Current Events > Silent Hill 4 IS a good gsme

(+) Yeah! (+)

Silent Hill 4: The Room is the best Silent Hill game after the second one and one of the most original horror games ever developed. If SH4 hadnt been part of the Silent Hill series, itd probably be considered one of the most unique games in the genre. Part of what makes it so distinct is that it goes against the formula of what wed come to expect of the series. Many gamers, including myself, were initially turned off by how drastically it had changed. But once the expectations faded, a horrifying experience awaited, unrelenting in its oppressive terror.

Room 302
A big part of why most of the recent Silent Hill games have been underwhelming is because they tried to outdo what was essentially narrative perfection in Silent Hill 2. The story is a trek through madness, guilt, and personal horror projected subconsciously into some of the most gruesome monsters ever seen. The climax is both revolting and satisfying, a narrative twist that makes the jigsaw puzzle of Sunderlands journey a Rosetta Stone of death.
As much as I enjoyed parts of Homecoming, Downpour, SH3, and Origins, they felt more or less the same games, only rehashed. In short, protagonist has issues in Silent Hill, an evil cult causes a whole lot of trouble, and we wish wed never entered the hellishly foggy suburbia. Revelations uncover a dark past that can be resolved in a number of different ways. Awesome sound effects and music from Akira Yamaoka (and Daniel Licht for Downpour and Memories) scare the crap out of us. Occasionally, a UFO reveals its grand machination to take over the world. Rinse and repeat.

SH4 began as a side story with loose connections to the series before becoming a full-fledged sequel. Because of its tangential origins, Team Silent was able to experiment and innovate on some of the core ideas in the series, sometimes scrapping them altogether. The Rooms biggest achievement is that it makes mundane, every day living, horrifying. At least with the previous three Silent Hill games, I felt like I was transported to a place that was far away, a slice of American life seen through the prism of Japanese developers.
SH4 brought the terror home. Henry Townshend is stuck inside of his own apartment and cant leave. To highlight the feeling of familiarity, all the sequences in the apartment are in first person mode. Its you whos chained in and taken captive with no explicable reason. A claustrophobic atmosphere pervades and in the tight space you call your apartment, theres no food, the phone is disconnected, and the television is shut off. It also didnt help that the first time I played SH4, I lived in an Apt. #304, just two doors away from the games Room 302.

The voyeurism of spying on your neighbor and the people across from you, a la Hitchcocks Rear Window, is both creepy and addicting. You can look out the window and see people going about their lives, all of them oblivious to what youre going through. One of the most disturbing interactions I had didnt even revert to the typical scare tactics most games useyou know, gory monsters and agonizing shrieks punctuated by alarming music. Rather, it takes place mostly in silence.
Alerted by neighbors, the superintendent checks up on your room, knocking on the front door, even using the spare key to try to enter. He is unable to get past the chains and despite your pleas for help, he cant hear a thing. He eventually writes you a note and slips it under the door. When you look at it, its covered in blood, undecipherable.

The superintendent then murmurs how reminiscent this is of the last time, and Im thinking, what last time and what in the world happened to the slip? For the next few peeps out your front door, youll see him standing in the hallway, troubled, unable to articulate his fears. Just by staring at his troubled, polygonal face, powerless to help yet knowing what awaited me, I felt terror. Not only was aid from the outside world going to be impossible, but the dude outside pretty much knew I was screwed.

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I'll try and play it when I finish 3

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It was mediocre. Henry was a dull protagonist, Walter felt like the sun everyone revolved around, the plot was bland and the environments were drab and monochrome.

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It might be a good gsme

But it's a terrible game.

Inventory management with limited slots
Awful camera
Invincible enemies
Backtracking
Escort quests
Destructible weapons
Long treks

All it needs is an underwater level and it can be a teaching tool of how not to make games. There's a reason why no one in Japan would touch the serie after they made it.

Sure the story was interesting but as a game it was awful

Indeed pretty much all you talked about in the OP was the story. You can get the same (in fact a better) experience by watching a Lets Play on Youtube

This is not true of any other Silent Hill. Even Homecoming
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Great concept just awful execution.

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I liked it more than 3.

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