Silent Hill: Shattered Memories lets you search with your flashlight by pointing the Wii remote.
Image courtesy KonamiSAN FRANCISCO — The creators of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories want to reinvent the videogame horror experience on Wii.
It's not just about using the Wiimote as a flashlight so your character focuses on things you're pointing at, or about making radio noises crackle out of the controller's speaker, although Shattered Memories does both those things. Instead, the Konami developers are taking a much more radical approach: They are re-evaluating all the horror game tropes that earlier Silent Hill games helped establish, and throwing out things that don't work.
For instance, you won't have to worry about getting into awkward combat with shambling zombies in Shattered Memories, which is scheduled for release later this year. And you won't have to run around every room humping every wall and mashing the A button to find hidden secrets. Everything you need to survive the terror of Silent Hill is at your fingertips.
"Survival horror is a genre that is crying out to be reborn," said lead designer Sam Barlow at a Konami presentation in San Francisco last week.
Horror games have garnered a reliable niche audience ever since the release of the original Resident Evil in 1996, but many designers working in the genre seem to sense a certain stagnation. There's nothing less scary than predictability, so developers have taken to significantly altering the latest entries in classic horror game franchises. Like the extensive makeover of Resident Evil 5, the Wii version of Silent Hill is an attempt to boost the creep-out quotient by tweaking the gameplay at the series' heart.
The original Silent Hill, released on the PlayStation in 1999, helped define the nascent horror genre. It told the story of Harry Mason, a man trapped and looking for his young daughter in the haunted town of Silent Hill. The game spawned five sequels and a 2006 feature film. Like the movie, Shattered Memories is a retelling of that first story in the series. It is developed by U.K.-based Climax, with some input from the original Japanese development team.
While the upcoming game will also be released on PlayStation 2 and PSP, it began life as a Wii project. Nintendo's casual-gaming dynamo machine is the lead development platform, said Konami producer Tomm Hulett at a recent game preview event.
"It made sense to put Silent Hill on the Wii," he says. "Apart from the controls making sense, the philosophy behind the Wii of interacting directly with the games worked well with the idea of reimagining survival horror."
Walking around and pointing at objects with Harry's flashlight is enough to explore all the hidden details of each room, Hulett says: "I can just look at objects, I can zoom in on them. If Harry has an insightful comment to make, he just makes it."
Use the Wiimote to light up creepy environments in the upcoming Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.
Image courtesy KonamiHarry's mobile phone is one of his most important tools. He can use it to call phone numbers that he sees scattered across Silent Hill, take pictures of odd-looking scenes to reveal past events, and ... well, probably a lot of other stuff that the developers don't want to talk about yet.
In keeping with the theme of remaking the horror game genre, Shattered Memories won't include much combat.
"A lot of survival-horror games are based on rules established in the zombie genre," says Barlow. "So you have lots of slow, dumb enemies walking around and you beat on them with a pipe. If you look at horror movies, slasher flicks or psychological thrillers, and see what counts as action in those movies, people are going to start having an idea of where we're going.
"We're getting away from the action-horror trend, where it's about the guns you have, and collecting ammo, and shooting monsters, and focusing on the survival aspects."
Konami is also moving away from puzzles that can confound players and keys located far from the doors they open, a gameplay mechanism with no real benefit other than making players backtrack.
"In Shattered Memories, when I come to a locked door, a television I have to turn on, whatever it is, I can stop and think — 'Look around, what am I missing in this area?' I'm never going to have to run back to the grocery store two blocks away to find an egg or something ridiculous," says Hulett.
Instead, says Barlow, puzzles are about "giving the player something to grab hold of ... interacting in a meaningful, physical way." The one example Konami showed of how this will work was very simple — a key was hidden in a soda can, and the player had to pick up the can with the Wii remote and turn it upside-down to dump the key out.
From what Barlow and Hulett have described thus far, you'd think Shattered Memories' improvements are largely based on streamlining the experience, making horror games more straightforward and less frustrating. But there's something else they're doing with the design that, depending on how it is implemented, could either be a clever gimmick or a real game-changer. They call it the "psych profile."
"The way that (most) games deal with interactivity can be quite simple and dull," says Barlow. "You're the big barbarian hero, do you want to save the maiden or not? Do you want to be good or evil? It's slightly childish. The idea behind the psych profile is that the game is constantly monitoring what the player is doing, and it creates a very deep set of data around that, and every element of the game is changed and varied."
Barlow and Hulett wouldn't talk, at this early stage, about what sorts of things might change due to how you play the game, or what kind of data the game collects about you as you play. In the trailer that Konami showed, a character flashed between two very different physical appearances — that could be one of the things that changes.
The psych profile also sounds slightly sneaky. You won't necessarily know that things have changed based on your gameplay style, says Hulett: "When you go online and talk about it with your friends, they wouldn't know what you were talking about."
"We're trying to play on subconscious things. Pick up on things that you don't know you're giving away," says Barlow.
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories will be available in the fourth quarter of 2009.
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