I played Silent Hill 4: The Room · 2:26am Oct 17th, 2020
True to the Silent Hill name, this game is unsettling and tense. There's two parts to this game, inside your room where you play first person. This is an area for story and storage. Each time you come here there's something different.
Let me start at the beginning: You come into the story having been locked in your apartment for a while, you can check the door and things seem fairly normal. The radio talks a bit about what's going on, but there's not really much at the moment.
If you look outside you see a fairly normal looking city, you can look into the windows of your neighbors, sometimes it's creepy, sometimes it's funny. The street eventually has something happening on it, so it's worth checking out from time to time.
If you keep looking around your place you find there's a hole in the wall that looks into your neighbors bedroom. Given that there's typically a psychological element to Silent Hill I had to wonder just how disturbed the main character was.
Eventually a mysterious hole opens up in your apartment. A large one too. When you go through this hole you get to the second part of the game. This goes into a distant third person view and you meet the first person outside of the apartment. You have to hurry and get armed, and weapons are never that great in Silent Hill so don't get too attached. You're going to spend most of the game running for your life.
It's in this first area that the most frustrating and terrifying enemy in game appears. The ghosts. The screen starts looking like an old show. After my first encounter with a ghost every time the screen began to get that look I got apprehensive. You can beat the ghosts all you like, even knock them down and finish them with a stomp. But they don't stay down long. You cannot kill these things. At best you can get a sword late in the game that lets you pin them to the ground, and lose the sword in the process.
They aren't even the freakiest enemies in the game.
Eventually you find another hole back to your apartment, and you find that what you've been doing outside wasn't in your head. (Despite having good reason to think so.) It's useful to do a full inventory of your apartment whenever you return as things are changing every time you come back. Sometimes there's even creepy little scares hiding for you.
There's four main areas you go through, even the titular Silent Hill. Each area has a companion for you to work with, and inevitably fail. And even worse, they become ghosts to chase you down as well. Those ghosts still freak me out more than the freakier looking enemies.
Like the rest of the series, this game has multiple endings. Three depending on how you did, particularly at the last boss fight, and one joke ending. I didn't get the joke ending, but somehow I think it involves a dog. The joke ones usually do.
Silent Hill as a series plays on horror game mechanics to get an occasional cheep scare, but builds it's environment to ratchet up the tension. Making an enemy unbeatable though escapable ensures that you never really feel safe anywhere in the game. Making a class of enemies like this makes you jumpy every time the screen begins to flicker. And having fallen companions turn into these enemies plays on the lone survivor psychology. Most of them you want to help for some reason, and you fail them. You hear about your failure on the radio.
There's great storytelling going on, integrating what you did in the level before into what you hear in your apartment. I honestly see a few things they expanded on for PT in this game. It's not as pants soilingly creepy as PT, but it's got some good moments.
If you've got this game or want to pick it up, go right ahead and enjoy. It's Halloween after all, why not scare yourself a bit.
Ooh! Creepy!
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I do have a favorite part.
One of the weapons you get is a chainsaw, but you need to save it for the right time. The right time being a hallway filled with one of the freakiest enemies that thankfully can be eliminated. This is why the chainsaw exists in the game. And it's time to play as Ash Williams. If only for a moment.
"Hail to the King, baby."
Actually I have some Army of Darkness games, I should break them out for a review sometime.
Wait, my PS2 doesn't work anymore. And I can't borrow my buddy's that long. (I played SH4 at his place because I needed someone to make jokes with to get through this game. Silent Hill always freaks me out.)
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hehe! Reasonable.