Silent Hill: Book of Memories is a 2012 dungeon crawler video game developed by WayForward Technologies and published by Konami. Released for the PlayStation Vita, it is a spin-off of the Silent Hill video game series. It features a player-created protagonist who receives the titular book on their birthday, which contains their entire life story, and makes changes to it with unforeseen and often unfavorable consequences. Book of Memories features gameplay elements from role-playing games: as the player character traverses the dungeons and defeats monsters there, they gain experience points and thus improve their respective abilities. The character progresses from each themed level by collecting pieces of a puzzle and then solving the puzzle. Five endings are available based on the character's alignment; the sixth is a joke ending in the tradition of previous Silent Hill games.
Book of Memories entered development in summer 2010. Konami intended for the game's content to be oriented towards short multiplayer sessions on a handheld console, which was a departure from the single-player gameplay of previous Silent Hill titles. The narrative concept of Book of Memories was inspired by the fictional Book of Lost Memories in Silent Hill game lore, with the Book of Memories conceptualized as the literal story of a person's life. Daniel Licht returned to score its soundtrack; Rob King and voice actor Troy Baker contributed a track, which featured vocals by Mary Elizabeth McGlynn and Baker's background vocals. Upon release, Book of Memories received mixed reviews. Critics remarked on its departure from the perceived trappings of the Silent Hill franchise, and were divided on its place within the series: some wrote that it succeeded as an enjoyable dungeon crawler, while others criticized it as neither a faithful Silent Hill title nor a good dungeon crawler.
Plot[]
On their birthday, the player-created protagonist receives the mysterious Book of Memories, which outlines their entire life. The protagonist attempts to change their life for the better, with unforeseen and often unfavorable consequences: in their dreams, they visit a monster-filled location that corresponds to the particular character affected by the protagonist's alterations to the book. After a while, the protagonist comes to realize that the respective guardian monster of each location has been representative of the person whose life is affected by changes made to the book; by defeating that guardian, the protagonist was overcoming that person's desires and thus altered their life. The protagonist resolves to find their own guardian before anyone else can and contemplates undoing the changes made to the book.
After finding and killing the protagonist's guardian monster, five endings are made available, based on the in-game notes collected. In the "Pure Blood" ending, the protagonist uses the book to live a life of excess, until they find their spouse writing in the book one day. The protagonist then writes them out of their life and descends into a spiral of distrust and misery until the book goes blank. In the "Blood" ending, the protagonist tries to destroy the book to no avail. The neutral ending finds the protagonist in a psychiatric institution, trying to use the book's power to balance the world. In the "Light" ending, the protagonist's resolve to not write in the book anymore is tested by the barrage of tragedies being broadcast on the television, while the "Pure Light" ending finds the gravely ill protagonist giving up their life to save a child's. The sixth ending is a joke ending in the tradition of the Silent Hill series. It features the characters of Book of Memories traveling to Silent Hill on spring break, encountering characters from previous installments in the series.