Silent Hill 4: The Room

Silent Hill 4 isn't quite what I expected. While 3 was a direct sequel to 1 that played like an improved version of 2, this game changes core mechanics and largely feels like its own thing (though there are, of course, references and connections to those earlier games within it).

I, once again, played this on my PlayStation 2.

It's taken me a while to get through this but I think I really liked it. For starters, this game is creepy. Just look at this intro video.

Isn't that just unpleasant? The actual game gets a bit less uncomfortable once you become accustomed to how the enemies work, but even looking at some of those designs (when you know they typically aren't much of a threat) can be upsetting. This is a good horror game.

Now, for some negatives. The game feels different to the others and it takes a lot of getting used to. There are still semi-fixed camera angles (well, a number of fixed perspectives and a camera that sometimes follows the player a la a traditional third-person game) but the tank controls have been fully excised and replaced by analog movement that doesn't always play well with camera changes. There's an item-limit and a storage box, like Resident Evil, which means you'll be doing a lot of backtracking for inventory management if you aren't careful.

The biggest changes, though, are in the game's structure. While 3 was relatively linear it at least evoked the wandering and progression of the first two games, this one feels more disjointed. You'll spend a lot of time in our protagonist's, Henry's, apartment where you'll explore a relatively small location in first-person. From that apartment you'll crawl into a hole and enter a new environment (a spooky forest, a hospital, an apartment building, you know, standard Silent Hill stuff). At various points you can discover a hole in that environment that'll take you back to your apartment where you'll be healed and can access your storage. You can then hop back into your apartment-hole to come out of that environment-hole, effectively using your apartment as a sort of save-room hub area.

After making your way through each of the game's environments, the back half of the game suddenly tasks you with escorting another character through each of those same areas you've already gone through. Enemies are different but for the most part the locations are the same as before. Your apartment, formerly a safe haven, now no longer heals you and instead is periodically haunted by various ghosts you'll need to dispel using items.

In a general sense I don't hate this structure because revisiting familiar locations under a new context has become one of the hallmarks of the series at this point, but without significant cosmetic changes to these locations it feels a lot less... I don't know, novel. The other games'd have you visit a location before seeing its Otherworld (I think that's the name they've gone with?) variant, but this game seems to just take you through the same iteration of each world twice.

As for what you're doing this second time around, the "escort mission" of it all gets pretty tedious. While I don't think your guest can die (not immediately, at least, but I'll get to that), you need to keep her close to you, and more importantly out of harm's way, if you want the "good" ending. The final boss effectively has a secondary time limit that'll get shorter the more damage she takes over the course of the game so if you want to even have a shot at saving her you'll need to get skilled at dealing with her often-fiddly AI. This was a constant source of frustration for me and I don't know that it entirely worked, but watching her slowly march towards a soft fail-state as I whittled away the final boss's health made me very tense so, well, maybe I see what they were going for with the whole thing.

So. Many. Holes.

As it stands this is probably my least favorite of the four Silents Hill I've played but that is by no means a condemnation of this. It does a lot of cool things and, maybe most importantly, new things. It would be very easy for a series to rest on its laurels and just do more of the same but this tried out some new ideas (with, unfortunately, mixed results).

I think that's a 6.5/10 so, you know, it could be worse.