PS Vita’s forgotten Silent Hill game deserves a revival

Even though I hadn’t played a Silent Hill game before, I knew that it was a horror series, but I was surprised when I booted Book of Memories up and didn’t find it scary at all. After creating my character and watching the intro cutscene of a guy delivering a strange book to him, I was immediately thrust into a tutorial where I learned how to bash the guts out of classic Silent Hill monsters like the Nurse.

At the time, I wasn’t used to Silent Hill’s more cryptic storytelling in the form of collectibles and symbolism. Up until then, I had almost exclusively played Japanese RPGs, which were much more straightforward and expository. Eventually, I was able to piece together the plot: the Book of Memories allows users to rewrite events in their lives, but there’s a catch. When asleep at night, they are transported to a world ravaged by monsters. By defeating the guardian of that particular world, the rewrite becomes successful.

It’s a strong setup, but the story never quite resonated with me. Cutscenes were poorly animated and its graphics aren’t as impressive they are in as Killzone: Mercenary and Uncharted: Golden Abyss. That can make it tough to fully get into it.

As for its gameplay, it’s presented from a top-down view, similarly to Diablo, and players must go through several “zones” in a dungeon crawler fashion to make it to the boss. Each zone contains segmented rooms with various challenges to collect puzzle pieces that will unlock the path to the next zone. It’s really easy to not notice that an hour has gone by as the zone structure complements the Vita’s pick-up-and-go nature.

My job in college was to sit at the front desk at my dorm and perform administrative tasks. I often took overnight shifts so I’d have fewer students coming up to the desk and interrupting my gaming sessions. Even at 2 in the morning, Book of Memories failed to scare me.

As you continue defeating monsters, you’ll level up and increase your stats, just like with any other RPG. You can also equip artifacts that can boost your stats even further. While the combat mechanics don’t really evolve over the course of the game other than just swinging or shooting, the simplicity is really what keeps it engaging. The light RPG mechanics felt familiar and ultimately led me to sticking with the game for the long haul. There was just enough here that it still somehow sunk its teeth into me.

While Silent Hill is mainly a single-player franchise, Book of Memories experimented with full-fledged multiplayer. Here, up to four players can join together to tackle the zones, and they can continue from where they left off in single-player. However, what’s baffling is that other players can’t simply jump in or out of a host’s session in progress. To get everyone on the same page, you have to boot up multiplayer from the menu and then make your way to where you were before, which held the feature back at the time of release.

Luckily, Book of Memories, like many other Silent Hill entries, has plenty of replay value due to its multiple endings. Players have an alignment gauge that swings between Light and Blood. By choosing whether to complete challenges, the notes you find will have a specific alignment. Depending on how many Light or Blood alignment notes you’ve collected, your ending will change.