There are many possible permutations of story elements, but no matter how much the world changes from one play-through to the next, the nightmares you experience and each of the puzzles you solve remain identical. ![]() For example, in one game, you might encounter a friendly country cop, but in another she's a frigid, shoot-first-ask-questions-later type. ![]() Characters, dialogue and ghostly messages can drastically change the forms of the monsters you flee from are customised to your personal fears and even the areas you visit, as well as the ending, can differ, which makes this a great game to replay in different ways. Your performance and answers to these questions can have wide-ranging effects on your gameplay experience. During each of these sessions, your therapist asks you to complete simple exercises or answer uncomfortable personal questions about fear and sexuality. You can even call up the phone numbers seen on billboards and wanted ads all over the city for hidden messages.Īt regular intervals throughout Shattered Memories, you're temporarily pulled out of the action to interact with an extremely unconventional psychologist in first-person sequences. In Shattered Memories, the town itself is a main character, and everything from the haunted objects to the kitschy mementos you find lying around help to establish Silent Hill. Occasionally, you may also catch a glimpse of a ghostly flickering image just out of focus to the naked eye but not to the digital sensors in your camera phone - snapping a photo reveals the hidden truth and also triggers the delivery of a voicemail or text message. Finding the source of this disturbance will lead to a spooky moment and the receipt of an eerie voicemail or text message on your cell phone, which helps to explain the significance of that particular localised haunting. When in the presence of such an item, Harry's flashlight will begin to flicker and a burst of static will emerge from the PSP speaker. And haunted it is, for Silent Hill is a swirling vortex of paranormal activity with something new lurking around almost every corner.Īs you travel throughout the town, you'll encounter everyday objects with strong emotions attached to them. These controls not only work without a hiccup, but are also extremely simple, which helps to pull you into the haunted town almost immediately. The simple puzzles you encounter are also solved in this manner, like twisting a radio dial to the proper station or adjusting a planetarium projector. These controls work remarkably well, and the slow, deliberate pace with which you interact with objects increases your sense of immersion. Nearly every action you perform, such as opening up cabinets, requires moving around a cursor with the PSP analog nub and hitting a face button. Power is out across most of the town because of the snowstorm, and, with everything bathed in darkness, only your flashlight can light the way. Though these nightmares represent the only moments in the game in which you're actually threatened, you're constantly vigilant because of the fantastic and haunting atmosphere of every area in Silent Hill, from Midwich High School to Lakeside Amusement Park. If the monsters succeed in bringing you down, you're returned to the beginning of the maze to try again, but while they can sometimes take several tries, these mazes are rarely frustrating. Each nightmare is its own self-contained maze of twists and turns, but without any sort of useful map to guide you to freedom, you need quick thinking, a strong sense of direction, and a little bit of luck to find the way out. They are many and cannot be harmed, so Harry has no choice but to run for his life as these hideous monsters give chase. Trapped within the mazes of ice formed in these frozen nightmares, Harry must run, jump, climb, and crawl his way out as he is stalked relentlessly by the pale-skinned, shrieking ghouls that emerge to hunt. There's a dark side to Silent Hill, and every so often, the world freezes over before your eyes as supernatural glaciers rise from the earth to consume almost everything. As he traverses the dangerously snowed-in town, Harry meets and interacts with several of its residents, from a local cop to an overly familiar party girl, struggling to come to grips with the fragments of memory the accident left him with, as well as his constantly shifting reality. ![]() Awaking in the snow, Harry is horrified to discover that he can't find his 7-year-old daughter, Cheryl, and, armed with little more than a flashlight, sets off into the darkness to find her. When loving father Harry Mason loses control of his car on the icy streets of a town called Silent Hill and crashes, everything begins to unravel for him.
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