| Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Nintendo Wii GOOD: clever and haunting BAD: way too short FINAL: You WANT this game. |  Courtesy Konami |
Right from the start, "Silent Hill: Shattered Memories" hits an art-house film vibe. The opening menu screen sits over a looping home movie clip of Harry Mason and his seven-year-old daughter Cheryl on their visit to an amusement park in the town of Silent Hill. As the game begins, it alternates between scenes of a psychiatrist preparing for his next patient and the Masons' car skidding around a dark, snowy road. The car careens off into a junkyard and Harry goes unconscious. When he awakes, he realizes that Cheryl is missing. Meanwhile, the player is jumped back to the doctor's office, to experience a personality quiz delivered from the player's point of view.
Thus is revealed the game's key hook: it will throw various psychological profiling techniques at you, ask for your honest input, and then use that information to adjust how the game plays out. For example, if you confess to being a jock in high school, the game will dress the onscreen Harry Mason in a green sports jacket. Your views on love will determine what happens to a dating couple later in the game. By folding your psychiatric profile into the game, "Shattered Memories" seeks to find a very personal way to get under your skin.
"Shattered Memories" also monitors you during gameplay sequences, noting your habits and activity. If you linger over the beer bottles found in Silent Hill's many downtown bars, the game will start to assume you have alcohol issues. When presented with a choice of rooms, one with a door decorated with girly flowers and the other with sexy lips, which do you choose? When a character in trouble calls out for help, do you respond? "Shattered Memories" combines what you tell the doctor with how you actually play the game to mold itself on the fly. At the game's conclusion, the doctor delivers a thumbnail report of your personality profile. In my case, I found it unsettlingly accurate.
Harry's story switches between three distinct zones. First is the psychiatrist interviews, second is the exploration sequences, and the third zone is known as the "Nightmare." The game really shines when you are exploring Silent Hill. I mean that literally, as you're using the Wii Remote as a virtual flashlight. It is extremely smooth and intuitive, casting believable shadows in every dark, haunted room. It looks absolutely fantastic.
The "Nightmare" bits aren't as slick. You'll encounter several "Nightmare" sequences; they are usually triggered by amnesiac Harry coming across some vital clue pointing to his daughter's location. The town then transforms into a world of ice, freezing any other characters and twisting buildings into otherworldly forms. Pursued by faceless zombies in these ice zones, the only thing you can do is run. In a decision that breaks with almost all pre-existing horror-themed video games, Harry has no means of attack. If a zombie jumps on you, you must shake the Wii Remote and Nunchuk to toss it aside.
This is quite blatantly the weakest part of the game, as it combines flailing, inaccurate motion controls with a muddled, confusing escape sequence. All you have to do is get to the "Nightmare's" exit point, but it is easy to get lost as you dash across the frozen landscape avoiding the flesh monsters. Often, I found that I had strayed from my intended direction and inadvertently doubled back all the way to the beginning. Fail.
Luckily, you have a modern tool at your disposal: Harry's cell phone. Serving as a GPS map, a camera, and a message center, the phone is a brilliant way to work video game conventions into "Shattered Memories" without breaking the immersion illusion. The phone, naturally, works as a phone, letting you receive calls from the game's cast. Proving how effective Nintendo's little Remote can be, all phone calls play on the Wii Remote's speaker. Hold it up to your ear and prepare to be seriously creeped out!
Harry Mason's search for his daughter unexpectedly casts the player in a key role, influencing through indirect means (as opposed to the usual direct heroism in most video games.) At its best, it feels like a personalized trip through a really good "Twilight Zone" episode. Unfortunately, while it would be too long for a TV show, it's short for a video game, clocking in at around seven hours. Even with those seven hours being really good, that's still too short an experience.
New gamers should delight at the head trip "Shattered Memories" provides, but thanks to the emphasis on psychological horror, old "Silent Hill" fans may not find it worthy of the name.
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