Their shattered memories make accurate recollection impossible; their addiction makes them expert dissemblers; their sensibilities allow a capacity for remorseless self-criticism to sit alongside an equally robust talent for self-deception.
And they have added their distinctive signature to the "art of ruins" that runs like an elegiac thread through post-war European culture, from the bombsite paintings of Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach to WG Sebald's melancholy journeys amid a landscape of shattered memories.
Shattered Memories returns to Kaufmann's office periodically throughout the game.
Which, quite naturally really, has dragged the blue hedgehog's reputation through all manner of mud and shit and shattered memories.
Climax Studios, the developer of Silent Hill: Origins, developed Shattered Memories with a development team made up of more than 55 members and a supporting network of more than 90 artists.
In contrast to the previous installments of the series, which featured various types of monsters, Shattered Memories features only one type of humanoid monster, whose physical appearance changes in response to the player's actions outside the Nightmare realm.
Wesley Yin-Poole of VideoGamer.com ranked Shattered Memories in seventh place on his list of "top ten nerve-shredding video games", and wrote: "Dark, dank and dangerous, Silent Hill grabs you by the scruff of the neck, shakes you till you throw up, then headbutts you right between the eyes".
I played a terrible game called Tender Loving Care after I'd done Shattered Memories.
The horror game Silent Hill: Shattered Memories raises questions about algorithmic pigeonholing by profiling the player and tailoring its scares to their personality type.
Working on the survival horror adventure Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Barlow introduced a character named Dr Kaufmann, a psychotherapist whose role, ostensibly, was to evaluate the mental wellbeing of protagonist Harry Mason.
