This week marks the release of one of the strangest games to come out of a major studio in quite a long time: Konami’s and Climax Studio’s Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. It is memorable for a variety of reasons, but ithe game’s most unique design choice sees gameplay limited to analyzing environments for the vast majority of it. There’s no combat, seldom few puzzles, and exploration is kept to a minimum with little room to stray from the beaten path. Instead, the gameplay mostly lies in searching around you for clues as you try to piece together the game’s tragic and mysterious tale. In this sense, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is more of an extended interactive cutscene at times, a concept I once scoffed at.

My feeling was that if a game aims to tell a linear tale with no win or lose condition, what’s the point of it being a game in the first place? Action games reward dexterity and skill, whereas puzzle games reward keen intellect. If games don’t tease my mind in such ways and want only to tell a story, they can be handled best as movies - at least that’s what I thought.

It’s a design philosophy that can be found in even the most story driven games like BioShock and Half-Life 2. It’s not enough that those games tell a story, they have to let you shoot stuff too, lest people complain that they’re not gamey enough.

The new Silent Hill does away with conventional notions of what it means to be a game. To its credit, I found the simple act of trying to comprise what the hell was going on to be as thoughtful and engaging as any game I’ve played this year.

Shattered Memories makes the player observe its environments to great effect.

I do have a confession to make, though. While I’d always been intrigued by the Silent Hill series, I’d never found it games much fun to play. I’d enjoy the aesthetics, rich metaphors and lucid atmosphere, but always found the experience of playing them something of a chore. They relied far too much on fetch quests, obtuse puzzles, lackluster combat, and stressful resource management.

In comparison, Shattered Memories dissipates all of these. What’s left may be slim to some, given that it’s only about seven hours long and without much room to stray from its rigid path. Instead, it boils down to the core of what made the Silent Hill series so compelling initially.