The game's free-form exploration--which has you pointing directly where you want to shine your flashlight with the Wii-mote--feels perfectly natural, and the real-time lighting effects look extremely good for a Wii game and are roughly on a par, I'd say, with the lighting in Doom 3-era games. (That's in terms of general fidelity, not the specific lighting tricks being used.) Harry's tendency to comment on things he has something to comment about is also a nice touch; it makes the exploration feel streamlined.
After checking out an abandoned, pitch-black building to see how these controls worked, the E3 demo jumped ahead to a combat scenario--or what passes for combat in Shattered Memories. One of the bizarre conditions afflicting the town of Silent Hill in this game is a pervasive deep freeze, where everything around you becomes suddenly and violently encased in ice. I started fleeing the ice as it spread, only to come face to face with some of Silent Hill's trademark repulsive monsters.
Like the flashlight, the defensive controls felt natural and actually tied into the frenzied panic of what was happening onscreen, which--if you'll allow me a Wii cliche--drew me a little more intimately into the action. The developers at Climax seem to be distilling what makes a survival horror game scary and focusing directly on those elements, finding ways to make the Wii's controls work for those elements rather than allowing them to be an obstacle to good, direct control.
These scenes were shown at the Konami event a few weeks ago, so I'm merely verifying for you that they play as well as I hoped they would then. But here's your brand new information about Shattered Memories, a truly unique and sort of creepy technique for personalizing your experience that I didn't expect. Essentially, the game has its eyes on you at all times, watching what you're doing and recording what sounds like an enormous array of minutiae about how you're playing. The game starts with a psych exam, which you can see a bit of in the trailer below, where the doctor asks you increasingly personal questions about your likes, dislikes, bedroom behavior, and other strange topics.
Shattered Memories seems like an ambitious game, from the eschewal of standard survival-horror tropes like shooting, to the quality of the graphics the Wii is crunching here, to the application of data-mining to a psychological horror context. I really hope Climax pulls it all off; if it does, this seems like it could be one of the better third-party games from a traditional "hardcore" genre we've seen on the Wii yet.
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