backtrack.
That said, and convenience permitting, I'd recommend a playthrough of Silent
Hill 2 before tackling this one, as you'll get a bit more out of both titles
that way.
For the total novices, the general gist of the series has always
been the idea of our worst intangible fears brought to life. The overarching plot
revolves around a demon-worshipping cult who used the nightmares of a young girl
to create a hellish alternate reality, sort of a twisted mirror world that exists
on a different vibration from our own. This "nightmare world" and its encroachment
on reality has been the hallmark of the series since the first game, and while
the actual creation and destruction of the alternate dimension itself is book-ended
by games one and three, there's seventeen years in between them, and it's in this
timeframe that Silent Hill 4 (and Silent Hill 2, for that matter)
take place.
None of this really concerns the protagonist of The Room.
Named Henry Townsend, he's basically just an average guy with crappy luck. At
the onset of the game, we're told that Henry has been living relatively happily,
if alone, in his apartment in the small town of Ashfield. He's on friendly terms
with the neighbors, acts a bit introverted, but isn't a particularly unusual or
remarkable person in any way. So he's as confused as anyone else when he suddenly
finds himself trapped in his own apartment, and it's only after five days of nothing
that the tile on his bathroom wall crumbles away to reveal a sizeable hole that
he gets a chance to figure it out.
This is where the game grants control,
and it unwinds in two distinct ways. About 2/3 of the game takes place in the
nightmare world that exists beyond the hole in the wall, and this is traditional
Silent Hill fare. Though the game has lost the trademark flashlight and
radio items that played a key role in the atmosphere of the previous games, most
everything else remains the same. Henry wanders around the warped vistas of the
alternate dimension, getting attacked by the inhabitants there, collecting items,
solving puzzles, and trying to figure out why he's been dragged into this mess
in the first place.
In an interesting plot twist, the worlds themselves
have very little to do with Henry as a character. In the previous games, the pacing
was generally a set amount of gameplay in the normal world, then a shift into
the nightmare world, a boss fight at the end, and then back into the real world.
Repeat four or five times until the end of the game is reached. Here, the nightmare
world is the only existence Henry has outside of his apartment, which brings up
the real "gimmick" of the game: The Room of the title.
As the
game moves on, it's possible, and in many cases required, to return back to the
apartment in order to heal, save, and view plot events. Since (unlike the protagonists
of the previous games) the nightmare world isn't specifically tuned to Henry himself,
he can more or less come and go at will. At various spots in the infected dimension,
there are holes similar to the one growing on his bathroom wall. Pop through one
of these holes, and Henry wakes up on his bed in the "real" world as if he never
left. Besides gleefully screwing with the player's sense of reality, this serves
the neat function of creating a believable and plot-relevant hub system to the
game's stages, and provides a nice breather when the oppressive atmosphere elsewhere
gets to be too daunting.
The apartment is also used to great effect as
a storytelling device. While all the action happens in the other world, the apartment
is where most of the interesting plot events play out. Henry can look out of his
windows to the world outside, and can also check the peephole on his door and
spy through a small crack in the wall into the room next door. It's a good idea
to do these things each time you take a detour back to the apartment, since it
provides both clues to what's really going on as well as answers to some of the
puzzles in the game's external stages.
As for the nightmare stages themselves,
they've got the usual assortment of puzzles to solve and enemies to fight, with
one critical exception. Generally speaking, Henry can defend himself. The game
places a fair emphasis on melee combat and provides an extremely large number
of close-range things that can be used to kill the various denizens of the other
dimension. Since everything there is technically "real", the beasties can be killed
like you'd kill anything else. There's also a refreshing adherence to realism
as far as the armaments that can be scrounged up. For example, Henry can take
a wine bottle out of his fridge and use it to club enemies. After it breaks, he
uses it as a much more effective stabbing weapon. It sounds a bit strange, but
it makes more sense given the situation than randomly finding a gigantic mace
somewhere and using that.
Combat itself isn't overly difficult, though
it seems so at first. Long-range weapons do exists, but ammo is extremely scarce,
so it's usually in your best interests to scrap it out at close range, particularly
since healing is free. There are healing items in the game, but those are also
very scarce, and you will need them later, so save yourself some frustration down
the line and save every one you get unless you absolutely need it. The time will
become clear when should use them, trust me.
The critical exception to
the otherwise conventional enemies comes in the form of the Ghosts, a completely
new enemy in the Silent Hill milieu, and a very, very unnerving one. While
the enemies originating from the nightmare world can be killed and will stay dead,
the Ghosts are the corrupted remains of other people who were trapped there before
Henry showed up. Completely apart from the normal enemies, there are only a limited
number of these Ghosts, but they cannot be killed, and will stalk Henry throughout
the entire game. They can move through walls (with one of the more startling graphical
effects in the game) and are much faster and more dangerous than any of the other
native inhabitants. Just being too close to them will cause damage to Henry, making
them incredibly formidable, not to mention frightening foes to get chased by.
To make matters worse, there's often two or three of them after you at once, meaning
that you're constantly running from these things in some parts of the game.
As disturbing as they can be, they're luckily not as annoying from a gameplay
standpoint as they might sound. The designers were pretty good about not pitting
you against Ghosts and normal enemies at the same time, and there are usually
no instances where you need to do any serious exploration while they're tormenting
you. In addition, there's an item that will keep them completely at bay, but breaks
after a certain amount of use, and a particular weapon that can literally pin
them down for good, but it can only be used once-there are five of these weapons
altogether, but they're not easy to find.
As for how all of this is presented,
the graphics and sound are quite good, however, they are still a small step back
from the remarkable Silent Hill 3. The main characters are rendered in
painstaking detail and look very good, even for a port of a PS2 game, but the
graphics here aren't really going to blow anyone away. Same goes for the sound.
The voice acting is, unfortunately, pretty horrific. Henry has an interesting
voice, but he delivers all of his lines in a bizarre, almost emotionless semi-whisper
filled with awkward pauses, making him sound like he's on loan from a David Lynch
movie.
The other thing, aesthetically, that may irk veterans is that
the series' prior use of darkness as a scare tactic has been completely done away
with. In the other titles, you couldn't see squat 90% of the time, which made
it that much more frightening when some stumbling horror lurched out of the shadows
and took a swing at you. Here, everything is weirdly well-lit for what has traditionally
been a lightless world. It depends on the person playing, but speaking for myself,
this took the overall scare factor down several notches. It's not exactly Mario
Sunshine in there, but the raw visceral fear that permeated Silent Hill
3 is nowhere to be found.
If that sounds disappointing, well, it
is, at least at first. In fact, The Room doesn't really begin to show its
true colors until about halfway through the game, when there's a noticeable gameplay
shift and suddenly Henry goes from being a passive observer to taking a much more
proactive (and dangerous) role in the plot. Once the story reaches this point,
it begins to fold in on itself and tinker with the conventions regarding the function
of the apartment versus the nightmare world it connects to, and it becomes both
much more compelling and much more frightening. The best way to explain it without
ruining any of the plot is to say that the game has an almost passive feel until
the midway point, when it finally "notices" you, and then the kid gloves come
off.
All I can really say is to stick with it if you want to see why
this game is as good as it is. It's quite a bit different from the other titles
in the series, and coming down from the brutal part three it seems almost languid
in comparison at first, but The Room pulls the remarkable trick of sinking
its hooks into you without you even knowing it, so when the curtain finally drops
and you see where you were being led, it's that much more of a kick to the gut.
Overall: 8.5/10
It's a slow-burner, but Silent Hill 4: The Room is one of the most intelligently
plotted horror games out there. If you're willing to invest some time and pay
attention, it has a hell of a payoff. Recommended to fans of the series, fans
of horror games in general, or anyone who likes the games that make you sit and
think after you're done playing them.
[
top ] |
