Silent Hill Shattered Memories review

Shattered Memories isn’t so much a remake of the original PSOne game but a re-imagining of the story. You play as Harry Mason who, after a car crash, realises his daughter’s gone missing in the creepy snowy town of Silent Hill. So off you trot to find her with nothing but a torch and a mobile phone to keep you company.

On the Wii you can use the remote to direct your torchlight but on the PSP it just points where you look which at first can seem limiting but you soon get used to it. You can also zoom into objects to either read them or interact with them by opening, unzipping or turning things to find keys and other useful bits of information.

Weirdly though, there’s no combat whatsoever. Instead of hitting the nightmarish creatures with a big stick, this time you just run for your life. When the world around you freezes over and you hear the screams of the weirdly shaped things you know it’s time to hightail it to the waypoint on your map. It certainly does get tense as you run for your life but it is a pain having to stop to open up your map whilst things are trying to jump onto your back.

You’ll also meet some interesting characters on your nightmarish journey and have regular visits to a shrink who’ll profile you by asking you questions and making you perform little mental tasks. These directly effect the way the game behaves from the way the monsters look to how characters act towards you and even dress.

So the game’s a mix of adventure, puzzling and running for your life but it would be nice to mix things up a bit more. There’s not really any sense of tension when there’s no ice about as you know nothing going to jump out at you and go boo! Still, it’s a functional thriller on the PSP and in a way it’s a blessing there’s no clunky combat as it’s never really been very good in any previous Silent Hill game. Shattered Memories gets a very good 7 out of 10.

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