Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is a "reimagining" of the original Silent Hill game. The premise is the same: You are Harry Mason, you've crashed your car and your daughter is missing, so you go look for her. Trouble is, you're in Silent Hill, so bad things are about to go down.
The gimmick here is the psychological profiling you get in between episodes, where a therapist asks you various questions and has you perform different tasks to evaluate your personality, which in turn changes some of the events, characters, and environments you see throughout the game.
Gameplay consists of exploring an area (Getting from point A to a puzzle to B) until the world freezes over, which means it's time for some monsters to appear. The twist here compared to previous games in the series is that you can't actually fight them, you can only run and shake them off if they grab you. Theoretically this removes the frustration of bad combat from previous Silent Hill games, but now you just have the frustration of being surrounded by enemies and being completely unable to make your way through without getting jumped.
You end up falling into a routine during all this. The entire game follows this A-B-C (Explore-run-psychologist) routine up until the very end, which makes the whole thing awfully repetitive. You'll know that you're completely safe while exploring, which completely destroys any potential tension, and you know after the monsters appear, that escaping them means you've reached the end of that episode.
The much boasted "Psychological profiling" feature in this game falls kind of flat. The questions you get asked and the various challenges you are told to perform actually do appear rather exciting at first, because you'll wonder what exactly the answers you give are changing in the game.
The truth is, you won't notice. During consecutive playthroughs, making different choices than you did before, you'll notice how some characters act differently or wear different clothing, or how Door A is open instead of Door B, which leads to a different puzzle. There is not a whiff of "Scaring you based on your fears" in here, it's just a bunch of switches and triggers, barely related to your actual behavior.
Nonetheless, the actual story in here is great. As you're about to get worn out by the concept and repetitive nature of the game, the story twists a few more times and ends. The ending also justifies the monsters, which is very welcome, considering their presence has annoyed you for the past 6-8 hours, which is roughly how much it's going to take you to finish this.
I played the PSP version and the game looked great. If you have the choice then definitely go for the Wii version for the better graphics and well-made motion controls, but if you're in a situation like me where you're interested in the game, but without a Wii, then you can't go wrong with the portable version.
This game is most definitely worth your time, but some unfortunate issues are holding it back from greatness. I myself am very interested to see what the developer comes up with next, after hopefully having learned from their mistakes.