Let's Play Silent Hill: Shattered Memories p.10 - Results of Therapy (FINAL)

[@jeffanderson3424]

I like to think that Harry is a real ghost doing things around the town while 3 real people have intense experiences with spooky ghosts durring a spooky storm. Everybody who mans an answering machine in Silent Hill has to see a call log full of dead air. Thats definitely ghost behaviour. Lisa is probably fellow ghost.

[@In4m8ion]

Or ghost Harry polterguisted her right into the grave. And poor Cyble is gonna have just so much explaining to do

[@Klarden]

UFO ending for ShatMem is one of my favorites for sure.

[@friendlyfrankenstein]

I look forward to these playthroughs so much and this time I feel like what I learned is: I kind of love this game. it's so CLOSE to doing what it set out to do. It beguiles me. I got the impression of Cheryl having some latent, underused powers, just... manifesting this version of her dad into the world. A ghost of a memory, wandering around a mall giving a security guard a weird night.

[@In4m8ion]

Ironically a remake of this game could be far more impactful than the SH2 remake. Taking this concept and just finding that lil bit thats missing could make it into something real unique for the franchise. But SH2 is the one people like…so whatever graphics that thing up I guess…

[@TrashPanda-2112]

The real horror is being a third wheel in a couples argument. I'd rather be chased by murderous monsters.

[@In4m8ion]

This! 10 seconds into that ride I woulda been eyeing just throwing myself from the car.

[@KevinCow]

This game's fascinating because it feels like a prototype for a bunch of trends that would become popular in the coming years. At a time when horror games were moving more into action thanks to RE4, this game completely removed combat and instead focused on running and hiding. I remember this being a point of contention at the time... but then we got games like Amnesia, Slender, Outlast, and so on, and horror games about running and hiding became a whole subgenre. When you're not in a nightmare, it's just about walking around and looking at stuff, piecing together the story through notes and audio logs and environmental storytelling without the threat of conflict or failure... that's basically a walking sim before games like Dear Esther and Gone Home popularized it as a genre. Some of the nightmare sequences felt like they were trying to do a similar reality bending thing that Arkham Asylum's Scarecrow sequences did a few months earlier, and which every dream sequence in every AAA game has since copied. And of course I'd be surprised if the psychiatrist didn't directly inspire Until Dawn. ...It just didn't really do any of those things well enough to take credit as the trailblazer.

[@InfiniteQuandary]

Missed opportunity: When this boat's a rockin', soon there'll be raw shockin'! 😂

[@devmech]

Damn you beat me to it! 🤣

[@Webwielder]

Need the camera to turn around revealing that the therapist is telling a weepy-eyed young woman that she’s not having enough sex.

[@inferno232]

I love my SuperGreatFriend!

[@SapphireCrook]

I've become more acutely aware of choreography in games and such. I love how when the therapist claims "a child's fantasy" he gestures towards Harry, but he's LEANING the other way, showing the dichotomy. It's a small thing, few people think or care about it, but I dig shit like that, especially since the human brain will often invent such things entirely out of thin air. It's like ghost hunting your own brain, except ghosts are sometimes real and sometimes just sheer accident.

[@neauxway]

Can't wait for Book of Memories!

[@devmech]

When is the SGF "Noises of Love" album coming out? I've got a hot date and I need that perfect ambiance.

[@JuanPerez-cs1gx]

I hope it includes his rendition of "Cradle of Forest" from the SH4 LP

[@JFJD]

He’d better not forgot a cover of Love T.K.O (oh, oh, oh)!

[@LordQuadros]

So my take on the nature of Harry throughout the majority of Shattered Memories: By default, he's the platonic ideal of the perfect protective father, almost lifted straight from the original events of SH1 (which, in this case, serves as a fantasy she developed of her idealized father coming to rescue her from her "evil witch" of a mother), but Kaufmann has been forcing her to recontextualize him in reality, complicating the narrative by making its own inherent contradictions apparent, and what we as the audience see and play through is sort of a visualized metaphor. It should also be stated that this in no way makes Kaufmann a good therapist. He's damn lucky this kind of accidentally worked out.

[@Terjay]

"So are you saying I wouldn't have sex with the gun, Doc?"

[@05trowa]

I think if they had added a few more alternate locations and made it so the profile you were building made you take alternate routes it would have gone a long way in encouraging the replay aspect and could more easily explain why people act differently at the key story points.

[@BKRandyful]

This was a lot more fun to watch than I imagine it is to play. The first ice scene where the crossroads freezes over is really well done. I loved Kaufman's performance and the twist at the end is great. Matt McMuscles actually just did an episode on this game that explains why it's such an odd departure from typical silent Hill games.

[@GrislyBeasty]

When the boat comes arockin’ don’t come rawshockin

[@nonsquarepixels]

The heavily aliased, mid-resolution 3d graphics - in this version especially - feel like a direct inspiration for Crow Country.

[@Scarwing]

I think the idea in the Lisa scene is she felt terrible, reached over, knocked the pill bottle over in her desperation, grabbed a couple pills off the table, saw they were the wrong color, then died.

[@JuanPerez-cs1gx]

So Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is like Google, Social Media and streaming services? It constantly monitors you and gives you points based on where you pause, where you stop scrolling, what picture you are looking at, for how long, and so on and then it adapts the internet by changing "recommendations" and commercials depending on what scares you the most: Dying, "not getting enough", leaving childhood behind, etc.

[@ricktastica]

i loved these playthroughs so much!!

[@Woot100]

the Wicked and Weak ending (i.e. the one you couldn't get) has been rumored to be bugged for a while. Rarely people manage to get it, but it seems like it has WAY less event flags than everything else. Don't feel bad you couldn't get it, this is like, a Known Issue and I don't even think rom hackers have managed to patch it, it's just that janked. A shame, too, I think it's probably the saddest out of all of them.

[@In4m8ion]

Is Cheryl supposedly telling Kaufman the actual story we’re playing? Cause I know hes a terrible therapist, but I feel like before the second cut away, he needed to get some security or something on site, because if shes telling him something she truly believes happened…she needs a level of help that weekly optional visits are not going to be adequate for.

[@gayrurumon]

Yeah that was a better game than I was expecting based on its reputation. There were a lot of neat little touches, and I warmed up to the visual style of the other world after a while despite being initially cool on it (heh, get it?). It still had a lot of problems; I don't know if the core gameplay they went for was all that great, and there was just a whole lot of missed potential when it cam to the whole "this game plays you as much as you play it" thing. I'm guessing they wanted to do more with it at some point, but had to cut back on some of their plans due to time and money; the classic dilemma of games like this. Still, aside from a little bit of weirdness with certain aspects of the writing, I think the core narrative was solid.

[@foxyshibata3783]

Unlike Homecoming, Which stumbles into a few really good concepts and themes entirely by accident, Shattered Memories approaches the table with some really good ideas intentionally and just, sorta, does them very poorly. With some Tweaking and...well, to put it bluntly, Much Better Writing, this could have been amazing. Many people have said they prefer the idea of Cheryl literally summoning Harry's ghost and I absolutely agree with them. The 'Physical, Supernatural manifestation of inner turmoil' *is* a great concept, and I would prefer more of that in the Silent Hill Franchise over trying to bend over backwards to directly relate it to The Cult or something, and the twist of 'Your charecter is actually someone else's Trauma-Monster.' is a really good one too! It's just. Not done well. The seed of good ideas puts it above Origin in my Rankings, but, I have only barely touched on my main point of criticism. The Writing is bad. This game feels bad. There is a mean-spirited edge to it, and I think a chunk of that comes from just poor character writing, but I think the majority of it comes from the 'THIS GAME PLAYS YOU AS MUCH AS YOU PLAY IT' ass attempt at 'Psychological Horror'. It's not only a bad idea, it's also done poorly, and leaves a sour taste in my mouth at the whole thing. The plot moves at a very stop-and-go pace, where instead of slowly untangling the mystery until a final reveal, the big reveal is threatened several times over before the world freezes over and 'whoops now, lets just forget about that now!', because they don't know how to properly foreshadow, they just bait and switch a full reveal three fucking times in the game. I understand that was an intentional design decision, but fuck man that doesn't make it less annoying. The combat's also bad. You can do depowering 'running away' based combat and make it very good, very tense, and very atmospheric. This doesn't. It feels like it's one of those Changed perspective levels in like Crash Bandicoot where you're being chased by a boulder more than it feels like anything that'd make me feel fear. But, overall, It does feel like people were trying with this game. It feels like they were into what they set out to do, and boy did they try. They tried to do too much, and they didn't do very well, but at least they tried. That puts it above A Short Message, as well. Anyway, I dunno how to wrap this up. Happy 3rd least favorite silent hill game that SGF has played.

[@jamesmason3734]

Is there anyone who edited Kauffmann's glass shattering into the deltarune explosion?

[@Nnomad175]

More like...rackshocks?

[@shokatsuryoukoumei]

See you next year, Murphy. Don't forget your running shoes.

[@bloodykun4443]

Feel like I ought to comment now I've seen the other endings, just to be authentic. To get some criticism out of the way, I do think each of the tapes feel almost too hammy, like a really obvious caricature where I just can't take it seriously - that and I just can't not think of Kaine when Dahlia is cussing Harry out. I also agree that for one, there aren't enough differences, or at least it's hard to say whether there are, my main problem with it being really vague as to whether you'll get something different or not regardless of what you do, or whether you're doing enough. I think the idea must have been to go for more of a naturalistic feel to it, and I feel they are self aware of that enough with the SH2 reference in the UFO ending, just going off of how in SH2 there were really obtuse mechanics that would effect players' endings without probably realizing it until they inevitably started to figure out all the details. I can get not wanting it to feel too gamey, especially with its tone as a serious horror game, but just judging from this second playthrough, it is simply too frustrating for the average player to deal with it seems, unfortunately. As far as the rest of the fine details of the story goes, I think there are perhaps at least elements of truth to each of them, and whether Dahlia's abuse or Harry's drinking or infidelity came first, but think that hardly matters when it comes to really messy toxic relationships between two adults. Interesting that it almost seems like an inversion of James and Mary, only one death is far more sudden and the other is much of the driving force of two characters' estrangement from each other. You have them saving face when breaking the ice to young Cheryl, causing much of her guilt and projection, and I think perhaps however you can play the game and make choices ("Frankenstien's monster" as Kauffman says) may be Cheryl's way of realizing in retrospect that there were problems outside of her control. As you say, I think many of these things feel superficial, especially compared to mechanics in SH2, but it's hard to think of how the developers might have done these aspects any differently. Anyway, that's all to say I really don't think any of what happened was "real" in Harry's journey here. I could be wrong, but watching the intro multiple times, I really can't see Cheryl in the backseat of Harry's car as it's crashing. Maybe we are simply not meant to look that closely, but I doubt that isn't intentional and feel like that is a tell that this is a story entirely told by Cheryl to Kauffman. An aside I had thought of that doesn't matter so much, I initially had the impression that these were multiple sessions over a long period of time, but the idea crossed my mind that this is their first time meeting, which makes his outburst at the end a bit less believable, but even so, I don't think he's meant to be a shining example of anyone good himself, just as he was a bit abrasive in the original SH. I've also thought about you noting there is no analogue for Alyssa in this game, and as to what might have caused the crash instead. I wonder if that might have been a catalyst in the entire concept of the game in the first place, especially in not going for much of the cult or demonic aspects of the original. I also feel it is even more interesting in that Cheryl ends up having many elements of her design seemingly based off of Heather, or at least coincidentally close. Heather's grief being so fresh for a version of Harry we don't get to know so well in recent years is an interesting contrast, even more so with Claudia Wolf - as far as i can recall, not directly related to Dahlia but taking on a very similar role to the original version of her, and who kind of reminds me of the mother in Stephen King's Carrie. That's me getting a bit off track, though, and running out of more concrete stuff to say, probably due to my own brain fog having got my shots yesterday. Thanks for anyone who takes the time to read or reply.

[@adamcammack3534]

Best Ending Cutscene

[@seanmcbay]

This game wasn’t bad but feels like a missed opportunity to not connect it to the original SH1 in some way other than a line in the joke UFO ending.

[@ShayleaChensu]

It wasn't as terrible as everyone said it was going to be but yeah, they didn't do a great job with the women in this game.