At the same time as trying to outrun these monsters, players also have to navigate the twisted, cold environment they are trapped within. The terror that comes from having no way of fighting back is exacerbated by the level design. As lead designer and writer Sam Barlow explained in an IGN interview: “How many children wake up screaming because they had a dream where they beat up a zombie with a baseball bat? You wake up screaming because you ran and you got caught. This seems unusual at first, but like almost every other facet of the game, it has been implemented to serve the story (more on that later too).īy embracing this feeling of evasion rather than direct confrontation, the nightmare sequences in Shattered Memories really do make you feel as if you’re trapped in a bad dream - like a child running away from the bogeyman. When you are overwhelmed, there isn’t a violent Dead Space-esque death scene where the protagonist is devoured limb from limb - instead Harry is tackled to the ground. But should you become swarmed one too many times, that’s game over. When you are grabbed and tackled, the game utilises the motion controls (more on that later), whereby Harry can push the enemies away. Whilst you can delay their pursuit by pushing over cabinets or picking up bright flares to ward them off for a limited time, you have no way of directly attacking them. When Harry’s world freezes over, the defenceless father can only run away from the creatures (“Raw Shocks”) as they relentlessly chase him.
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Silent Hill: Shattered Memories went one step further in maintaining this feeling of helplessness established by the series by removing the combat completely. Some see this sticky and frantic combat as a downside of traditional survival horror mechanics and controls, but in retrospect, the sense of feeling underpowered in gameplay now seems like somewhat of a lost art in AAA gaming. In order to reflect the main character’s lack of skill, gunplay is often unwieldy, with the animation times on aiming and reloading feeling like an age to complete.
Relying on primitive melee weapons such as lead pipes and wooden planks to bring the grotesque enemies down is encouraged since it conserves ammo, adding a whole new layer of tension since you have to be closer to the monsters for your strikes to register.
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Instead, players are put into the shoes of an everyman or woman with little to no experience of how to wield a gun.
Unlike the majority of lead characters in Silent Hill’s market rival Resident Evil, the protagonists in Konami’s series aren’t combat specialists. While Silent Hill 2 is rightly considered the jewell in the crown of the franchise and one of the best games of all time, it’s also worth looking back on just a few reasons why Silent Hill: Shattered Memories deserves to be seen as one of the best in the series. This article contains story spoilers - read on at your own risk. This is partly what makes up the intriguing “psyche profile” mechanic, whereby certain elements of the game are altered to create a personal experience for players based on their choices within the world as well as their answers in these sessions. These short, first person sequences act as a framing device to Harry’s experiences within the game. Interspersed between Harry’s attempts to find his daughter in the near-desolate town are psychiatry sessions with a therapist by the name of Dr. He is soon forced to battle with both his own potential amnesia as well as the hideous monsters that appear whenever the world freezes over into its nightmarish alternate reality. As Harry’s journey progresses, he realises that in true Silent Hill fashion, all is not well with neither his own fractured state of mind nor the town he is exploring. After crashing his car in the snowy town of Silent Hill, he wakes to find that his young daughter Cheryl is missing. It overhauled many of the established mechanics of the franchise, taking it in a wildly different direction with a narrative that required barely any knowledge of the games that came before it. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, developed by Climax Studios, in many ways feels like the Resident Evil 4 equivalent of the series. Silent Hill on the Wii console? A western-developed reimagining of a Japanese-made, genre-defining PS1 game? Psychiatrist sessions? No combat?! For some fans, the drastic changes that the seventh title in the Silent Hill series introduced was a very big cause for concern.
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