Shattered Memories was pretty bad in retrospect. The psychological profiling was poorly implemented: any person familiar with survival horror game logic tends to explore every nook and cranny to begin with. No, I wasn’t looking at that sexy mannequin because I’m an utter pervert, but only because I am curious about my surroundings. Secondly, the puzzles were of kindergarten variety mundane. But if there is anything really damning this game to hell, it’s the action sequences. I’m not maddened by the removal of combat, but who on the design board thought it’s a good idea to have these sequences be so discrete? It completely extinguishes the tension. In other Silent Hill games, the exploration and combat were interwoven. This ensured that you’re always on the edge and it also meant that the actual combat mechanics didn’t have to be that great. But now you have these banal action sequences which: a) have no impact on the rest of the game, since you don’t use nor need to conserve resources, b) require no stealth nor observation, all you got to do is follow the blue light like a mindless chicken, c) have harmless mooks.
The only aspects I took a liking to were the icy environments, which I thought was a neat reimagination of the Otherworld. The story was somewhat interesting, but most of the surprising and good bits were the effect of drawing a contrast between the original story, rather than appreciating the narrative as its own thing.
All in all, I think Westerners and even pseudo-Westerners like Kojima are incapable of understanding the soul of the franchise, so I don’t even feel much remorse about the untimely death of Konami and Silent Hill.