There is a misconception
in the adventure community that the Silent
Hill games are not adventure. The truth is that not
only did Silent
Hill 3
contain more puzzles than many ‘pure’ adventure games
like Jack the Ripper,
but that the Silent Hill games also have a slider bar that allows
the player to set the puzzle level to ‘difficult’ and
the action level to ‘easy.’ Now, I’m not going
to try and pull the wool over your eyes and claim that you will
never need to fire a weapon, but you will find yourself needing
only one shot to dispose of a foe rather than three or four. I
find it a great satisfaction to be able to enjoy the game on a
cerebral level while still getting the adrenaline rush of vanquishing
a misshapen baddie.

Which brings us to Silent
Hill 4. The conclusion of the last entry
neatly tied up all of the loose ends from the trilogy so how could
Konami possibly do a sequel? Well, SH4 is a fresh approach to the
series and supposedly is not related to the previous episodes (though
we all know that somehow, someway all of the games will intersect).

Silent Hill 4:
The Room takes place in the small town of South Ashfield, only a few short
miles from Silent Hill. This time you play as Henry
Townshend who wakes from a nightmare to find that he is trapped in
his apartment. The outside door is heavily chained and boarded shut.
Strange sounds are coming from the bathroom (okay, knock off the
giggling), but when he goes to investigate he notices a strange portal
that leads to alternate worlds. There is not much more we can reveal
about the plot as a) Konami is being very tight-lipped, and b) we
couldn’t hear a damn thing the Konami rep was saying to us
at the E3 as the noise in the Konami booth was ungodly loud.

Your point-of-view will change depending on your location: first-person
viewpoint for the reality of your apartment and third-person viewpoint
for the alternate worlds. The control system is exactly the same
as the previous games as are the excellent graphics and soundtrack.
The monsters once again resemble something that Clive Barker would
have vomited from his imagination. The new Silent Hill seems to once
again be the perfect balance of puzzles, action and horror

The brief E3 demo was
more than enough to get me jonesing for the final version. I can’t
wait to once again sit in the dark, afraid to peek around the next
corner. Konami has indeed perfected
the fine art of scaring the crap out of gamers.