Silent Hill 4: The Room for PlayStation 2 Reviews by Gamers

Like it or not, the "survival-horror" genre has reached, and passed, its zenith some time ago. Say, three or four years ago. Potential players that might have stayed with the genre apparently were lost on Resident Evil: Code Veronica's controls, its evil twin story, or didn't care too much about the "huge" change from pre-rendered backgrounds to polygonal ones (though many hardcore fans did). And player and critic reactions to Silent Hill 2's claustrophobic fogginess and Silent Hill 3's quick action were all over the charts: Either you loved or hated them.

Personally, I love survival horror games, and I especially love the Silent Hill series. I adore a good scare, and nobody does it better, with that beneath-your-skin sense of freakishness, that subtle eeriness of silence and the unknown, than Konami's Silent Hill team. I love the sense of atmosphere, the surreal sense of wandering around lost in limbo, the logic puzzles, the NPC grotesques, the obscurity of Pyramid Head, and perhaps the most freaky instance ever, a radio talk show host speaking over a broken radio who seemed to address his show directly to me (SH2).

So I've wondered why I've hesitated to play this latest one. After finishing it this weekend, I discovered why. Despite another interesting story (this, of course, is debatable depending on what level of fan you are), and all of the key mark characteristics of the series, Silent Hill 4: The Room is neither brilliant nor terrible. Instead, it falls into that weird ether world of limbo, a game that's good in parts and weak in others, leaving you with a feeling of only mild satisfaction. It's like waking up with a great hunger to a plate of luke-warm eggs.

Gameplay

While Silent Hill 3 was in development on PS2, Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo (KCET) was simultaneously working on Silent Hill 4: The Room. This being significant because it's the first simultaneous release on both the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. (SH4 was released in Japan in July.) This year, gamers will see a few significant changes, they being pacing, location, and your relationship with "the room" itself, while there are several interesting, though less significant, alterations in the form of menus, puzzles, and storage.

The Room

The story proves to be the most significant -- yet strangely insignificant -- aspect of this new arrival. Henry Townsend is a pretty average, straight white guy who one days wakes to his apartment room, which is industrially secured by multiple chains and locks from the inside. He cannot get out through the windows, and so he's stuck, left in wonder and confusion. Several days later, a small hole appears in his bathroom. It turns out to be a portal to another dimension, and it's Henry's only way out.

The room, you soon learn, is a safe-house for regaining health and for saving your progress. It's also the biggest new aspect in the architecture of the game. See, Henry is caught up in what basically results in a Silent Hill twilight zone, a plane he must examine and explore in order to escape. The room is where it all begins. As Henry, you'll explore Ashfield, a town a few miles away from Silent Hill, as well as subway, forest, water tower levels, and the apartment itself.

However, you'll always return to the room. It decays as you progress, and since the portals from the other world always lead to the room itself, you find that part of its intrigue is seeing how it transforms, what new things happen in it, and what other new clues there are to find. For instance, you can peek out the front door peep hole and you can yell all you want, but the neighbors, landlord, and your friendly next-door neighbor Eileen cannot see or hear you. You're trapped. You can peek into Eileen's room, too. You'll never see her nude, but you will watch everyday details of her life, such as the shaving of armpits, sweeping, getting ready to attend a party, and watching TV.

The room is a growing, organic creature of its own sort that requires your attention to complete the game. It creates a decent amount of claustrophobia, but not the kind that I'd hoped for. And yet, it's almost always fun to see what's going to happen next.

On the other hand, the room has issues. It's a small but annoying detour that's worth complaining about, at least a little. Each time you need to save or store items (the storage system has changed) you're required to return to it. Adventure games are meant to be slower than action games, no doubt, but the amount of travel you do just to get back to the room, including load screens and minor repeating cutscenes, is tedious. This save system is purposely designed to force you to travel back and forth to the room.

Still, Konami wants you to use the central hub a lot, and it's definitely succeeded in doing so, but there are at least two issues resulting from this design change. A) The previous Silent Hill games' save systems weren't broken by any means, so why force a change? And perhaps more importantly, the storage system, which I always really enjoyed, is now like Resident Evil's (and in my opinion, less favorable) system. The items you carry are limited, and when you're full, it's back to the room again. Again, it's not a major problem. In fact, it's hardly a problem at all, but it's not a great improvement either, and why change something so mildly unless you're really going to improve it?

The Story

The story itself is classic Silent Hill. An innocent guy gets trapped in deadly cult underworld and is forced to confront, explore, and fight the religious and "demonic group" behind it in order to escape. In the mean time, Konami does a pretty good job of scaring you with surreal circumstances, unexplainable deaths, and a series of undead creatures of obscure origins. This time we've got bizarre monkeys, Amazon women zombies that burp when you hit them, and Siamese twin ostrich things that walk on two hands. In other words, it's less sexually disturbing and suggestive than Silent Hill 2 but just as weird.

Who is Walter? Is he dead or alive? What does he have to do with the journalist who resided in the apartment before you? What is the cult all about? (You should know this by now.) And should you take the doll? These are all questions that would ruin the story if I told. Let's just say they comprise the bulk of the game's storyline.

Another interesting change is the game's pacing. It's entirely different than any other Silent Hill before it. The first half is easy and entirely explorative. Your room initially exists as a safe house, you're unlikely to die even once, and there are almost no logic puzzles at all. They're almost all fetch puzzles. Also, in the first half, there are no bosses at all. About one-half to two-thirds through, however, that changes. (SPOILER) if you take the rag doll, your room becomes possessed, transforming it from a safe place to a dangerous one. This makes saving and collecting health a much bigger concern. So, now in addition to ghosts that never die, the game's biggest enemy (a "guy" with a trench coat) regularly appears with gun in hand, and he's tough. The bosses do eventually appear, three or four of them, but the logic puzzles from previous games make only a minor appearance. And that's a real bummer.

As Silent Hill stories go, however, Henry's odyssey is very familiar, and because of this, less scary. I became much more attached to these characters than before, which counts for a lot in a story-driven game. Fans of the series will be no doubt excited by the story's new wrinkles (I won't reveal more than I have already), and the story is THE reason I play Silent Hill, but honestly, despite all of the excellent trappings of the series, this game is less frightening than previous iterations. That could be because I've played all the others, and I'm very familiar with them, or it's because it's genuinely less scary. At least the story ties in well with all the other Silent Hill games, rather than just one.

(SPOILERS AHEAD) Silent Hill 4: The Room returns a little length to the series. Not much, but a little. It's a wee bit longer than Silent Hill 3, the series' shortest game, and it should take anywhere from 10-15 hours depending on your skill. Also, there are four endings. They depend on several variables. The conditions they depend on are primarily based on the total number of phenomena exorcised. If you exorcise more than a certain amount, you'll get one ending, and if you do less than a certain amount, you'll get another. There is one big condition, whether you keep Eileen alive. So if she stays alive, you'll get one ending, and if she dies, you'll get another.

Combat

The combat system is slightly different, though if you weren't told about it and didn't read the manual, you wouldn't even notice the difference. A little yellow circle at the top of the screen shows charge power, and when it's filled by means of repeated attacks, you'll unleash a devastating single blow. It's a risk/reward thing. It's powerful but it leaves you vulnerable. This meter is a decent addition but it really doesn't make a difference to the overcall combat, especially since the rest of the combat system is similar. What does help to keep the combat flowing is the new on-screen menu. By pressing a single face button, players can pick and switch weapons on the fly. It beats the old menu system with speed and ease of use.

Everything else about the combat system is the same, for better or worse. It's slow but not miserably slow, and the enemies are auto-targeted. My only issue with this system (despite the fact that it's getting old) is that once you've downed an enemy in a group, it's difficult to finish it (by stomping) when another enemy is near. The targeting system doesn't account for the dead enemy, so you'll have to lead it away from the pack in order to kill it or beat it down once it gets up again. The weapons are different, but in a sense, they're still the same, with a series of hand weapons, a few guns, and some heavy surprises later in the game. The golf clubs are fun (though mostly to collect), the axe and bat are great, and the box cutter is worthless. The addition of torches adds a good touch, especially as a neat play on the idea of light and darkness, and as a deterrent against ghosts. One sword also pins down ghosts, which present some of the most annoying antagonists in SH4.

Another addition which is bound to cause debate is the NPC character, Eileen Galvin, your next-door neighbor. More than half way through the game she'll become a NPC who follows you, and who you should try to keep alive. This means that she must be taken care of, and not just like with Maria from SH2 where she came and went, but for the rest of the game. Naturally, she controls better than the she-demon from SH2, i.e. she gets caught on less stuff, and she talks a little bit more, but Konami, why? WHY for the rest of the game???!!! Sure, it fits the story, but wow, she ends up being a pretty big piece of baggage.

Graphics

Silent Hill 4: The Room's excellent overindulgence of visual filters, wide ranging textures, and its very graphic sense of decay, rust, and throbbing, fleshy landscapes, are all well intact. What's improved ever so slightly are the character models, their hair, facial expressions, and their sense of movement. The motion-capture is great, and sometimes you'll swear the bodies you see moving are real. The animation can get in the way, and when a stuttering demon dog, ape zombie, or even Henry himself shake violently due to some collision problem, it detracts from the game's overall look and feel. I must say that while the lead protagonist Henry looks unlike any previous character, Eileen looks once again like Camaron Diaz, which is to say, like almost every other good-looking female character in the series.

Whether it's because I've seen so much of Silent Hill before or not I'm not sure, but SH4 doesn't have the visual dynamics of previous games. It's just not as visually stunning as before, nor are the ideas or freaky nightmare rooms as mind-bending as in previous games. There is one room that's an exception, and that has to do with Eileen in a very large sense. I'll just let you experience that yourself. On the second floor of the hospital, it's the first or second door on the right.

The PlayStation 2 version is once again beautiful, though the slightly higher resolution Xbox graphics edges it out. While there are very few differences between the two, the major differences result in higher contrasting tones in the PS2 version. Its colors are noticeably darker and muddier.

Sound

One of the best changes in the series since its humble beginning is the improvement in voice work. Even since Silent Hill 3, the voice work in this version has markedly improved. Characters still talk slowly and occasionally with stilted deliveries, but for the most part conversations are much more realistic and fluid. While the story isn't a knockout punch, the dialog has also improved to stay in step with the voice-over work.

Strangely, this Silent Hill has a healthy set of very familiar sound effects, some of which are so obvious you've heard them dozens of times before. The most obvious ones are screams and grunts. Several of these must have been rented at about 5 cents a pop, because I could have sworn I heard these on my stock Halloween Sound Effects record circa 1975. Also, several of the creature sounds are just wrong. In the hospital (yes, there is yet another hospital), you'll meet several giant Amazon women who have giant foreheads and carry axes. They burp when you smack them. No, really. Burp. They also make the funniest sound when you kill them off, like an old woman yelping after realizing she's stepped in dog poop. Lovely. These she-beasts transform from being incredibly intimidating to the silliest character in the game. Um, who gave that sound effect the green light?

Musically, the game is excellent. There are songs of innocence, performed with acoustic instruments. And there are songs with clear themes of loss and distress. Musical Director Akira Yamaoka took the light acoustic touch introduced in SH2 and has been played it out here with excellent taste and variety. It's excellent.

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