Silent Hill 4: The Room
by Konami
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Video Game Reviews of Silent Hill 4: The Room
Customer Review: ABC: Apathetic, Boring and Cantankerous
Summary: 2 Stars
When you get a series like Silent Hill, your expectations for it are going to be pretty high. But every now and then a famous developing team with a famous series decides to change things around to attract new players and also to mature the series into something different rather than remake the same game. The only problem is that game developers causing a game to mature will often lend themselves to immaturity in lieu of innovation and by handing out a game to new fans, their own expectations for the game to deliver any semblance of emotional value said series was responsible for will have died out. All of this lies in the case of Silent Hill '4' The Room, quite possibly the worst fourth game in ANY series ever conceived next to Resident Evil 4 and quite possibly the worst Silent Hill game ever made featuring the dumbest subtitle ever to support the main one (The Room?? That doesn't sound ominous at all, it sounds boring... and it is).
The Room has taken a lot of different steps in order to make itself stand out from Silent Hill games, almost to the point where if you compared the two it would be hard to tell they're related. The Room doesn't depend on thick fog or thicker darkness to establish fear, rather it depends on one claustrophobic room pitched in a very dull First Person Perspective that encounters goofy low-budget haunted house noises whenever you approach something evil and doesn't inspire any feeling of being trapped despite that sense being pivotal to the plot as well as very large, bright and wide open alternate areas that are visited through a hole in the wall.
The enemies especially show little semblance to a Silent Hill game as you fight zombie dogs that scream like monkies and cats whenever they get hurt, two headed zombies that make low budget ape noises and tall female zombies in torn mini-skirts and bras wielding sticks who burp every time you hit them... yes, burp.
You even run into ghosts who, like most video game ghosts, are the cheapest, overly powered, silliest enemies you'll ever encounter in a game. Every time you get close to them, they hurt you. You can't fight them effectively without getting hurt in return even when you do wear special gift store items to guard yourself from them, but here's the biggest downer: they're everywhere. They're like Nemesis on that regard in that they follow you everywhere you go. Some of them aren't even that scary. The one that's set on fire just looks like a guy in black make-up with fake fire around him that causes more slow-down than a DreamCast racing game and one of the ghosts is a huge Ju-On/Ringu rip-off. Even weirder is that they all want to kill you for reasons the game never establishes; they have no goals, they have no purpose... they're dead people, why are they here?! And why do they all make only one noise when they chase you?
You'll notice right away that Team Silent just dug through a low budget sound effects library to deliver the game's atmosphere, some of the noises you've heard so many times in previous games they're common place. It's not a good sign when the first noise you hear is a scream you've heard in Super Nintendo and 989 Studios games. But enough technical faults, lets get to the aesthetics.
Silent Hill has always had a good idea of what a protagonist in a horror game should be like, but apparently they ditched that too by replacing the usually charismatic, occasionally emotional, but well spoken and always empathetic protagonist with a dull, mumbling, unimaginative, stoic, idiotic, anti-climactic... thing. Okay, maybe I'm making a big deal about this, but I'm not kidding when I say that the main character in this game would've been more poignant and effective if they had replaced him with a piece of card board or a brick or a tree stump. This man is DEVOID of human emotions. For what reason I don't know. The manual describes him as a boring dude, he ACTS like a boring dude and he never EVER gets interesting. Of course I can't blame all this on the hero, apparently all the other NPCs tend to be just as one dimensional, but at least some of them were more interesting than the hero and actually had a personality! I personally have never wanted to see a grown man being constantly showered with acetic acid, but if it's the main character of Silent Hill 4 we're talking about, then tell me where the ticket booth is!
Well apparently the plot isn't about him or the other characters, no-no, it's about someone else. Silent Hill loved the concept of 'sympathy for the devil,' but Silent Hill 4 tries something so alien, so different and unique that it's practically ineffective. Don't you hate it in horror media where the writers think it would be really scary if serial killers were winging, emo, religious, long haired super men whose motivation for killing is so crystal clear and perfectly explained that the character doesn't even feel insane? Well, expect that in Silent Hill 4 because the antagonist is all of that and is anything but scary, especially when you consider his origins are dependent solely on continuity errors, faulty factual assumptions and memos that treat its audience like an idiot. Much like the protagonist, the antagonist is also a formless, emotionless, cold lump of clay which makes sense for a killer I guess, but does so little to boost empathy for that character despite the fact that the game treats him like a tragic victim of society. Personally, any antagonist that hounds you throughout levels wielding two pistols who can't actually be killed permanently is the kind of character I'd rather watch get processed through a pastrami slicer.
It's actually hard to get into how bad the game play is in this game without spoiling the events in the story and considering the game takes place in an entire day the events are so constant and hurried that it's practically hard to absorb (or even believe) any of it, but the game design needs elucidation for those who don't know of the lurking horror that is The Room's game play.
In order to progress in the game, you have to shift between reality and the trade mark 'Other World' by going into a hole in your bathroom. While this feature is unique and creepy the first time around, being overly exposed to the feature on a minutely basis breaks the atmosphere considering how many times you literally have to go back and forth between reality and the Other-verse.
Some of the back-tracking adds to this as well seeing how you will have to use different elements in your apartment that you apparently can't find in the Other World despite the fact that I'm pretty sure you could clean a filth encrusted toy key by, you know, wiping the dirt off.
The Otherworld is literally broken up into distinguishable levels that are all separated by different sections that ultimately break the desire for exploration; in the first two games, you could literally explore an entire town while following the linear story line, but The Room practically locks you in a cage and sends you down a conveyor belt.
Much like Resident Evil 4, Silent Hill 4 depends on the 'innovation' of having the players play the role of alpha male for that arbitrary reason that players love the idea of the brutish, dark-haired, inhuman main character scoring with a hot, foxy young woman in a mini-skirt who couldn't protect herself with a tooth pick, but thankfully unlike Resident Evil 4, the female in Silent Hill 4 can actually protect herself after being severely injured (dayumn) and is so motherly and intelligent that she ends up being the best character in the game! All of this kind of wears off however when you consider the emotional connection between an emotional woman and a living, breathing piece of petrified crap and the fact that you have to save her by keeping her from fighting, thus helping you. At least in this case you can't blame her for running slower than you seeing how she has a sprained ankle.
You will also have the option of saving this person from a lingering danger over their head. While looking after her was a seemingly mindless chore, I felt naturally inclined to do so because with the escort-mission aside she was the only character in the game I didn't genuinely feel like jumping into the screen and incinerating them with a flamethrower out of unbridled rage, so saving her was a must for me. However, in order to do this you have to use items that take upwards to half a minute to heal her and considering that she just gets more affected a minute later and if you let her fight even once past the third revisitation you're going to be spending a lot of time healing her which means sitting around scratching your nose waiting for nothing to happen.
Even saving your game gets to be obnoxious because you only have one save point and at later points in the game said save point will be guarded by things that can hurt you and even kill you if your not careful.
But you know what the worst aspect about this game is? The endings. All of them. Each and every one of them are devoid of a climax, emotion, dread, accomplishment... even sense and logic.I've played games where your only ending is repeating the entire game over again for no reason, I've played games where all you get is a text saying 'Congratulations, you won' and I've played games where the only ending is a still image where the credits scroll up... and those... ALL of those endings were art compared to the endings of Silent Hill 4 The Room.
Ultimately I found this game to possess the dreadful ABC of gaming that it was so Apathetic, Boring and Cantankerous that I couldn't logically find myself playing it out of fear or interest without wanting to turn it off and play one of the many Resident Evil Clones from the 1990's even if they weren't that good and a game that I end up playing only so I can protect the jiggly young woman in the mini-skirt and hope the hero ends up dying in the process isn't a game dedicated to being scary or involving.
Silent Hill 4 the Room was not a fun or scary experience for me and was about as insulting to my patience as it was to my intelligence, but if you like blatant Ringu knock-offs, boring, brown haired, emotionless heroes and more plot line movie rip-offs for the sake of originality in a horror game then dig right in. Personally, I think there's enough of this trite in horror movies today, so why bother?
Customer Review: another overrated Silent Hill game
Summary: 1 Stars
Though I admit the premise is intriguing, and the atmosphere is spooky as hell, there is very little real substance to the game, and I'm not sure why I continue to play these Silent Hill titles. Lots of walking around whacking these creatures with a plank of wood... That's not my idea of fun gaming, and I find it disappointing that in some ways Silent Hill has set the standard for survival horror lower than it should be. They all pale in comparison to other games in the genre like Fatal Frame, Resident Evil, and Clocktower.Customer Review: Engaging storyline draws you into the world of Silent Hill.
Summary: 4 Stars
This game did a great job of drawing you into the story. I felt like I was actually trapped in the apartment. The story was very spooky and the game had a lot of scary moments. I did complete most of the game with a walk-through as I found this Silent Hill to be difficult. This let me enjoy the storyline and not wander about for hours on end. Great graphics and sound. I do recommend this game to Silent Hill fans. Customer Review: Silent Hill 5
Summary: 3 Stars
The next installment in the Silent Hill survival horror video game series, is currently being developed by an American studio. Let hope they can bring this franchise to the next level.
A couple of annoying things to point out bout THIS title.
1. the voice actor playing the protagonist nearly put me in a coma. He has the same tone of voice no matter whats happening around/to him.
2. Hate the combat system. Was never hoping for or expecting a God of War type..but something smoother AND useful to the player when trying to eliminate the creatures and/or survive enemy attacks.
3. Their are a few moments in the animation of the characters (espeacially the main character) where is seems they're moving in 0 gravity. Its just seems SOOOooo slow at times.
So some positives.
1. the game is creepy.
2. I like how the you start you learn more and more about the apartment as you get further into the game.
3. and just some all around creepy creatures AND human residents living in the apartment building.
In conclusion, the game is "OK". You MIGHT wanna rent this before you think about buying though.
Customer Review: not better and scary than silent hill 3
Summary: 3 Stars
it's still a good game, but not better than silent hill 3, that was one of the best games of the saga also with silent hill 1, but if your a silent hill fan the you have to play it and make your own review of the game. It's not scarier than silent 3 but still frightens you sometimes.