Silent Hill: Shattered Memories

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a bold reworking of the series' first entry that takes only the basic situation from the original and rebuilds everything else from scratch. Harry Mason wakes up after a car crash in a snowbound town and searches for his daughter Cheryl, except the path to her runs through sessions with a psychotherapist who speaks directly to the player. The answers to his questions, drawing, filling out questionnaires and small choices in the environment continuously change the game: characters look different, behave differently, and entire storylines land differently. It's one of the most interesting attempts at adaptive storytelling to appear in the horror genre, and players often only discover its existence on a second playthrough.

The gameplay deliberately does away with combat. Harry has no weapon, and the moment the world turns into an icy nightmare, all he can do is run, knock obstacles down behind him and shake off pursuers with a flick of the controller. The rest of the time the game is more of a slow exploration: shining a flashlight, examining rooms, opening doors and listening. The mobile phone is used brilliantly, serving as a map, a camera and a channel for oppressive phone calls, and the player holds the Wii Remote to their ear to use it. The controller's speaker thus carries part of the sound design directly into the player's hand, and several of the game's best scares rest on exactly that.

Technically, this was an above-average title on Wii, with stylized lighting and dense snowfall that replaced the original game's memorable fog. The music and sound design keep to the series' traditional line, a mix of ambient textures, metallic screeching and a few surprisingly melodic songs. Reviewers at launch praised above all the courage to experiment and the psychological ending, which counts among the best-written moments in the whole franchise, even though some fans mourned the loss of combat. With time, Shattered Memories is now viewed as one of the strongest horror games on Wii and as proof that motion controls could serve storytelling, not just action.