True, other Silent Hill games base endings on how you interact with characters. They personalize the ending to a degree that the other games weren’t capable of.
#Silent hill shattered memories series#
All Silent Hill games have multiple endings, but in Shattered Memories, they’re not just used to continue a series tradition. While you play as Cheryl in the office, your actions as Harry define his character and what ending you get. The transformation of Silent Hill is a tool of repression, her way of literally running from the truth. Everything freezes, monsters come out, and by the time the world is back to normal, the subject has been changed. He tries to guide her towards the real truth, but when she gets dangerously close to a breakthrough, the story stops. Our time spent playing as Harry is her retelling of this story to the psychologist. She created this alternate history and believed in it so firmly that it became her truth. No child sees their parent as a normal person, and this little girl saw her father as an unbreakable hero death was simply not possible. Cheryl, being only a young girl, couldn’t take the trauma and made up an elaborate story to explain her father’s sudden disappearance from her life. In truth, there was a car crash, but Harry died. But the action isn’t really a flashback, it’s a dream, a made up story. This story is told through flashbacks, as we take periodic breaks from the action to talk to a psychologist in his office. Cheryl disappeared and Harry braved the weather to find her. The story leads us to believe that Harry and his daughter Cheryl were in a car crash near Silent Hill during a blizzard. It’s almost a relief when everything turns to ice, and you enter the nightmare world.Īnd then there’s the twist.
That fact is hammered home every time you hear a message, and it weighs on you like a heavy depression. When I hear a recording at a thrift store of a girl excited over finding the perfect prom dress, I don’t think, “That’s sweet,” I think of the many ways that such a night can go horribly wrong. Your imagination fills in the blanks and by this point the game has lead you so far down into this dark world that you can’t think of anything nice. Since you hear only snippets of these peoples’ stories, and because there’s no gore, no blood, and no violence, much of the horror is implied. They, combined with the pitch-black nights you often find yourself in, and the claustrophobic, snowed-in streets, give this supposedly safe world an oppressive atmosphere. These stories paint the picture of a cruel and uncaring world. At least when everything freezes over and the monsters come out to chase us, the dangers are obvious - in the real world they’re hidden. These vignettes of everyday wickedness don’t make the real world scarier necessarily, but they are far sadder and more disturbing than the nightmare world. In the brothel, I receive a call from a man talking to a prostitute: “Sorry,” he says, “you almost had it, but when I noticed the wig you lost it.” I later hear him complimenting the pigtails of a high school girl. Cheese style play house, both are across the street from a high school. I discover a brothel next door to a Chuck E. A teenager calls her mother from a forest ranger’s payphone asking for a pickup because she doesn’t trust the crowd that she’s with the next text we find has a photo of her dead body and tells of a prank gone wrong.
As Harry approaches a specter or haunted item, he’ll get a phone call or text message telling a sad and disturbing story of everyday life: a big sister who jumps into a sewer to save her little brother they both drown. Shattered Memories avoids this pitfall by populating this world with ghosts, harmless ghosts, but ghosts with a story to tell. With no direct threat to the protagonist, the game could easily become tedious as we navigate the environment. The only danger that the player faces is one of boredom. Most of the game takes place in the snow-clogged, oddly-empty, though otherwise realistic, town of Silent Hill. However, despite the differences, it keeps the single most important facet of the Silent Hill franchise intact, the very facet that its predecessor, Homecoming, forgot: retaining the psychological in psychological horror. It’s not simply a reimagining of the original Silent Hill. Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a complete departure from the traditional survival horror format. This discussion of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories does contain spoilers.
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