Review Silent Hill 4: The Room Developer: Konami Publisher: Konami Genre: Action/Adventure Release Date: September 2004 Platform: Review by November 8, 2004		Buy this game at Trade for this game at:

Back in 1999 - when Resident Evil dominated the survival horror gaming world – the first game of a new series appeared, determined to change the standards of the genre. Its name: Silent Hill. SH was the dream of survival horror fans, and its dark and disturbing world transported gamers to entirely new heights of horror. It took almost two-and-a-half years for the highly expected sequel, Silent Hill 2, to be released, but it again offered a fantastic morbid storyline. The sequel was completely irrelevant to SH1 and lacked in some areas, but was still an excellent survival horror game nonetheless. Two more years passed before Silent Hill 3 appeared and returned the story back to its original concept and also “fixed” whatever SH2 was lacking, becoming what is probably one of the scariest games around. By that point it was obvious that the Silent Hill series ruled the survival horror world both in popularity and quality. The announcement that Silent Hill 4 was going to be released just a bit over a year after the release of SH3 caught many by surprise. It seemed as though a series known for its quality was being rushed and, unfortunately, that feeling turned out to be prophetic.

In Silent Hill 4 you play the part of Henry Townshend, who moved into room 302 of the South Ashfield Heights apartment complex two years ago. Life was fine until five days ago, for not only had Henry been haunted by a recurring dream, but he could no longer leave room 302! The door was chained shut and the windows locked tight. Even more unbelievable was that his telephone had quit working and however loud he screamed, no one seemed to hear him. Now a huge hole has appeared in the bathroom wall, yet it does not lead out of the apartment, but instead leads to a series of alternate worlds where Henry will have to literally fight for his life, for if you die in the alternate worlds, you die in the real world too!

SH4 is not a real sequel to any of the previous games of the series, but instead picks-up from a SH2 side-story about a serial killer named Walter Sullivan, who was arrested and put in jail, where he committed suicide. Walter used to carve the numbers xx121 on his victims, where xx started from 01 and kept rising. Now new victims have started to appear picking up from the last number before Walter was arrested. But as Walter is dead, the police naturally suspect a copycat killer. Is this really the case? Did Walter indeed kill himself? And what does all this have to do with the strange occurrences in room 302?

Before starting, you can set the options to your preferences. Among the visual, sound, control and miscellaneous options, is one to set the resolution from 400x300 (!) up to 1600x1200 in the PC version (which is the reviewed version). This option, of course, does not exist in the PS2 version. There’s also an option for Real Time Shadows that is not available on PS2 (for some reason, while using an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro, I could not have Real Time Shadows while having Direct3D Anti-Aliasing on). When you’re ready to start your game, you’ll be asked to choose a level of difficulty and here comes the first let down.

Survival Horror games are action/adventure games with an average correlation of action:adventure about 2:1 – and that’s why those who insist that survival horror games are adventure games, have no idea what adventures are all about. Starting with Silent Hill 2, the series made a revolutionary move to change this correlation by offering the gamer the ability to choose separate levels for action and puzzles. That way one could play the game focusing on the action parts, while another player could make the puzzles harder and the action easier. This made the SH series even more accessible to those adventure game players who do not want to break their fingers killing monsters. For some reason SH4 merges the difficulty to a generic level of easy, normal or hard. According to the manual, both action and puzzles will get affected by changing the game level. That is only partly true though. While the action part does change from easy to hard, with the monsters not as easy to kill, there is no considerable difference in the puzzle level – if there is such a thing in this game. The puzzles in SH4 can be counted on one hand and they stay the same regardless of the difficulty chosen. The only difference being the easy level gives away everything that needs to be done and the hard level provides blatant hints. And don’t expect any puzzles like the zodiac puzzle in SH1 or the gallows puzzle in SH2. The very few puzzles here are mainly the ‘find the item and put it where you’re told’ variety. The aforementioned action:adventure correlation has dramatically changed towards action in SH4 with very little adventure elements.

The moment the game begins, you’ll notice something entirely new – it is now 1st person perspective. This occurs only in Henry’s room though and the perspective changes to 3rd person when Henry is exploring the alternate worlds. It is an excellent idea and gives the feeling of the real world as seen through Henry’s eyes versus the alternate worlds seen from outside Henry’s body. Unfortunately, while in 3rd person mode the cameras are plain awful. The SH series never had good camera perspectives and neither does SH4. You’ll constantly find Henry walking/running towards the camera, and sometimes you won’t even be able to change it. You will often have no clue what lies ahead and, more often than not, when Henry turns a corner the camera will not follow until he has walked several steps or you press the key to swing the camera behind Henry’s back. On a few occasions, parts of the background will have zoomed into the camera making it impossible to see what’s going on! You will need to have one finger on the Tab key (default key for moving the camera behind Henry) at all times – but don’t expect it to always work.

Along with the horrible cameras, the control system is no longer 3D (meaning up for forward, down for backward, left/right for turning around). Instead, it is now 2D, meaning Henry will walk in the direction of the key you press. Some people might prefer this better, but the problem is, when the cameras suddenly change, you’ll have to be pretty fast in changing which key you’re pressing, otherwise you’ll end up watching Henry doing an intricate dance, which is not what you want to be happening when you have a couple of monsters on your tail! There should at least have been an option for the player to choose between 2D and 3D control mode.

While inside his room Henry can look out the windows and out the front door peephole to see what’s happening outside his apartment. He can also peep into Eileen’s (his neighbor) room through a hole in the living room wall. Don’t expect to see anything naughty though. Unless watching Eileen shaving under her arms is your thing – yes, you will see that! Eileen will follow Henry in the alternate worlds for about half the game. The bad thing is, she will slow Henry down and is constantly in the way. You also need to make sure she gets hurt as little as possible. Henry can defend her, but she can also defend herself by equipping some Eileen-only weapons like a chain, a whip or a handbag! The good thing is, most of the times she can be left behind in one area and that way she will stay safe regardless what was in that area. Also, while in his room, Henry will automatically replenish all health he has lost in the alternate worlds. That will not happen during the whole game though, since from one point on, the room…Oh, no, I will not tell!

The alternate worlds are mainly parts of Ashfield and not Silent Hill itself. Henry’s visit to Silent Hill will be brief and not even inside the town. Also, the alternate worlds are very small, making the game a very short experience. If you decide to focus on it and be persistent, you might be able to finish it in one day. There isn’t much exploration to be done, very few puzzles, and most of your time is spent fighting. There are monsters everywhere and they are easily the best-designed monsters of the whole series! From mutant dogs to two-headed monsters, they are all ugly and menacing! They are not much of a threat on the easy level, but on the hard level they are pretty tough to kill, something made even harder by the fact that there are no heavy weapons in SH4. The only weapons you will find are melee weapons (including a vast variety of golf clubs!), one handgun and late in the game a revolver that’s very powerful but holds only 6 bullets and replacements are extremely hard to find - so it’s a good idea to save them for when the going gets really tough. A big surprise was that there are no ‘semi-bosses’ throughout the game. There is only one, final ‘boss’, who, as opposed to the previous games of the series, is a big challenge and also requires some thinking to defeat, instead of plain shooting - which was a very welcome change.

Along with the regular mishmash of monsters, SH4 features a new kind of enemy: ghosts. Ghosts are a real pain. They usually come out of walls and when they are around the screen turns red and Henry holds his head like he’s in horrible pain. Ghosts cannot be killed, they can only be knocked down. Later in the game Henry will find methods to knock ghosts down faster and even keep them down. Overall, the enemies in SH4 - monsters, ghosts and the final boss - are probably the best part of the game.

A huge change that serves no other purpose than to make the game as annoying as possible is the inventory. This time your inventory is limited – Henry can carry up to ten items at a time. There is a big storage box in Henry’s room where items can be stored, but this box can only be accessed from within the room. When in an alternate world, you’ll find several holes that can lead you back to Henry’s room, but don’t expect to find one in each area. So when you find an item you need but have no more space in your inventory, you’ll have to go find a hole, enter it, put some items in the box, exit through the hole again, and go back to where the item was to pick it up! To make matters even worse, multiple items like bullets or health drinks do not count as one with an index number like they used to. In SH4, if you have 3 health drinks, they will take up 3 inventory slots. If you have 120 bullets, they will take up either 10 slots on easy level, where bullets come in packs of 12, or 15 slots on hard level, where bullets come in packs of 8! So you can practically forget about carrying all your ammo. Worst of all though is that you cannot drop anything! If you pick up an object you’re stuck with it and the only options are to either carry it around or put it in the storage box – but you will never be able to drop it!

As if all of the above were not annoying enough, the PC version of SH4 returns to the ridiculous consolish save-point methods. While the PC versions of SH2 and SH3 featured full saving capabilities, including quick-save, in SH4 the only place to save is a diary in Henry’s living room. Which of course means, every time you want to save you will have to find a hole to return to your room. The only reason I can think of why Konami didn’t implement a proper saving system for the PC this time is the quick development time led to a direct PC port.

When it comes to survival horror games, atmosphere is one of the most important elements and SH4 also fails in this department. Yes, there are monsters and dark places and growling sounds coming from out of nowhere, but there is just something missing. There is the feeling that the game tries too hard to impress by being “loud” but with not much substance. Its much more gory than scary. Blood is everywhere and not only on the monsters you kill. Trails of blood, bloody clothes, bloody beds etc. Almost anywhere you look there will be blood! If you’re a gore fan, you’ll definitely feel sated.

The graphics are very good. Especially on higher resolutions with anti-aliasing on, the textures and the characters are almost flawless. Also, SH4 uses, of course, hardware T&L (Transform & Lighting), thus offering some stunningly beautiful lighting effects. The lighting effects are real-time and unfortunately cannot be captured on screenshots. All that is great, but marred by unbelievable clipping. While playing SH4 I witnessed clipping that brought me back to the first days of 3D. First of all, all melee weapons are like holograms. They don’t have any real matter. They go through walls, tables, cars you name it. Monsters become holograms when the die, since Henry can walk right through them when they are lying on the ground! Also, if they fall on a wall they don’t get pushed forward or stay against the wall. Instead they just go through the wall. Another graphics problem encountered is that, in cut-scenes, the dialog often starts slightly before the lips start to move. The graphics in the PS2 version are by far inferior. Very edgy and not as vivid, not to mention that the lighting effects don’t even come close. But still the PS2 version doesn’t look bad and the fact that it cannot compare visually to the PC version was expected.

The sound plays a very important role in SH4, since that’s mainly where the game bases its attempts to be scary. Unexpected growling sounds, hisses, glasses breaking, knocking on doors they all help build up the tension and, depending on your threshold, will or will not make you jump from your chair. The voices aren’t anything special, with Henry sounding pretty much apathetic, especially considering his situation! The soundtrack continues the high standards found in the rest of the series.

Overall, disappointment is the word that best describes Silent Hill 4. Not that the game itself is bad. But it carries a heavy tradition and does not deliver. It is a mediocre game that would have probably gone unnoticed under a different title. And the fact that the town of Silent Hill doesn’t even appear, makes me wonder if the only reason the Silent Hill title was used was to appeal to the mainstream who are now familiar with the name. The focus on action part makes it hard to recommend it to adventure gamers, who will derive a lot more satisfaction from the previous games of the series, especially the customizable SH2 and SH3. For those who are looking for a great survival horror game, I would recommend the first three games of the series instead, as well as the excellent Fatal Frame 2. If you’ve played all those, don’t mind the lack of adventure elements, and have some extra money to spend, you could give SH4 a try. In the meantime I will wait patiently for the announcement of Silent Hill 5 and hopefully, next time, we’ll visit the town of Silent Hill again and play a game that lives up to the Silent Hill name.

(All screenshots taken from the PC version with 6x Anti-Alias on, and most of them have been brightened with Macromedia Fireworks due to excessive darkness [not being able to capture real-time T&L])

Final Grade: C
(find out more about our grading system)

System Requirements:

Supported Video Chipsets

• nVidia GeForce FX, GeForce4Ti, GeForce3Ti (GeForce MX series not supported)
• ATI Radeon 9800, 9700, 9600, 9500, 9200, 9100, 9000, 8500