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.

Silent Hill has had a rough patch, and I thought Book of Memories would change this. The game seems really great at first, and I like the idea of the series branching off for the first time to a different genre. The dungeon crawling path works well for the series, but it is poorly executed here. The first few levels are fun, but later on, they repeat the same way over and over again. The game doesn’t feel much like Silent Hill at all except visually, and I promise you there isn’t a single scare in the whole game.

The story is paper thin in which a man or woman (you get to create a character with a very weak customizer) that gets a strange book for their birthday from the mailman seen in (the last terrible game) Downpour. It is full of memories and you decide to go inside and change them. That is pretty much it. The story is barely delivered through notes and scattered audio clips. Silent Hill is known for good stories that are at least confusing, but not boring. This one is boring and uninteresting.


The game has a top-down perspective and you run around levels opening rooms and completing challenges to find puzzle pieces. Silent Hill is known for puzzles, but these are pretty lame (more on that later). You are safe in hallways and each room is random. That is probably the most fun part of this game: What’s in the next room? Some need keys to open which is found in red highlighted objects. When your flashlight is on these objects you can search through are highlighted and they contain things like ammo, medkits, weapons, keys, and repair tools.

The whole point of the game is to run around smacking down everything in sight, but this is where the game mainly fails. The weapons are nods to pretty much everything seen in past game like the steel pipe, wood plank, fire axe, revolver, sledgehammer, and a few original weapons. The issue here is that they can break very quickly. This made the game extremely tough because enemies are really hard to take down. Even after leveling myself up a lot I never did much damage. Using repair tools can come in handy, but they are hard to find and you can’t hold many of them. You can once you upgrade your backpack more, but this requires a lot of memory residue which is also hard to come by. Saving up this currency is even tough because you will be spending it on medkits and repair tools 90% of the time. See what I mean? This is all a vicious cycle that never ends.


There are RPG elements that allow you to equip relics which increase stats. Leveling up takes forever and doesn’t seem to do any good. The combat itself is boring and stiff. You just mash an attack button until everything dies. The lock-on button is handy for ranged weapons, but blocking didn’t really do much good for me. I felt the combat system should be more refined and intuitive for a dungeon crawler. Maybe add some spell casting? I can’t tell you how tired I was of the game by Zone 11, I just called it quits. One redeeming quality to the combat are the fun boss fights every three zones. You have to use strategy and discover their weakness, but why can’t regular enemies be like this? Most enemies are ones from previous games and very few are new. I just felt the developers didn’t know what direction to go in, Silent Hill survival horror or dungeon crawler.

It really shows in all the flaws in the game. The puzzles are the same three that repeat over and over. Event rooms are confusing with zero clues on what to do. Even the karma bar seems useless because picking up enemies’ blood (depending on whether they are light, blood, or steel) will move your karma bar around. Seems pretty pointless actually. The only way to really enjoy this game is co-op with up to four players because the game is really hard. Not to mention the fact that if you die before saving at the one save spot in each level you have to do it all over again, not fun.


Book of Memories has some nice graphics for the Vita, nothing special though. There are no scares to be had and the same track loops over and over again. The story is uninteresting, the character creator is weak, the combat difficulty is all over the place, the combat system is boring and stiff, and many other elements wrapped in the game just feel wrong and half-baked. I love the idea of a dungeon crawler in this series, but please pick one side or the other. Also, make it scary next time.

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.

Still somehow not the worst Silent Hill game (I genuinely had a more frustrating time with Homecoming) but I struggle to come up with redeeming qualities for this game beyond it being baseline functional. The gameplay is beyond basic, with the usual dungeon-crawler furnishings but without anything that makes it unique or exciting. You walk into a series of interconnected rooms, kill the enemies, and acquire keys and puzzle items to proceed to more rooms. It doesn't need to be nearly as long as it is and the new level gimmicks later dungeons provide don't do much to make things more interesting. The biggest problem has to be the unique tiles, which provide specific effects when you or enemies stand on them, such as healing you, slowing down time, or draining your health to name a few, but these tiles are invisible unless you're standing directly on top of them, meaning its incredibly easy to forget where they are and just get fucked over randomly with no real strategy to avoiding them or using them to your advantage. The respawn system is more complicated, as post-launch updates actually overhauled it significantly, and I forgot to update my game until halfway through, so I got to experience both. Originally, if you died in a level, you'd have to either restart all of your progress or restart from your last save point, which doesn't sound unreasonable but considering how labyrinthine the levels are and how much needs to be collected it makes the game feel extremely frustrating and repetitive. The update changed it to where you respawn immediately at the beginning or a save point without any progress lost, and you simply have to backtrack to your death point to collect your lost items which while still not ideal is significantly less frustrating. It almost felt like cheating, since it was clear the levels were not designed around this and the update was a hasty response to player feedback. The game also has a blood/light system, which determines which ending or abilities you acquire based on which enemies you kill. This isn't frustrating by any means but it's very underdeveloped and having to monitor which kind of enemy I'm about to bury an axe into kinda sucks what little fun there is out of the combat. A lot of enemies also just suck to engage with, such as the Insane Cancers which take up an absurd amount of damage and explode upon death, or the Bogeymen who are often surrounded by black fog which miraculously makes every attack miss and stalks you throughout the entire level. There are also puzzles, which are randomly generated and technically different every time you play. This RNG element doesn't matter though, as the puzzles are almost entirely the same every time. They all amount to "this item is sorted this way, in this direction" and the variation is astoundingly limited considering its random nature. At some point you don't even need to read the puzzle memos, you can just guess them via very quick trial and error. It makes you wonder why they even bothered to have them at all. It's not an outright painful gaming experience by any means and is largely functional in moment-to-moment gameplay, but it's boring, repetitive, and oftentimes frustrating.

The story isn't anything to write home about either, written by at the time series producer Tomm Hulett, who also has a story writing credit on Silent Hill Downpour. The story changes based on the player's actions, and whether you've absorbed more blood or light, negative consequences can occur for those whose memories you are attempting to change. Unfortunately, this element also feels underbaked. You never actually meet any of the characters whose memories you change, and although the game attempts to fill in the blanks via memos and TVs which broadcast past conversations, it's hard to feel connected to any of it because you never get to feel their reactions to the changed events, you are simply told them. Beyond that, these characters are very one-dimensional and essentially just serve as light context for why the player is exploring these levels. The game also pretty much tells you its themes at the end of the game, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't do it in any way that feels earned and rather a shoehorned way to catch the player up on whatever they may have missed. The game also seemingly tries to be a canonical Silent Hill story, which again isn't necessarily a bad thing, but considering how much it also tries to be a game filled with fanservice for all of the previous entries these two elements do not mix. It's difficult not to feel rubbed the wrong way when the game is trying to tell a serious and emotional story set within Silent Hill's world setting while also having Pyramid Head and other monsters manifested specifically for other characters appear willy-nilly like they're Umbrella BOWs.

Unfortunately, Book of Memories' presentation isn't up to par, and can't elevate an experience that is otherwise a bit hollow. The art direction seems to miss the appeal of Silent Hill entirely, and if it weren't for the copious amounts of blood, feels almost like a bowdlerized interpretation of the series made for younger players. The Otherworlds you run through aren't remotely creative, and not only do they feel demonstrably "not Silent Hill", but also wouldn't feel interesting on their own in an original title. The game may contain rivers of lava, stinging hot metal walls, lush forests, and musty temples, but I feel like I could grab any other dungeon crawler and find similar if not outright identical environments. The only one that stood out to me was the Water Otherworld, as its metal catwalks, pouring rain, and lived-in feel reminded me a lot of Downpour. While I may not consider that the "right Silent Hill" to take inspiration from, it certainly feels more at home than the game's otherwise substandard environments. Although the game lifts enemies from prior entries, a missed opportunity to design original creatures fitting the game's themes in my opinion, the game does present a few newly-created monsters. The biggest examples are the Guardians, the bosses at the end of each zone who symbolically represent the individuals whose memories the player is trying to rewrite, and their designs honestly confuse me. While not strictly bad designs, they feel like they come from a PS3-era God of War clone, and fail to stand out on their own or appropriately blend with the rest of the series. There are a few new mooks too, such as the Mothers and the Blood Babies, neither of which I care for. The former feels like yet another oversexualized Silent Hill monster without any real thematic reason to be so, and the latter feels like a Grey Child knockoff, which is even odder considering the children are added to the game in the DLC. Once again, they fail to stand out in any sense.

The game's tech isn't much of a looker either, and upon sharing screenshots with my friends, they remarked that it resembled an early 2010s iOS game in a negative sense. Textures are all absurdly low-resolution, which wouldn't normally be a huge problem considering the game's camera is set at a far distance, but ground textures often look stretched and resized poorly which removes any benefit this could have. Character models look outright uncanny, with most facial features conveyed through textures, making it resemble an early Dreamcast game. Environments all look samey with little variation, and what little detail exists usually doesn't add quite enough. The game tries to mask this by using at-the-time current gen graphical features such as specular mapping and normal maps, but it's simply putting a bow on an otherwise unsatisfying presentation. Performance is also quite bad, with the game seemingly targeting 30 FPS but rarely hitting it, and often chugs along like it's nobody's business. The patch seemed to iron out some of the performance issues, but later areas still struggled to maintain a consistent framerate in any sense of the word. I understand that Book of Memories probably didn't have a AAA budget, but considering there are much better-looking games on the Vita I find the poor performance to be inexcusable, and the game itself to look rather poorly put together.

The soundtrack was composed by Daniel Licht, who worked on Downpour the same year and is also known for working on the Dexter and Dishonored franchises respectively. While I wasn't necessarily a fan of Licht's work on Downpour, I'll admit that it was competent enough to suit most of what that game needed. Here, however, I struggle to describe the game's score. I'll simply call it "video game music" because it is that unmemorable. None of the tracks give the levels a defined atmosphere, instead, I naturally tune it out while playing, as they fail to immerse me in the game's world nor are they catchy enough to be memorable in their own right. The only one that stood out to me was Water World, as just like the level itself, it had an atmosphere that I thought was surprisingly competent in matching the atmosphere the area provided, which the other tracks do not do for me. I'll also say the game's credits theme, a rendition of Akira Yamaoka's Love Psalm, is genuinely fantastic, is one of my favorite Silent Hill vocal tracks, and is a perfect closer for the game.

Silent Hill: Book of Memories gets a lot of flack within the Silent Hill fanbase, but due to the Vita's low sales and the game's general lack of availability, I honestly doubt most of those people have played the game for themselves and are criticizing it on concept alone. I don't like doing that as I do want to give every game a fair shot, and unfortunately, I'm sad to report that I think Book of Memories, even when approached on its own terms, is a below-average and sometimes even bad dungeon crawler which fails to bring a fresh breath of air to the series or expand on the universe meaningfully. I don't think it's as awful as some claim, it's entirely functional for the most part, but it simply isn't fun. The mechanics feel half-baked and poorly thought out, the story is simplistic and difficult to get invested in, the game doesn't have much of its own identity, and the presentation is bland and uninspired. I don't have many positives to give the game, but I'll simply say that it wasn't painful enough to give anything less than a 4/10, there is a baseline competence here that I can't put aside. I can't recommend this game to anyone though, because I don't even think the game itself knows what audience it is targeting.

Book of Memories podría haber sido un interesante Silent Hill portátil o un dungeon crawler con una temática curiosa y por culpa de tener que ser un multijugador con niveles procedurales no puede ser ni lo uno ni lo otro.

Jugué un mundo y medio y a pesar de que las mecánicas fueran muy simples, no es que lo estuviera pasando mal. Pero cuando me enteré que esto lo tengo que repetir durante 10 horas más hasta ver los créditos, apagué la consola. Si un día encuentro a alguien que se lo quiera jugar en coop por los jajas se puede volver a intentar.

A game that gets talked about more for what it isn't, rather than what it is. All because people don't understand the concept of spin-offs. I'm not saying it's a great game, but Book of Memories is far from the franchise tarnishing change in direction so many would have you believe. That would be Konami's Silent Hill themed pachinko machines which appear to be the sad future of the series.

The reason this game has such a bad rep is because it moves away from the traditional survival-horror gameplay we've come to associate with the SH brand in favor of top-down ARPG action à la Diablo. There's also co-op. This is definitely going to seem like an unforgiveable sin to any purist, but when you consider that this is a one-off side-excursion with no effect on the main continuity things are a little easier to swallow. Especially seeing as how it's a mostly competent experience that has you battling it out with enemies from all across the series and is packed to the brim with fan-service. I would be lying if I said there weren't irritations though.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is fine. I enjoyed exploring the procedurally generated levels and fighting classic Silent Hill foes. Things like degradable weapons and limited supplies are a nice touch that add some tension and serve as throwbacks to the series' survival-horror roots. The problems arise when the game tries to be any more complex than just killing your way through rooms of enemies. The convoluted karma system sucks a lot of fun from the experience. It's one of the many things the game never explains to the player. Given how it's tied to which ending you'll receive, it's frustrating to find yourself getting penalized and working your way to a conclusion you don't want for reasons you don't understand. I like the idea of discovering systems out through actually playing the game rather than having them spelled out for you right at the beginning. Take The Binding of Isaac for example. It explains very little to you and only by diving into it's twisted world will you discover how everything works. I feel this is what developer WayForward was trying to go for with Book of Memories, but they completely dropped the ball as there's no way to figure anything about the karma system in game. At least not as far as I could tell. I had to find my info online. That's just poor design. The load times are also atrocious.

WayForward did manage to create an interesting narrative for Book of Memories. The idea of changing the past to affect the future at the cost of others is interesting and quite twisted. I just wish it felt like I had more control over the outcome. Graphically, while far from the most impressive title on the Vita, it at least looks like a Silent Hill game. The soundtrack is also fantastic despite the loss of Akira Yamaoka. The vocal tracks in particular are among the series' best.

Gripes and irritations without a doubt hold Book of Memories back from feeling like a true welcome addition to the franchise. Yet, this isn't a complete slap in the face to Silent Hill or it's fan-base as there is some fun to be had with the core gameplay. What we have ended up with is a serviceable, albeit inessential hack 'n slash dungeon crawler that has a nasty reputation because it tried to do something different with a long-running and now dormant series.

6/10