Interview with Tomm Hulett - Revealing Shattered Memories’ Story (Gamer Grenade)

Date published: 2010.02.12
Source: Gamer Grenade

Anyone who’s spent a reasonable amount of time with Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Wii/PS2/PSP) – and especially those who have finished it – have more questions than answers concerning the game’s story and characters. Exercising all the freedoms that writing for a website can afford, I took these questions straight to the source for answers direct from the main man – Shattered Memories Producer Tomm Hulett. WARNING: The following article contains frank and open discussion of the game’s story and characters – do not read if you haven’t yet completed the game.

Gamer Grenade: These questions are mostly going to take the form of ‘So what’s the deal with blank?’ about the story and characters. I’ve played through it a few times, and I get the sense that there’s a lot of weight behind the characters and events, so I’m trying to piece the puzzle together.

So you finish the story and find out that Cheryl is the one in the psychiatrist’s office. Is the implication that the game is Cheryl’s narration? That you’re seeing the story that she’s telling to the psychiatrist?

Hulett: That’s certainly one way to view it. It is Silent Hill so anything can happen.

Gamer Grenade: Ahhh yeah, that will probably be the catch-all for most story questions.

Hulett: Yeah, every question, heh. But it could also be that Harry is like Maria in Silent Hill 2. The town has given shape to this figure, so he would represent the ideal, given life to explore the town, whereas the real Harry was this other person.

Gamer Grenade: The interesting thing is, at times the game is a projection of Cheryl’s desires or fantasies some of the time. At other times, it seems like it’s occurring in reality. You’ll have Cheryl imagining her father as the game analyzes the player – being obsessed with alcohol or women or whatever – but on the same hand you’ll have characters in the story telling Harry that he’s already dead. I’m curious – those two seem at odds, and they butt heads inside the story. Is that an intentional conflict, or are these little bits of reality starting to erode at the fantasy that Cheryl has created?

Hulett: It’s definitely an intentional duality, and it goes back to the old games where you’re in this hellish world where everything is melting around you and there are monsters, and you’ll come across a character that doesn’t see any of that. So, are they real? Are you real? Are you imagining things? Do they exist? You have no idea. We kept that theme with Shattered Memories as the central core of everything, so that Michelle could be a girl you meet that went to school with your daughter, or Michelle could be this projection that Cheryl has because she saw Michelle with her Dad when she was little, or Michelle could be a symbol for something from Harry’s past. There are many ways to interpret a character. Hopefully when people play it with their profile, they feel connected to that version of the game. They can draw their conclusions based on what they saw.

Gamer Grenade: Huh, so is there a legitimate canon idea for who represents what? Is it intentionally crafted such that any character could mean a variety of things to any player depending on how they see it?

Hulett: We definitely have multiple things each character can mean. Not like mean to everyone, but like I said, Michelle could mean this or this other thing. Certain profiles will lead them one way or the other. For example, in one Dahlia is clearly Harry’s wife, or past Harry’s wife, or something. In another, profile’s dialogue, she basically says ‘I know OF Cheryl,’ like someone he’s seeing on the side. There’s a little bit of ambiguity to things like that where you’re not quite sure what it means.

Gamer Grenade: Ah yes, I was going to ask about Dahlia. I imagine that out of all the characters in Shattered Memories, she’s probably invoking the most questions. I was going to ask – is Dahlia supposed to be Cheryl’s mother? She’ll talk about knowing Cheryl and Harry, but is always very resistant to talk about their history, which implies something bad happened. Then there’s that one point where you walk in on Dahlia and she’s much older, and it’s almost like the timelines match up. But then when you get to the end of the game, and see who is presumably Cheryl’s mother, it doesn’t look like Dahlia. I was going to ask – is Dahlia Cheryl’s projection of her mother? I assume the answer will be something like ‘It could be, maybe.’

Hulett: That actually surprised me. We weren’t really ever thinking along those lines. As soon as people begin the game, they begin this whole ‘Cheryl’s in love with her father, and she’s projecting herself as her mother.’

Gamer Grenade: That was my thought too, actually.

Hulett: I guess it’s valid since so many people feel that way…

Gamer Grenade: [laughs]

Hulett: And maybe Climax slipped that one in under my radar, but I never thought that until I read it online. It’s interesting, Silent Hill at work I suppose.

Gamer Grenade: Hey, and the fact that that can happen is the mark of a successful Silent Hill game. People can take it and think about it, come up with ideas that are different. The fact that it plays on a person’s ideas about relationships and stuff like that… Maybe these theories that Cheryl is in love with her Dad say more about the players than the game.

Hulett: One interesting thing about Dahlia, or one of the things she brings up that a lot of people haven’t noticed about the game, is that it actually follows the exact course of the original Silent Hill. After the School you have the church where you meet Dahlia, you find out that she’s Cheryl’s mother, though Cheryl was a girl named Alessa. And then in Shattered Memories, after the school you have the church, where you meet Dahlia, who turns out to be Cheryl’s mother.

You can trace both games that way; they sync up really nicely. It’s always funny when I read comments that say ‘Shattered Memories is nothing like the original game. They’re totally different. They only have a couple of character names.’ It’s like, ‘Well yeah, but they’re really similar. Look at all these similarities.’ People haven’t noticed that, they may want to replay and check it out.

Gamer Grenade: Speaking of similarities to Silent Hill, like you were saying before, you guys dropped out all the story about the cult. Personally, I can understand why, because that was never one of my favorite parts of the games anyway. I’m interested why you guys made that decision.

Hulett: We’re hearkening back to the Silent Hill 2 idea that the game you play is in the head of the main character, or reflects their inner person. That game wasn’t really continuing the story of Silent Hill 1. It was more seen through this character. The first thing we thought when we were redoing the first game was ‘What can we change, what can we make different? What if we did the first Silent Hill more similar to Silent Hill 2, where it’s not about these outside forces, it’s about this inner world.’ The cult didn’t fit in to that idea, and the cult’s been featured in so many games that we wanted to see where else we could go with it.

Gamer Grenade: It just occurred to me that the Silent Hill games cycle – there was the team that made 1 and 3, and the team that made 2 and 4. It seemed to me that the team that made 1 and 3 were focused on the story of Silent Hill with the cult and all that, and then the team that made 2 and 4 were of the Shattered Memories approach. Then you have what you could call 5 and 6 that continue that back and forth – that probably wasn’t intentional, but I guess that means that the next Silent Hill will be back to Pyramid Heads everywhere and rusted metal grates.

Hulett: [laughs] I hope not. Rust pyramid-headed nurses.

Gamer Grenade: So instead of the traditional nightmare Silent Hill, if you can even call it that, where you have bleeding walls and stretched-out tanning flesh around, you guys went with ice. Was this a thematic decision? Was it technical – like was it easier to render ice? What were all the artistic and thematic ideas behind using ice instead of the traditional nightmare Silent Hill?

Hulett: Early on we were still thinking what we could do on the Wii. We thought that you always see Silent Hill in the same season – there’s no differences to the town. It would be interesting to see what the snow would do to the area, and how scary would it be in the snow? When we pitched it to Climax and they linked on to that idea, and thought the original game was snowing out of season, so if we’re re-imagining the original game, we could take that further.

Their effects programmers were excited to render all the snow, which turned out very well. And that, combined with my favorite idea from the other games that everyone sees a different nightmare world – in Silent Hill 2 you meet a girl named Angela who sees a firey world, and at one point you end up seeing the world through her eyes, so there’s a cool scene with that. I always liked the idea, but each game basically features the same rusty world.

I wanted to explore what that would could be, because the rusty world isn’t scary anymore. We all know what it looks like, we all know these chain link fences that we’ll be walking on, and we all know that there’s going to be flesh on them, and we all know there’s going to be fire beneath it.

Gamer Grenade: [laughs]

Hulett: Climax took the snow concept and and said ‘Ok, it’s snowing outside, maybe the nightmare world could be this icy hell. It’s very lonely, and you’re isolated, and we can do cool ice effects.’ Pretty much every factor entered in to making the nightmares, and hopefully in future games we can do even more different nightmare scenes. There’s lots of scary things out there to explore.

Gamer Grenade: Speaking of the freeze-over moments, about two-thirds of the way through the game, they always seem to happen at the most inopportune times in terms of who’s talking and what they’re about to say.

Hulett: [laughs]

Gamer Grenade: It’s that way where ‘Oh! But the real killer is *blargh!*’ I was curious – is this just a convenient device to build suspension or do these freeze-overs happen because the truth is about to be revealed? So it’s like Cheryl’s trying to protect her fantasy from reality.

Hulett: You pretty much have it figured out with that. It factors in to what Cheryl’s doing in therapy. Just as you’re about to realize the truth, those devices that you’ve used your whole life kick back in. You hide back in your fantasy world.

Gamer Grenade: Ah ok, that makes sense. Speaking of the nightmare segments, as I played, the monsters that chased me changed form, but when my girlfriend played they didn’t. By the end of the game, my monsters had these weird puzzle piece heads that were detached and floating around. I was curious – what things prompt these changes, and do different monsters represent something?

Hulett: They all represent your psyche profile, and each nightmare looks at your profile and changes the monsters accordingly.

Gamer Grenade: Can you give a few examples of what monsters appear when a player is profiled a certain way?

Hulett: If your Harry is a pervert, you get the sexualized monsters. If you get a drunk, substance-abusing Harry, your creatures are rotting away. If people’s aren’t changing at all, maybe they’re indecisive and keep leaning back and forth between different extremes.

Gamer Grenade: When it comes to the subtle permutations in the game – that had to get exponentially complicated. Tracking people’s progressions, the decisions they make, and how that can influence clothing and conversations and posters… how was that ever managable? I imagine a state diagram or a flowchart that filled a whole book.

Hulett: [laughs] Yeah it was pretty complicated, and there was a lot of voice work to do. Fortunately, that was the lead designers problem and not mine.

Gamer Grenade: Nice.

Hulett: I just had to make sure he pulled it off properly.

Gamer Grenade: I can only imagine – if you had six or more different versions of the same phone call with subtly different wording. Did storage ever become an issue for all that audio? I guess since it was played through the remote speaker, it didn’t need to be super high quality.

Hulett: That was the saving grace – it’s supposed to sound like a cell phone call, so it doesn’t have to be perfect. The real trick is that the game is streaming and there’s no dedicated load space. The game never pauses and says ‘Now Loading.’ Making sure that all the data was where it needed to be in an area – there’s maybe five phone numbers to call, and you get two voice mails, and it has to figure out which one you’ll get and make sure it’s in memory – that was the tricky part.

Gamer Grenade: That reminds me of one thing – what’s the deal with Lisa? I’ve tried coming at it from a number of angles but I can’t figure out what she means to the story. Could you give a little insight as to what she’s all about?

Hulett: Lisa is the fan-favorite character from Silent Hill 1, and everyone will talk to you very dearly about her. She appeared in Origins and had some scenes that fans of the original didn’t like, so there was a big outcry from them about how Climax had ruined Lisa forever. Since this was a reimagining of the original game we had to include Lisa.

For her significance, I’ll just say that she’s clearly someone who Harry wants to take care of and nurture, so that may be something she represents. In the same way that fans want to take care of her and make sure nothing bad happens to her. But, in the first game, she dies, so it was sort of an exercise in how much can fate change this time? How much effect can you have on how things play out?

Gamer Grenade: Could also be a statement on how poor of a caregiver Harry is.

Hulett: [laughs] Yeah there’s that too!

Gamer Grenade: What’s kind of scary – when my girlfriend was playing, she forgot by the time she got to the cabinet what pill she was supposed to get. I’ll have to remember to never ask her to get me medicine.

Hulett: So you learned something very important!

Gamer Grenade: It’s interesting… the spirit that I came into the interview seems counter to what the game is all about, wanting specific answers and explanations. That gives me even more to think about though. Thanks for sharing all your experience and insights!