Most impressive of all, Shattered Memories features a genuinely mature, original approach to survival horror – unfolding a disturbing and yet affecting narrative over the course of six or seven hours play time. Rather than a gun or club, your principle tool is a mobile phone – a handy bit of kit that gives you both a map and a camera for detecting ghostly presences, as well as the ability to call the numbers that appear on posters throughout your environment. Much of the game is spent exploring creepy, abandoned locations, solving puzzles and picking up messages from what appear to be haunted parts of the environment. New ideas are to be found in abundance here: there’s no combat, for a start – only occasional Nightmare sequences in which the player must flee or hide from pursuing monsters. Shattered Memories takes a very different approach. It was a fairly decent attempt to ape the feel of the old games, though its only real claims to innovation were an increased focus on melee combat, and the occasional shock of grisly, Saw-like violence. The most recent effort, prior to Shattered Memories, was Double Helix’s Silent Hill: Homecoming. After that Konami’s own Team Silent surrendered control of the series, passing the development baton to Western developers. Silent Hill 4 toyed with a first-person perspective for half of its duration, forcing the player to skulk around in a dingy apartment (at the time one editor – who shall remain nameless – got so confused by this that he spent an hour in the very first room, waiting for something to happen). It’s fair to say that the Silent Hill franchise has suffered a bit of an identity crisis over the past half-decade or so.
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