A great reimagining of a series that had started to lose its way, and one of the best titles on the Nintendo Wii.
Shattered Memories at its core is actually a reimaging of the series' original entry.
To those not familiar with the original, you take the role of Harry Mason, who upon regaining consciousness after a car crash, realises his 7-year-old daughter Cheryl (of whom he was travelling with) is nowhere to be found. He begins to explore the town of Silent Hill in an attempt to find his daughter, but obviously without revealing any piece of the story whatsoever, he definitely does not find her around the corner and go home to live happily ever after.
The approach to the way the story unfolds is however somewhat different to the original, as well as being pretty much unique with regards to the way it tries to merge the player and their actions with the games scenarios and locations. The game tries to analyse you with a combination of interactive cut-scenes in a psychiatry session, where you appear to be reciting the games events and your actions throughout them.
The game manages to pull these scenes off very well and does manage to tailor the game enough to gain a level of personal horror in the game not found anywhere else within the survival horror genre. This is not to say that they are overly in depth or truly earth shatteringly influential to the playing out of the game, but they are nonetheless interesting, effective and well portrayed giving a great change of pace to some of the games more heart racing sections.
Shattered Memories also provides a level of tension that few games in recent memory have been able to conjure up. The game achieves this through a combination of some of the best visuals and use of lighting found on the Nintendo Wii platform, proficient but not overly used voice acted dialogue,avery atmospheric soundtrack providedby the series legend Akira Yamaokaand very clever design choices such as; a focus on running/hiding/escaping (rather than combat) the cleverly designed environments in order to carry out this gameplay approach, and the aforementioned brilliant use of what could be seen as admissions to madness in the psychiatrists office putting the icing on the cake (tenuous pun intended).
This game stands as a true survival horror game amongst recent 'horror' titles that should be preceded with the tag 'removal horror' due to their blatant gun toting eradication of fear and potential threats rather than featuring the escape horrific fates by the width of an undead fingernail. The lack of any kind of offensive weaponry, and focus on tension rather than blatant gore and in your face horror may turn some people off, but, if you appreciate how these elements combine in the light of the wider context of the game, you should have a thoroughly enjoyable time with this game.