This appears to be the last project in the Silent Hill series to feature Akira Yamaoka in the credits. Literally a week before the release of the game, the well-known composer (and also a producer) announced that he was leaving Konami.
Akira, who wrote the music for all the major parts of the series, will be sorely missed. Its soul-crushing sentimental and rough industrial chords created a unique musical environment. Yamaoka built an acoustic cathedral of melancholy with turrets of regret and nostalgia, with a languid and cold atmosphere. And it is precisely in this mood that the new Silent Hill is valuable, even if Akira's music is not very noticeable in it.
This game was announced as a remix of the very first part, which has already celebrated its tenth anniversary. Formally, Climax Group has retained the concept of the original project - phlegmatic father Harry Mason is still looking for his daughter in a strange city. The script, characters, setting in Shattered Memories are constantly echoing with their predecessor nostalgic notes. Actually, the game is based on a story that makes it look like a book or a movie. The story is gracefully divided into chapters with preludes: at the beginning of each of them, Harry finds himself in a psychologist's office. The Gloomy Doctor asks what happened to Mason in Silent Hill and flips psychological tests along the way. Our answers influence the course of events. Harry begins to remember, and the action moves to the past, to the city. Silent Hill is swept by a blizzard, Harry is looking for his daughter. This is still quite an ordinary world where you can meet people, and in which there are no monsters, not very difficult puzzles and a lot of interesting little things create an atmosphere. Then the plot pushes the hero to a point of psychological stress and Silent Hill changes. The streets are overgrown with ice, the space bends and tears, and strange aggressive creatures appear in the alleys. Harry cannot kill them, and each chapter ends with a nervous sprint in dark mazes. If we manage to escape, the protagonist will be transported back to the psychiatrist's office, and he will just shake his head and slip another test. One feels that the script was written by a connoisseur of modern drama. The game is truly cinematic. She periodically throws hints and teases with the complex characters of the characters. But what makes this story even more fascinating is its multi-variation. The authors filled the project with an abyss of small scenario forks: the development of the plot depends on the answers to psychological tests, on which rooms we enter. At these forks, the gameplay does not change abruptly, the player will still get to know all the characters and run each nightmare from start to finish, but they add an additional semantic layer to the story. It's interesting to replay. Shattered Memories is entirely based on storyline and cold sentimental atmosphere. In accordance with the traditions of the series, the gameplay rather interferes with getting acquainted with the story than vice versa. It's good at least that the riddles are solvable. And the sprint stages, where you need to elude the monsters, are simply poorly done. There is nothing terrible in them, and they are more like an obstacle course in the dark - a significant part of the time the player rushes through large dark levels, beats against the walls and listens to the growing puffing behind his back. Here, do not be afraid - you want to swear. Sketchy "stealth elements" also look helpless. Yes, shelters have appeared in the game, but hiding is useless. They will find it, get it and kill it anyway. However, Shattered Memories is the best Silent Hill project in eight years. Its main trump card is that, unlike its predecessors, it does not try to be like the famous second part. And it is for this reason that he is the closest to her. Like Silent Hill 2, Shattered Memories is less of a game and more of a good sad parable.
