The therapy sessions occur throughout the game. What kind of 'tests' do you have in store, and are they based on real practices?

Dr. K is a renowned psychologist, so of course the tests he’s developed are based on existing practices and principles. Each test focuses on different subject matter: family life, guilt, etc.

You previously said that the Psych Profile is constantly working in the background, analyzing every action. How deeply woven is this system, and can you offer a concrete example of a seemingly insignificant decision having a greater impact?

You shouldn’t think of it like one decision affecting something else. This isn’t about helping a young prince in the past and then inheriting his kingdom when you come of age or anything like that. The game watches everything you do, and learns what kind of person you are. Past games taught us that Silent Hill reflects the inner mind of each person – so that’s what the psych profile does. This time Silent Hill is looking back at you, rather than James Sunderland, Walter Sullivan, etc.

In demos you’ve seen that hallway with a sign at one end pointing toward the exit (left) and the restrooms (right). Well Silent Hill knows which way you turn, and if you go right, which restroom you go into.

Shattered Memories has no traditional means of combat. Why and how will we defend ourselves?

Traditional combat (re: guns and stuff) is there to empower the player. In Contra, you’re supposed to be a badass Contra guy, so the game gives you spread shot so that you feel like a badass Contra guy. In Metal Gear you get sweet gadgets. The game is saying “you’re a capable guy – so go be capable.” Harry Mason’s a capable guy when it comes to picking up some eggs from the store, but less so when reality melts away and he’s thrust into a nightmarish hellscape. Giving him a gun would make you feel like a capable guy, though.

In action games you have to feel empowered. That’s what the game is all about – action. But horror movies (the scary ones anyway) aren’t about army guys mowing down creatures with cutting-edge hardware. They’re about normal people who are probably going to die getting thrust into horrifying situations. You can’t simulate that with a combat system.

So, when there are creatures chasing Harry, you have to run. You can knock stuff down to impede them, and you can hide, and you can grab flares to ward them off temporarily – but the keyword is temporarily. They’re always crawling out of the woodwork to run you down. You have to use your mind and outsmart them. If they grab onto Harry he can throw them off, but that takes its toll and he’ll eventually collapse.

The series is renowned as an unsettling grotesquerie of twisted flesh, but everyone is staying tight-lipped on the specifics of the monsters. Can you tell me who is working on character designs and what types of themes are being explored?

The monsters were created in-house at Climax. How they appear will be determined by your psych profile, so that the horrors you face are decided by your subconscious.

Shattered Memories is the most visually distinctive of the series. Was the fog and boiler-room color-scheme played out, or is there a deeper significance behind the ice and blue hues?

It is kind of interesting that the “rust world” is thought to be a defining characteristic of Silent Hill, since it wasn’t present in SH2 or SH4. That imagery is tied to Alessa, the crux of Origins, SH1, and SH3. In the second game, it’s actually revealed that the Nightmare World appears different for each person. For Angela, in that game, it was a world engulfed in flames. We felt that we needed to explore this theme, since things that are “known” aren’t scary. We already “know” the rust world pretty intimately.

In the original game, there were two different weather elements – fog and snow. Since this is a reimagining, we chose to go in the snow direction.

With so many departures from the series, I'm curious as to how the project took root. Did you revisit previous installments to examine their strengths and weaknesses?

Being a fan of Silent Hill from the very beginning, I’ve played the games periodically and I already have well-established views on their strengths and weaknesses. Climax has been working on the series for some time now, and they have their fair share of opinions too. So we know it pretty well inside and out.

This project came more from realizing that within the “Survival Horror Framework” there isn’t anywhere to go. The reason a lot of titles are now focusing on action rather than psychological horror is because that formula stopped being scary. You can’t scare someone with the same thing four times. This genre more than a lot of others has “set rules” that the games seem to think they have to follow. For Shattered Memories we stepped back and thought, if we didn’t know we had to do all these things... what would we do instead? What would a “horror game” look like today if the genre never existed? That game is Shattered Memories.