TOKYO – There's a dearth of genuinely frightening games on the market today. No matter how many zombies, monsters or demons might jump through a window, every game gives you a tool to deal with that situation. Typically, that tool is a gun and even when ammo is finite, having a gun means you have a fighting chance.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories does away with all that. Your flashlight is just a flashlight, your phone is just a phone. There's nothing you can do when faceless pink humanoids approach you in the darkness – you just have to run away. If they grab you, you can shake them loose in order to run away again. Your tools are useless against them and your arms aren't worth much either.
Shattered Memories is coming for the PlayStation 2, PSP and Wii, although only the latter two versions are on display here at the Tokyo Game Show. I chose the Wii version because using the Wiimote as a flashlight sounded like a good way to utilize the motion controls. Unfortunately, that meant that shaking the monsters loose meant waving my arms frantically. It wasn't aimlessly, though, as the command to free yourself varies on how you are being constrained. Sometimes you shake to the left, sometimes to the right, etc.
As you can probably guess, you will be doing a lot of shaking and it gets tiresome very quickly. The demo level had me wandering around a dark frozen town (Silent Hill, I presume) and lingering in any spot would result in monsters showing up, sometimes two at a time. Holding the Z-button runs, but since that's the only way to stay safe I never let it go. I still got caught many times over because there is no escape. The monsters can open doors and while I found a hiding spot under a bench, they never left the room so I was merely delaying the inevitable.
Was it scary? Absolutely, but it was also frustrating beyond belief: I had no idea what I was looking for and the game offered no tips beside "keep running." The demo provided no incentive to find out what Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is all about. If the whole game is running away from monsters, that doesn't strike me as an appealing way to spend my time.
Image courtesy Konami
