i liked shattered memories on the wii a lot when it came out.
the other western silent games didn't look interesting, cause they seemed to be trying to fill in lore details to appease a rational, linear sensibility, and i feel the intrigues upon intrigues and deep immersion in the esoteric which marks the storytelling of the original four is far more interesting for the ways it forces you to study and think for yourself.
i never liked things that spoon-fed me easy answers, like it was a cute lil bedtime story to make me stop asking questions and go to sleep.
the other western silent hill games looked like they only had a superficial understanding of what silent hill was about, y'know -- rust, grime, busty nurse monsters, adversarial platonic solids, and akira yamaoka oscillating between bouncy seductive vocal rock tracks and hard dissonant industrial soundscapes of infinitely unfurling pain.
shattered memories came out in a time before the reboot cycle had fully cemented itself as the norm and the phrase "reimagining" did not yet have to be sectioned off by the latent treachery of a scary airquote.
think at the time i still predominately assessed the worth of a story by how well it was fully explicable to the conscious.
i'm not sure why i arbitrarily decided this is what made for a good story. think young men just know they need to set standards for themselves to trick themselves into upholding their own values, but then wise young men become unwise by lacking understanding of their own motives and thinking their games need to extend to other people.
since that's how i felt about stories, and silent hill's story was about capturing the emotional experience of being a traumatized girl with a split psyche extensively gaslit and tortured by her overbearing witchcraft-practicing religious mother -- but like... you're experiencing it from her adopted dad's perspective who is a rational writer who very heartfeltly and passionately wanders around in a fog of obscurity being confused and lied-to and strung along ... it was too deep, bro.
there is a narrative here, and because it is fundamentally about the occult, you cannot engage with its mechanics directly, and so there are layers and layers of subjective emotional entanglement piled on-top, and to parse the structure you must parse the character, for the whole will only be revealed in the simultaneous mastery of its component parts.
so, at the time, the idea of telling a different story using the original silent hill's setting and characters, but with a different gameplay style and aesthetic ... something more in-keeping with the rational, conscious, therapeutic. that seemed more interesting to begin with, for it would seem to almost promise something more original, and ultimately it does.
truth is, i don't care what -- if any -- relation shattered memories might have to the original. metatextually, it makes perfect sense. cheryl is a woman now on her third life, her father is dead.
throw her in another backwards world. "the real world".
why is her therapist the kauffman character? why is the sleezy doc who got alessa's nurse hooked on dope now her shrink? why is he browbeating her so hard to listen to him at the end? throwing his drink and insisting she listen, insisting her mother isn't a monster?
is this capturing something of how cheryl's past medical experiences were all marked by manipulation and deceit to keep her shackled to her abuser? is this another man in another time who only shares a name earnestly pleading with a self-destructive girl to come out of her cocoon?
if the two share no relation whatsoever, what is implied, and what do we suggest, by the incidental feature of them sharing a name and face? we read forward into this, but should we also read this backward?
how can we not, when it posits itself as an "official" entry?
You know for yourself the world of a narrative is an imprinting of the mind of its maker. If there's a reality beyond the template which pressed it, those are secrets which inform what has been made and are mere tendrils of probability. When you are in the world of the narrative, you are bringing things to it, making it more real to you as you imprint on it.
What a corporation says doesn't mean anything.
It'll effect things like house style, how they regularize flavor text, what details they prioritize going forward -- until they find something better.
Why would a current property holder know more than the original maker? Why do you think it makes sense to normalize living in an alternate world where the foundational work of inspiration is now merely pseudo-canonical. To whom are you pledging your loyalty?
Does it please you to think of the status-quo as some splendid garden?
A decapitation there, an uprooting here.
We're all invested in the fun little violence of keeping things the same.
Sit there and think about how you can do violence ~
simply by choosing to do nothing at all!
