What are Silent Hill: Downpour and Book of Memories?
Silent Hill: Downpour, released in March 2012 for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, was developed by the Czech studio Vatra. Its Murphy Pendleton flees a crashed prison transport into a Silent Hill built larger and more open than before, with side quests scattered through the town, rain as the trigger that swells the danger, and a water motif, downpours, flooded basements and a water torture Otherworld, replacing the series' usual rust and ice.
Downpour is also the changing of the guard musically: Daniel Licht, known for Dexter, took over the score from Akira Yamaoka, with Jonathan Davis of Korn performing the main theme, a choice that announced how far the series had moved from its origins. Reception was mixed, technical roughness chiefly, but its town exploration and side quests have defenders who rate it the most underappreciated entry.
Book of Memories, released for the PlayStation Vita in 2012 and developed by WayForward, is the series' true outlier: an isometric, cooperative dungeon crawler where players rewrite their own memories using the title book, fighting through zones themed on the series' elements and enemies. It keeps names, monsters and Valtiel, and discards nearly everything else, which is either heresy or the most honest spin-off the series ever made.
Together the two 2012 games closed the Western development era: after them the series went quiet on consoles for a decade, until the remake and new wave covered elsewhere in this shelf. Physically they are modest objects, standard editions across regions, with Downpour receiving Japanese releases while Book of Memories remained a Western facing Vita title.
Guides followed the split: Downpour received a full official guide in the West documenting its side quests, while Book of Memories, a systems crawler, was documented mainly through its own in game materials and period coverage. The pair on one page is deliberate: they are the fork where the series briefly tried to be two other genres at once.
