I was impressed by
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories for the Nintendo Wii when I
first attempted to play the game last year. The therapy session framing device was quite intriguing but I just couldn't force myself to play it because I knew I that the game was going to scare the heck out of me. Well, earlier tonight, I decided to play the game again and yes, I did stream the gameplay on
twitch.tv, with the camera feed on nonetheless. Suffice to say that it was a session filled with thrills, chills, crazy expressions on my face, and of course, very manly screams.
The painful, traumatic act of... rolling down the window.
Then, something unexpected happened. I was stuck in a room with no way out and judging from the graphical glitches, it was somewhat obvious that the game just simply broke. I had no choice but to reset it because I couldn't even open the in-game menu and when I started the game again, it went back to the very beginning and it didn't allow me to resume from wherever it was I left off! For a brief moment, I thought that the game was playing tricks on me intentionally because there is this nasty warning when you boot up the game:
Surely, this problem is just the game playing tricks on me, right?
Wrong! After both continuing to play the game for a little bit and resetting it twice, I concluded that perhaps my save file got corrupted. After I quit the game, I checked the instruction manual and found that the answer was a very simple one: the game has no auto-save. One must manually save the game and that ability is not granted to the player from the very beginning but shortly after playing the game. I most certainly had passed that point of the game but I don't remember seeing a tutorial pop-up informing me about saving the game. In hindsight, this is certainly my fault. I used to read a game's instruction manual completely before I play it but with the recent trend of in-game tutorials, I have stopped doing that. Now, I have lost about an hour and a half worth of progress but one thing is for certain - the game has certainly played me more than I could ever attempt to play it. It has won. I can feel it deep in my heart: the game is evil.
