WayForward shows off its cancelled Silent Hill DS game

Before WayForward made the isometric multiplayer dungeon crawler, Silent Hill: Book of Memories, it had actually attempted to make a far more traditional Silent Hill adventure on DS.

This was back in 2006 before the studio worked on Contra 4. The developer didn't get beyond making a one-room prototype demo using the lead character and assets from Silent Hill 2, but you can get a vague feel for what it was going for by watching footage of this canned project on WayForward's Twitch video below (starts at about 5:30).

Curiously, this wasn't WayForward's only cancelled Silent Hill prototype as its original vision for Book of Memories was vastly different from the commercial version that came out last year. Initially, it was going to be more of a puzzley adventure game that would switch perspectives between an isometric view and a more traditional behind-the-shoulder camera.

"The original idea was to have both perspectives in the game. And I think we were going to go closer for the combat stuff and for the puzzley stuff we were going to zoom out," game director Adam Tierney explained. "It ended up not really working. The tech was problematic. It was also just not feasible to support all assets in two different perspectives."

"If we could switch you'd have to build a ceiling that you only saw half the time," Konami producer Tom Hulett added.

"The lead programmer and I, we really digested it, looked into it, and it kind of would have almost doubled the work load to create something that would work in both perspectives, so ultimately we had to go with something like this," Tierney said, referring to the isometric view.

To see more of this coulda-shoulda-woulda been Book of Memories, watch the demo at about 24 minutes into the video above.