As a Silent Hill fan, I’m delighted the series has found its footing again. The latest entry, Silent Hill f, has been generally received very well by most critics and gamers, while Bloober Team did an admirable job remaking Silent Hill 2 last year.
Now, the Polish studio has confirmed in an investor call on September 30th that it’s entered production on remaking the first game in the series. News that Bloober Team would be handed the reins to it was announced at Konami Press Start in June, but now the starting pistol has been fired on the development proper.
However, as fond as I am of the 1999 PS1 classic that booted the series, this isn’t the entry I‘d most like to see pulled into the modern era. No, there’s another, underappreciated title that deserves modernization, one that’s something of an upstart, something of an outlier in the series – and like Silent Hill 2, it is, in my view, one of the best horror games of all time.
In my restless dreams...
I first played Silent Hill: Shattered Memories on a PS2 emulator (shhh) many years ago, and as you might expect, it wasn’t a glamorous affair. Plenty of jagged edges and stutters blighted my playthrough, but despite those obstacles, the game still managed to get under my skin like few others could.
It was released in 2009 and developed by Climax Studios. The lead designer was Sam Barlow, best known for his mind-bending interactive fiction titles, Her Story and Telling Lies. His most recent work was 2022’s Immortality, which is one of only a handful of games to get a perfect 10 from Edge Magazine, if that piques your interest.
It is itself a remake of the first Silent Hill, although it’s perhaps better described as a reimagining, given its numerous points of departure. But the basic premise remains the same: protagonist Harry Mason has lost his daughter, Cheryl, after crashing his car in the town of Silent Hill, so he sets off to find her.
Unlike the original, though, which devolves into a schlocky plot about a fanatical cult, Shattered Memories delves into the inner psyche of Harry himself, making him more closely aligned with Silent Hill 2’s protagonist, James Sunderland, in that respect. Those two would be a riot at a dinner party.
Rather than following a straight path from case open to case closed, Shattered Memories takes a meandering route in developing its central mystery, throwing in plenty of curve balls along the way to make your chin and head sore from all the scratching, before plunging into dream-logic sequences and performing narrative rug-pulls, all of which had me absolutely enthralled.
What further sets Shattered Memories apart is its gameplay. There’s no combat, and the only monsters that appear arrive at intermittent set pieces, where the world freezes over (this game’s variant of the rust world in previous entries) and ice-laden creatures chase you.
These sections are, undoubtedly, the least enjoyable aspect of the game, and feel as if Climax Studios didn’t quite have the strength of its conviction – or the greenlight from Konami – to make a horror game without any actual monsters.
What I really want from a Silent Hill game (and any other psychological horror, for that matter) is a disquieting atmosphere, combined with absorbing exploration and puzzles. And for the most part, that’s exactly what Shattered Memories gave me.
Aside from these ice chase sections, Shattered Memories is pure psychological horror, tasking you with navigating the eponymous town to uncover its mysteries, as well as the inner lives and struggles of its various citizens.
The control scheme was also interesting. Since it was designed for the Wii, it naturally had to make use of the Wii Remote, so interacting with the world meant lots of pointing and twisting and turning of objects.
Not only was this a tactile system, but it also served to slow the player down, which is a good thing. Shattered Memories isn’t a game you’re meant to rush through. It offers a more meditative experience, asking you to take your time to absorb all it lays out for you.
For this reason, I would love to see Shattered Memories on a big, modern TV screen running on a big, modern console, sprawled out on my sofa to best appreciate the cinematic sweep and head-mushing madness. This wouldn’t be a game I’d be keen to play hunched over at my PC… again.
As conflicted as I am about modern remakes and remasters (you’re not helping, Deus Ex: Remastered), there’s a good practical reason for remaking Shattered Memories. It was only released on the Wii, PSP, and PS2, which means it’s not exactly the most accessible game in the series for fans to play.
Had there been a PC release back in the day, we could’ve at least relied on some technically-skilled fans modding it back to life by now, making it compatible with modern hardware and controls, as they did with the superb Enhanced mod for the PC version of the original Silent Hill 2. Such fan-made projects often put official remasters to shame in their care, dedication, and scope.
But in this absence, the next best thing would be for Shattered Memories to get the full makeover treatment. Maybe if Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 1 remake goes down as well as its remake of the sequel, Shattered Memories will be next on its to-do list. And if it is, or any other developer’s for that matter, then please, I beg of you: be brave and axe those ice chases. Thank you.
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