Silent Hill: Book of Memories Review

Still, while many aspects of Book of Memories fail to meet their potential, if you’re prone to dungeon crawler addiction, you might easily find yourself enjoying this action-heavy Silent Hill despite its flaws. There’s something compelling about clearing floors and leveling up your character, especially since you can take the game on the road (though long load times hinder the ability to pick it up and play for a few short minutes at a time). There are many randomly placed notes and broadcasts to collect as you play, and while they each add only tiny bits and pieces to the game’s story, it’s enough of a hook to get your attention. Book of Memories scratches an itch for those who enjoy a steady grind toward a stronger character.

Co-op play isn't all that special, but it does expedite the puzzle-solving process.

Having three friends to play cooperatively with can help make the experience more worthwhile. While the co-op in Book of Memories is nothing revolutionary, it helps to have people at your side with whom to either stick together to more easily overcome some of the combat’s shortcomings through brute force, or spread out to collect puzzle pieces independently, greatly accelerating progressing and negating some of the need to backtrack.

When things go bad, though, they go annoyingly bad. For example, one trap you encounter randomly in dungeons, the poison trap, temporarily drops your health down to one hit point. On paper this makes the ensuing seconds scary and frantic, which could be good for Silent Hill. In practice, however, it tends to be exceedingly frustrating. Say you spend a good 15 minutes exploring a zone without finding the save point in that area (a common occurrence). You wander into a room in which the doors are locked and you're forced to fight. Right before taking a hit that would normally be harmless, you accidentally trigger a poison trap. There goes 15 minutes of work, from which you retain nothing--no experience, no items, not even bestiary entries.

The environments certainly look like Silent Hill, though they lack the atmosphere.

Therein lies the main problem with Book of Memories: it straddles the line between being Silent Hill and being a dungeon crawler and winds up being great at neither. Its failure to fully embrace either identity means it can't borrow all the best elements from either past survival horror games or past action RPGs. Developer WayForward hasn't married the refined loot lust experience of Torchlight II with the atmosphere and plot of Silent Hill 2--if such a thing is even possible. In the end, Book of Memories feels unique in comparison to earlier Silent Hill games, but the game might have been better served by sacrificing some originality for what is known to work.

Even when it’s frustrating, though, Silent Hill: Book of Memories can tempt you back until you have seen all it has to offer. It’s an OK Silent Hill side story, devoid of horror though it may be. It is also a competent dungeon crawler. It is far from the best of either of those things. In the end it is a game with an identity crisis, but one that had the potential to be much worse (and, sadly, much better) than it ended up being. Don't demonize it for being different from the rest of the series, but don't expect something amazing and fresh either. It's not a bad game; it's just confused.