Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

2009's Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was a reimagining of the first game in the series - not a sequel or a straightforward remake, but a psychological horror that adapted to the player's behavior on the fly. A system called the "butterfly effect" tracked how the player responded to a psychologist's questions between chapters, and changed characters' appearances and dialogue throughout the rest of the game accordingly, set in a frigid, snowbound alternate reality that protagonist Harry Mason fell into while fleeing monsters. Instead of combat against enemies, typical of the series' earlier entries, the game emphasized fleeing and puzzle-solving, a significant departure for the series.

The PlayStation 2 version arrived a few months later, in early 2010, and replaced the original's key gameplay mechanic - control via pointing the Wii Remote at the screen, used on Wii to aim a flashlight and search objects and interiors. On PS2, this intuitive pointing had to give way to traditional analog stick and button controls, which pushed the game closer to classic survival horror and stripped away some of the immediacy offered by hand movement on Wii.

The graphical presentation was noticeably weaker on the PS2 version - the console was already an aging platform by 2010, and the game had to make do with simplified models, textures, and lower resolution compared to the Wii original, and loading times between locations were also somewhat longer. Despite these compromises, the story and the core psychological mechanic remained the same between platforms, so players without a Wii could enjoy the same nonlinear narrative and the same story endings, just in a technically more modest package. The sequences of fleeing monsters in the dark "other world," where the game temporarily shifted from exploration into pure action, were preserved unchanged, just with slower analog-stick controls instead of hand movement - yet it remained recognizably the same game, with the same atmosphere and the same soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka.

Why play it: For players without a Wii who want to experience the original's same nonlinear story and psychological mechanic - the PS2 version also preserves the tense monster-flight sequences in the other world, just with slower stick controls instead of hand movement.