The Silent Hill aspects come into play more in the environments, the enemies (from nurses to straitjackets to, yes, Pyramid Head), and, most interestingly, the puzzles. Karma is earned by killing enemies of the opposite type (so you gain light karma for killing blood enemies), and early on you gain the ability to flip the alignment of nearby enemies, leading to an almost Ikaruga-esque strategy implementation of killing certain enemies before others.įor the most part, all of this could be an explanation of any dungeon crawler. A simple magic system can also be used by collecting either “light” or “blood” karma, enabling healing skills and offensive skills, respectively. Weapons can be leveled up through extended use, but it's a long process, and it's not clear what improvements are acquired when you do so. You may find that you have an affinity for a particular weapon, but at a certain point you've seen all there is to see. Every fire axe you find is exactly the same as every other, and there are a finite number of weapon types available, negating some sense of the discovery and loot lust found in other dungeon crawlers. The stats for these weapons aren't surfaced well, but to some extent it doesn't matter. The game's puzzles would be a lot more interesting if they were more varied. Different enemies have different weaknesses to weapons, so you might want to pay attention to what you bring with you. Both melee and projectile weapons are either one-handed or two-handed, and one-handed weapons can be dual-wielded. These weapons break relatively easily, but they can be repaired with a toolkit or simply replaced with similar weapons scattered throughout the environment. Most weapons are reminiscent of those in the earlier Silent Hill games, meaning you pick up a lot of wooden planks and steel pipes. Typical of most action RPGs, clearing a zone involves a lot of whacking enemies with weapons to get experience, money, and loot, with less of an emphasis on the latter. Like many a dungeon crawler before it, Book of Memories is built around randomized dungeon floors, or zones. This is immediately followed up by the idea to change what's written in the book, ultimately leading to a past-changing journey through your nightmarish psyche. Your character, whom you customize before starting the game, quickly learns that his or her entire life's story is written in the book (it must not be too exciting, because the book isn't that thick). The titular Book of Memories arrives on your character's birthday, in a mysterious package from the town of Silent Hill. At the same time, it loses a lot of what people like about the series, and it doesn't do well enough as either a horror game or an RPG to make the game great.ĭon't you want to beat up Pyramid Head with a guitar?īook of Memories begins, unsurprisingly, with a book. In some ways it works better than you might expect it to, providing the same kind of addictive role-playing game grinding you find in other games in the genre. Silent Hill: Book of Memories attempts to extract the survival horror trappings from Silent Hill and put them into a dungeon crawler-losing most of the horror in the process.
The experiment may inspire apprehension in the hearts of the series' fans, but it can also breathe much-needed life into something that's growing stale. Plenty of franchises can make successful departures from one genre to another, whether for a one-off side story or an entirely new spin-off series.
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