- #Silent hill book of memories vs dungeon hunter alliance upgrade#
- #Silent hill book of memories vs dungeon hunter alliance series#
While the early stages of the game limit weaponry to obvious tools of murder, as the game progresses and you complete submissions and fell the bosses that punctuate each chapter, so you begin to acquire a more powerful, Diablo-esque arsenal, albeit one that must be maintained with spanners under heavy use. At the start of each chapter a hulking monster issues you with an optional side mission, which, if completed, will net some more powerful loot.
#Silent hill book of memories vs dungeon hunter alliance series#
"Book of Memories is a curious game: an improbably boisterous departure for a series that has slipped into conservative compromise in recent years." The snappy multiplayer allows four players to co-operate together in what is one of the strongest experiences of its type on the Vita.Ī range of additional, optional tasks supplements this overarching objective. A single handwritten clue is also tucked away somewhere in each stage and, if you're at a loss for the solution, you can pay some currency for a more overt clue on the puzzle screen. An immaculate mini-map shows what areas are left to uncover and, while each room is usually host to a handful of enemies, the emphasis is on collecting the puzzle objects that are needed to unlock the final gate in the stage. There's a note of 'Metroidvania' to the stage layouts, with a series of locked doors preventing access until you've found a one-size-fits-all skeleton key to unlock progress.
#Silent hill book of memories vs dungeon hunter alliance upgrade#
Later in the game, when you happen upon the shop sanctuaries tucked in a far corner of a stage, you can upgrade your backpack (using the 'Memory Residue' currency earned from fallen monsters or solved puzzles) to allow you to carry a little more of everything - but the game is successful in communicating a sense that you're always a health pack and a rusty knife away from complete helplessness. Guns come loaded but these monsters are greedy for damage and you can easily empty the chamber on a single blood bat as its health bar soaks up the wounds.įind a new plank or crowbar and you must choose which of your current weapons to discard, while a range of two-handed options limit your choices yet further. Weapons degrade rapidly with use and must be regularly repaired with rare spanners, lest they break forever.
You begin with two weapon slots and room in your backpack for a mere handful of bullets and health packs. Item management in the face of scarcity of resources - that key component of any survival narrative - is part of this game's spine. In a first for the series, the protagonist is one of your own creations, dressed and coiffed to your taste at the start of the game.ĭig a little deeper and you find that WayForward has kept some of the earlier Silent Hill ingredients, albeit mixed and baked in novel ways.
There is, in its place, Diablo-thwacking, chest-looting and a range of character statistics to invest in and improve with the steady stream of experience points you beat from monsters' honeycombed skulls. There is no cold and brooding in these blood-flecked halls and alleyways, none of that interminable tension that comes from anticipating an injury yet to be delivered. The shift is disorientating - and the series' staunchest fans, those who revisit game after game in the hope of finding horror keen enough to match Silent Hill's earliest frights, may never recover. WayForward's extension of the Silent Hill myth departs more than just its stomping ground, also abandoning the survival horror execution in favour of a quick-paced, top-down exploration game that, for the first time in the series, allows four players to co-operate online. The game instead takes place in a series of esoteric rooms joined by interlocking corridors in six abstract worlds drawn from the psyche of the player character.
Tentatively at first, with Silent Hill 3, and then more urgently with the fourth game.įor this Vita-exclusive spin-off, Silent Hill the town has been almost completely abandoned. So the Silent Hill series departed its home town.
A town that reflects its visitors' sins back at them - and, therefore, a town few can stand to roam for long. In its close draw distance hid many of gaming's most striking horrors: faceless, stabbing nurses in short skirts and clicking heels, Dobermans gagging entrails from rabid mouths, pyramid-head executioners - and, very often, an absence of action.įew game series are named after their locations, but then few locations are so memorable as Silent Hill: a town twisted into grotesquely personal shapes by the grief, guilt and lust of its viewer. Who can blame Konami's long-running horror series for fleeing its beginnings? Silent Hill was a fearful town of fog and bereavement, of radios incessantly crackling with cautionary static: stay away, stay away.
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