaw. Various ghostly sequences that can be discovered throughout the game play out rather differently, as do echoed audio clips which play out after solving major puzzles, and even Harry's appearance changes at one point to reflect things. More significantly, it is very easy to miss on the first, and possibly even second pass through the game that every major area has, at at least point, a choice of two paths to take. Finding one's way to the school can involve a shortcut through either a burger joint or a brothel for instance. Within said school, progress is eventually blocked with a puzzle found in either the art room or planetarium. With all of these choices, it becomes impossible to double back to the alternate route, and both choices are presented as so obviously the correct way to move forward it's easy to miss that the other path even exists, unless on a future play-through you happen to be walking on the opposite side of the road.
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What really makes all of this click is how well the game makes use of the Wii's unique control scheme. Shattered Memories plays with wii remote versatility to astoundingly effective degree. When exploring, the remote acts as your flashlight, illuminating in whichever direction it points. In addition to feeling quite natural, this aids the game in identifying what objects best catch the eye. If you, the player, have your eye drawn to the sleazy calendar hanging on the wall, you'll naturally point your flashlight right at it, which the profiling system will then pick up on. In the first person segments, you nod and shake your head, or if you prefer, look listlessly about the room. The only real item you possess besides the flashlight is a cell phone. In addition to having a GPS map on which notes can be made, and a camera which aids a great deal in solving puzzles, various characters can be called, and will call you. When a call comes through, the audio is routed to the speaker on the remote. Various puzzles and object interactions use a similar reach and grasp approach to Metroid Prime 3's rotating door locks. The absolute best instance of creative controls however comes in the hospital. After having been in a bit of an accident, you find yourself temporarily wheelchair-bound. The wheelchair is controlled by taking the remote and nunchuck, holding them at your sides, and miming the action of repeatedly pushing the wheels, or pulling back on one side to steer. It's so natural no explanation of the gimmick is needed, and it's just plain simple fun.
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All these subtle touches do come at a bit of a price however. While the gimmick of constantly adapting to the player makes it impossible to call Shattered Memories light on gameplay, traditional challenges are fairly rare. The bulk of the game is just wandering about and taking in the scenery. Monsters exist only during a few set piece chase sequences which are so clearly identifiable that the rest of the game can feel a little too safe. Puzzles, while their solutions and hints are usually nicely randomized, aren't particularly plentiful either, particularly when half the best puzzles must be skipped on a given run through the game, as mentioned earlier. Of course, the better puzzles do largely make up for the lack of quantity with quality, particularly the art room puzzle for it's uniqueness, and the password reset puzzle for being both very well designed and shockingly organic.
Really though, Shattered Memories isn't about challenge, or even horror for that matter. It's about presenting a very personal narrative experience, with a lot of atmosphere and replay value. On that level, it's very hard to find any fault with it. It also does a nice job of complimenting the original game without usurping it. If nothing else, you'll never find another game with a more interactive coloring book in it.
