One of my favorite franchises is the Tales series, and in 2014, when Bandai Namco announced that the Vita-exclusive Tales of Hearts R was being translated into English, I went out and bought Sony’s handheld with my hard-earned college job money. Like any good gamer trying to justify their purchase, I started seeking out more Vita-exclusive games. That actually introduced me to many other franchises that I never would have otherwise tried.
Persona 4 Golden was my first Persona game, Uncharted: Golden Abyss was my first Uncharted game, and Killzone: Mercenary was my first Killzone game. These entries fulfilled the Vita’s promise of bringing console-level gaming to a handheld. However, others weren’t as successful.
The Vita-exclusive Silent Hill: Book of Memories was released in 2012 and received mediocre reviews at the time. It was criticized for not being either a good Silent Hill game, or even a good dungeon crawler. I always knew about the Silent Hill series, but had never played any of its games. After all, I was a toddler and early adolescent during its glory years in the 2000s.
So when I got my Vita, I dove into the Silent Hill series. Yes, the action-focused Silent Hill: Book of Memories was my first Silent Hill game. Now coming off the heels of Silent Hill 2’s excellent remake, I’m left reminiscing about an underappreciated game that deserves to be remembered too.
Reading time
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.
Sharing the pain
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.
After I unlocked the Platinum trophy for the game, I walked away with ambivalent feelings. While other Vita games led me to explore their respective franchises more, I wasn’t exactly sure if I wanted to check out another Silent Hill game. I knew that Book of Memories wasn’t a good one. Fortunately, I was able to cast aside those feelings and I played the Silent Hill 2 remake. Now I know why fans consider it a classic, and I’m looking forward to revisiting previous entries through Xbox’s backward compatibility program. I just hope players get a chance to do the same with Book of Memories revival one day.