Silent Hill: Book of Memories Preview

You got your Pyramid Head in my dungeon crawler.

Silent Hill: Book of Memories for the Vita is a new direction for the franchise. I know this because the Konami rep at the kiosk told it to me at least four times while I played the demo. It's a top-down, isometric-view dungeon crawler with randomly generated dungeons. Weapons, villains, and strange rooms with little girls yelling "no" at you are all Silent Hill.



The level I played was short on story and hefty on combat, with Silent Hill favorites like those... mummy-things, and those... dog-things. Pyramid Head showed up in the video preview, and I imagine that he and some other big time enemies show up as bosses later in the game.

A highlight of the game (which I wasn't able to see) is the possibility of four player co-op. Even without that I felt something strange that I hadn't felt for a while when I thought about the state of the Silent Hill franchise. It was... fun!



Outside of the basic combat mechanic which allowed you to assign small weapons to either hand, or a large weapon like a pipe to both hands, the level was completed by assembling the pieces of a basic puzzle from combat challenge rooms. A store, which had to be found, allowed the option of buying better weapons and provisions, though the level I played was early enough that this was hardly necessary.

Silent Hill: Book of Memories was a surprising amount of fun. Pistol-whipping mummy-things with dual-wielded empty revolvers turned out to be just what the horrible nurse-thing ordered.