Silent Hill 4: The Room

Silent Hill is one of my favourite game series of all time, and I picked up Silent Hill 4: The Room with great deal of anxiety. For those unenlightened, Silent Hill is a survival horror game series. While other games of this ilk rely on gory graphics and sudden shocks to scare the player, Silent Hill relies on psychological horror and repulsive yet fascinating stories to draw in the players. Despite the excellent visuals and the overall atmosphere, the previous episode, Silent Hill 3, was a disappointment –the story failed to engage me, and the main character annoyed me so much that I stopped caring whether she lives or dies. Luckily Silent Hill 4 is step to the right direction. It is chilling, disturbing, and genuinely scary.

Silent Hill 4 is quite different from the other games in the series. The development team has made many changes to the staple gameplay elements of the series. Some are good and some are indifferent, and some are downright problematic.
Because of this the problems of the game are not in the story or atmosphere (which are usually far more difficult to attain for a horror game) but with the gameplay.

Firstly, saving the game can be a pain, as you must venture back to your room from the nightmare worlds to do it, and sometimes this is a very long trek indeed. There was nothing wrong with the save mechanism of the earlier episodes, and while returning to your room is essential to the story and the gameplay, the loading times start to frustrate after a while.

While most monsters follow the formula of the previous Silent Hill games, the numerous ghosts in the game are irritating in the extreme. I can accept that I cannot destroy some enemies, but since the ghosts get up almost immediately after you knocked them down, your only option is to run away. This gets tedious after a while, and irritating, though for the story reasons I understand why the ghosts cannot be killed.

The first person view is first for the series and it is used inside your apartment gives the player some nice visuals, but it also breaks the gameplay somewhat. It is not bad by any means but it feels crowbared in.

The game is difficult to the point of frustration at times, and some things are really almost impossible to figure out without resorting to some help from the internet or Strategy Guide. This is not a problem as such, but be advised, play your first game on the Easy setting.

The worst of the new aspects is the change to a limited inventory. While I know this allows game designers to modify the difficult level, it really feels like unwieldy after I’ve gotten used to the unlimited number of items in the earlier parts of the series.

Puzzles, the staple of the Silent Hill games have gone completely, which is a real shame –they really suited the series in my opinion, and gave variety to the gameplay. Some elements still remain, but they are a far cry from the well-constructed brain teasers of previous episodes.

But happily the good points of the game vastly out-weight the bad ones. The story is superb mixture of horror, philosophy and psychology, the best in the series yet. Without giving too much away, the premise of the story is this: Henry Townshend, a young man in his late twenties, finds himself locked inside his own apartment, called room 302, unable to leave by any means save through a mysterious hole in his bathroom that leads into a twisted, nightmarish dimension. Taking the role of Henry, you must try to find your way back to the real world, and your journey takes you into the words of pure evil where you can find answers to the mystery of room 302.

The combat has evolved from the earlier episodes, and it is less clunky and cumbersome, though nowhere near as polished as a pure fighting title. However, the irritating Resident Evil-style control scheme is gone for good, and you can fully configure your gampad, which is a blessing.

As for the all-important fear factor, The Room is not quite as scary as SH 2 but it is nevertheless enough to give you sleepless nights, and it features some truly disturbing visuals and chilling sound and music. The graphic design of the monstrosities that haunt you is of high standard, though some of the more overtly sexual references of earlier episodes have been removed and replaced with more traditional horror elements.

The visuals of the games are stunning, as is the hallmark of the series. The urban decay and twisted locations, corridors infested with monstrosities and the calustrofobic water prison all help to create the all-important feeling of being somewhere else. Unlike previous games in the series The Room is fully 3D, but luckily the transmigration has been very successful. The art team of the Silent Hill series clearly takes a lot of pride in their work, and while the lighting leaves something to be desired, everything else of superb quality.

Overall, this is a fine addition to the king of the survival horror genre, and while not a classic like Silent Hill 2, it is a great game in its own right.

If you are looking to be scared witless and disturbed out of your mind, look no further. If you can put up with the weaknesses in gameplay (which I hope will be addressed in the next instalment) you can experience the best psychological horror story written for a console game, period.

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