It’s been a while since I played this. The gameplay seemed fine and co-op worked well. It looked decent and it was intriguing where it went in terms of story. But it shouldn’t be looked at as a Silent Hill game since it’s really its own thing. The story can be completed relatively quickly in 14 floors but you can continue. Each floor becomes more challenging and it takes far more time if you want to get 100% trophy. It can be frustrating when played alone in terms of big enemies being cheap, it can feel a bit repetitive and the story (through notes mostly) is not the best. I was planning on getting 100% trophy but I moved on and don’t feel like putting that much effort if it’s not on PC and not that amazing.

Hardly close to a conventional Silent Hill game, but it's the first one I've beaten XD . When searching for PSVita exclusives the other day after being prompted by talk of it in the PSVita thread, I came across this game on Wikipedia's list of Vita exclusives. When I saw a Diablo-like Silent Hill game I had never heard of that had been developed by WayForward of all people, I knew this was something worth checking out. I completed just the main story and it took me around 18 or 20 hours.

Looking at reviews online, I saw this game described as a Diablo game wearing Silent Hill's skin, and that's fairly accurate. As a Silent Hill game, this is up there with Homecoming as just an entirely derivative and soulless experience. Given that it's based around a Diablo-style multiplayer in procedurally generated dungeons, the story is fairly non-specific, but it IS there more than I thought it'd be. The whole concept is that your created character is given a mysterious book (the titular Book of Memories) as a birthday package from Silent Hill, and that this book has the entirety of your memories recorded within its ever increasing pages. Your character discovers that they can actually change reality by rewriting the memories in its pages, but doing so causes the "nightmares" that make up the game's dungeons, seemingly needing to conquer the nightmare to make the reality shift work. It's explained exactly how that works later on in the story, but it's a fair enough premise that's expanded upon by notes you find around each floor as well as through TV audio recordings that are scattered around as well. However, there aren't any original enemies or settings. The dungeons take on the look of settings from other games to decorate its hallways and corridors, and other than the bosses, it has no original enemies as its rooms are filled with scads of sexy nurses, double-headed dogs, Boogymen, Pyramid Heads, and more trying to cave in your greedy reality-changing skull.

The dungeon crawling itself is composed of enemy-less corridors connecting rooms in a linear fashion, almost like a Mystery Dungeon game but with doors enemies cannot pass through gating off the boarders of each room. There can be branching paths to dead-ends, but there will never be a ring of rooms (dungeons look more like a tangled up tree, where the branches never circle back). This makes the exploration of the dungeons more fluid and natural, but can make backtracking fairly uneventful and take a while. Especially if you're walking back to a shop or healing spot, it can make it take a while. The dungeon crawling is fun, as you can find the floor's shop (run by the game's only proper NPC, the mailman from Silent Hill Downpour), an artifact room (get a free passive equip item), a karma room, or one of the many battle rooms. Each floor has a fairly simple puzzle at the end that you'll have to solve, but first you must complete a number of fighting challenges in a series of rooms as well as finding the clue for that puzzle.

It took me a little while to figure out, but you don't actually HAVE to fight most enemies you come across. The only enemies you have to fight are the ones for the puzzle pieces, and you can otherwise just run away. Of course, there is an incentive and a kind of disincentive to fight every enemy you see (which I did). The incentive, obviously for a Diablo-like ARPG, is that killing enemies gets you level ups! Kill more enemies, level up more so you can buff your stats and unlock more equipment spaces to equip passive buff items onto. However, your weapons you find have durability! If you use it too much, it'll break unless you can find or purchase a wrench to repair it, and those items aren't numerous enough to just use one item in perpetuity. The tension of trying to preserve your weapons as well as your supporting/healing items is, I think, an effort to give the game an aspect of survival horror. On top of the danger of your weapons breaking and leaving you ill-equipped to do the required fights, there's the karma system. There are three types of enemies: steel, blood, and light. Killing light and blood enemies gives you the respective opposite type of karma (light gives blood, blood gives light). Having a lot or a majority one type of karma allows you not only to heal off of that kind of font trap you can find (although the opposite will hurt you), but also gives you access to powerful spells you can activate by touching the touch-screen.

The touch-screen use is probably my biggest issue with the game's overall design other than how it's kind of a crappy Silent Hill game, generically speaking (although there are plenty of proper Silent Hill games genuinely trying to be Silent Hill games that also have that fault XP). While the load times are a bit long (like 20 or 30 seconds), they only happen between stages and very far apart from the action, and the game itself runs great and I never had any framerate hiccups or game crashes (something I always worry about while playing a Vita game). But the buttons on the screen for certain things like dropping a weapon (press down on the D-pad and tap the weapon you wanna drop) or repairing an item/switching a weapon (very very close to the "close backpack" button) are awkward to hit during a tense fight and will often result in a misclick or wasting a lot of valueable time. It wasn't a game-breaker or a deal-breaker for me at any point, but it was certainly frustrating often enough that I feel I should mention it here.

Verdict: Recommended. This game was a real surprise to me as to how much I liked it. I wasn't really feeling it the first time I tried it out, but when I picked it up a second time, I just couldn't put it down and before I knew it nearly 5 hours had passed XD . It's not a perfect game, and certainly if you want a portable Diablo-like game, Diablo III on the Switch has you covered, but if you're looking for something a bit out of the ordinary from other Diablo-likes and you don't mind a Silent Hill dressing over it, then this is a great curiosity to pick up.