Afraid and Alone #8: Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)

One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.

The fourth Silent Hill game is a strange one (even for a series that regularly gets surreal and weird). Released in mid-2004, only a year after Silent Hill 3, Silent Hill 4: The Room was largely developed at the same time as its predecessor.¹ There have long been rumors that SH4 started as a completely unrelated game that was given the Silent Hill moniker partway through development, but this does not appear to be true. The game’s developers have indicated that at one point it was considered as a potential spin-off (under the name Room 302) rather than a main series game, but it was always intended to be part of the franchise.² Part of this misconception comes down to the notable gameplay and story differences from the previous games. Rather than just follow the same formula as the rest of the series, Team Silent wanted to move SH4 in a new direction. Specifically, they wanted to explore “the contrast between the normal and the abnormal life which changes suddenly”, which is where they came up with the central idea of ‘the Room’ (more on that later).³^,⁴

It’s difficult to find actual data for Silent Hill 4, but the consensus seems to be that it continued the series trend of diminishing sales. What I could find is that it debuted in first place in its first week in Japan (which was a weak week for video game sales there overall) before dropping to tenth in its second week – not a great trajectory.⁵ Critic response was somewhat tepid,⁶ and the game proved extremely controversial among the SH fanbase for years after release due to its departures from the SH formula and uneven execution of its ideas. It has since seen a reevaluation of sorts over the past decade or so, however, with praise going towards its atmosphere, innovations, and its existence as Team Silent’s final game before the franchise was licensed out to Western developers.⁷^,⁸^,⁹ This shift in the game’s reception over time was one of the big factors that got me interested in giving it a shot.

Silent Hill 4: The Room follows South Ashfield resident Henry Townshend, who woke up a few days ago to find that he could no longer leave his apartment. The windows were sealed shut, his neighbors couldn’t hear his yells for help, and – most concerningly – his door was chained shut from the inside. Now a mysterious hole has opened up in his bathroom wall, a hole large enough to crawl through. Rather than lead Henry to freedom, however, this portal deposits him in increasingly surreal Otherworld versions of locations around South Ashfield and the nearby town of Silent Hill, Otherworlds populated by monsters and seemingly built around the memories of someone else. It’s up to Henry to unravel what is going on and finally make his escape from his new prison.

Silent Hill 4 is perhaps the survival horror game that I’ve found the most challenging to review so far. The development team’s decision to experiment so much with the series formula, as well as their known struggles with time and budget constraints, results in a game that is such a strange mix of the stellar and the frustrating that it is hard to come to any kind of singular conclusion without putting a lot of thought into it. As such, I think it makes sense to lay everything out into three categories – the things I liked, the things I’m mixed on, and the things I didn’t like – and see what I’m able to draw from the results.

The Positives:

It’s always great when a game (a) has a strong central conceit and (b) that conceit is executed well. Silent Hill 4 absolutely meets both criteria. I’ve long believed that the mundane is a great source of horror, and what is more mundane for a lot of people than their home or apartment? It’s where you start your day and end your day; it’s familiar. You know what things need work, what things you love, what things annoy you. The design of Henry’s apartment does an excellent job of capturing this familiar, lived-in mundanity. The layout and flow of the place feels right, the arrangement of the furniture makes sense for a place where someone is actually living, and there are so many great little details (the photos on the walls, the cereal boxes in the kitchen, the magazines and TV remote on the coffee table). You can even look out of the windows to observe people and cars going about their day on the street outside. The way the ordinary look of the place clashes with Henry’s new normal – his inability to leave – is unsettling in a way I haven’t encountered in a survival horror game before. This apartment is meant to be a place of safety, so the fact that someone was able to seal it from the inside without a trace is incredibly disturbing.

*Image courtesy of Silent Hill Memories.*

The unsettling situation of Henry’s apartment is further enhanced by an unshakeable claustrophobia. Part of this feeling is the result of the place’s small size, consisting of a cramped bedroom, a bathroom, a utility closet, and a connected kitchen and living room. While this may be okay for a single person living alone like Henry, particularly someone who spends a lot of time outside, it would feel downright suffocating if you were stuck there for days on end and couldn’t leave no matter how much you wanted to. As opposed to the Otherworld segments, the apartment sections are played through first-person perspective. I have to think that the use of this gameplay mechanic contributes to the sense of claustrophobia as well, immersing the player in Henry’s environment and limiting their field of view.

But what makes the room work best for me is how dynamic it ends up being. In the first half of the game, this is illustrated through our view to the outside. There are three ways that Henry can glimpse the world outside his apartment – through the windows, through the peephole in the front door, and through a mysterious hole that opened up looking directly into his neighbor Eileen’s apartment. Almost every time Henry returns from one of the Otherworlds you will find that the views through each have changed. One moment there might be an ambulance at the subway entrance across the street, Eileen might be laughing at something on the television, and the building superintendent might be arguing with someone in the hallway; the next moment the ambulance is gone, another tenant might be trying futilely to open Henry’s door, and Eileen might be sitting on her bed anxiously contemplating why Henry hasn’t been seen in days. Some of these changes are important for the story, some just add to the atmosphere, but together they serve as an incredibly cool and interesting way to develop the story beyond Henry and make the building and the city feel alive. (Plus they get a few good pseudo-jumpscares out of it.) In the second half of the game, this dynamic quality moves from the exterior of the room to the inside. I will avoid saying too much more on this so as to not spoil anything, but it’s another fascinating shift in the way the room is used that really magnifies the horror of Henry’s situation.

*Building superintendent Frank Sunderland, spotted through the door’s peephole. Image courtesy of Reactor.*

Outside of the room itself, one of the biggest highlights of the game for me is the main villain, Walter Sullivan. Walter is a man with strong ties both to the apartment building in Ashfield and to Silent Hill itself, and serves as the main bridge connecting these two locations. (In a fun little bit of trivia, Walter is referenced by name at least twice in both the original Silent Hill 2 and the remake.) The game spends a lot of time delving deep into Walter’s past and his broken psyche, and this level of focus results in what is hands-down the best and most complex antagonist I have yet encountered in a survival horror game. Also one of the creepiest, despite looking like a normal human being. He’s a tragic figure, for sure, but one who took his troubled past and went in a horrifying direction in his search for closure.

Puzzle-wise, the game is a lot sparser than other games I’ve played in the genre. The puzzles that are present are mostly quite clever, though. In particular there are a number of them that require travel between the Otherworld and Henry’s apartment. You might find a dirty object that needs to be washed in his kitchen sink, for example, or a key item that limits your ability to progress in the Otherworld and thus must be juggled between the apartment and Otherworld to get it to the correct spot. It’s a neat trick that further helps to keep the game’s central premise from feeling too much like a gimmick.

And in general there’s a kind of nostalgic charm that pervades the whole game. The graphical style falls into that early-2000s, almost uncanny valley look that contributes to the unsettling atmosphere. The voice acting generally seems better than what I’ve seen of the original SH2, but it still stumbles in strangely endearing ways at times. The menu UI and the corresponding beeps and boops that are elicited as you navigate it are also very turn-of-the-century in a way that brings me back to the games of my childhood. There is definitely some jankiness to the presentation here and there, like enemies clipping into walls, but it didn’t bother me too much. From the soundtrack side of things, Akira Yamaoka (now also a producer of the game) turns in another fantastic set of tracks. The music tends to swing towards the darker and moodier this time around, befitting SH4’s unique tone. (The sound design, particularly for the enemies, is another matter that we will get to later.)

There are even moments where unusual voice direction and dated animation result in unintentional comedy gold. One such scene that gave me a good chuckle when it obviously wasn’t meant to was early on, when Henry walks up to a woman who is clearly bleeding to death and nonchalantly asks her if she is okay without a hint of concern or surprise in his monotone voice. Then there is perhaps the most glorious moment in the game, in which fellow tenant and man-with-clear-anger-management-issues Richard Braintree slowly falls several stories off a building, lands hard on his shoulder and exclaims “Ouch, dammit!” in the same tone of voice you’d use if you stubbed your toe, and then immediately points a gun at Henry, all while wearing one of the more bizarre ties I’ve seen. This weirdness with some of the cutscenes may seem like a negative, but I actually consider it part of the game’s aforementioned charm. It’s an odd game as a whole, so some oddness like that is expected.

The Mixed:

One of the biggest elements of SH4 that I have mixed feelings about is Henry himself. Most other Silent Hill protagonists play an active role in the story, often dealing with their own psychological traumas in the process. Henry does not really do either of those things. He doesn’t appear to have significant deep-seated issues that need to be rooted out, at least from what I can tell. He hasn’t been targeted for any personal reasons – he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, that is something that I don’t think the series has really explored before, which feels a little fresh and unique, but the game doesn’t really do anything with the concept. Perhaps the bigger issue, though, is his almost complete lack of personality. He constantly seems detached from what is going on around him, reacting to events with little sense of emotion and frequently speaking almost in a monotone (as in the aforementioned “Are you okay?” scene). I’ve heard it speculated that this was an intentional choice to make it easier for him to act as a player insert character, a blank slate for the player to project their own thoughts and feelings on. This could very well be the case, and I think that he does work pretty well in that regard. And that seeming detachment and social awkwardness could be the sign of an introvert, something that I can very much relate to. It’s just that he often ends up feeling bland, and in a story-heavy game with a small core cast like this it can be a little deflating to have such a bland main character.

On a similar note, with the exception of Walter most of the supporting characters show glimmers of something interesting under the surface but largely fall flat. The two people the player encounters the most are probably Eileen, Henry’s neighbor, and Frank Sunderland, the building’s superintendent. (If the name Sunderland sounds familiar, it’s probably because Frank is the father of James Sunderland, the main protagonist of Silent Hill 2. It’s a fun little detail that luckily doesn’t stray too far into ‘winking reference’ territory.) There are some intriguing tidbits about their past connections to Walter, but their personalities rarely seem to extend beyond being concerned or anxious about what’s going on nor do either of them have a particularly noticeable arc. Of the remaining supporting cast the most memorable is probably the previously mentioned Richard Braintree, but that’s largely due to his odd aggressiveness and not much else. The characters aren’t bad or annoying (outside of Jasper, maybe), I just wish some of them had more development.

*Henry’s neighbor Eileen. Image courtesy of the Silent Hill Wiki.*

Another part of the game that I ended up feeling conflicted about was the decision to have most of the game take place outside of Silent Hill. This isn’t because I believe that setting a Silent Hill game outside of the titular town is inherently a bad idea – I thought that Silent Hill f’s village of Ebisugaoka worked quite well in that regard, for example. It can work and it mostly does so here, illustrating how events in Silent Hill, Maine, can have consequences beyond the town’s limits. The problem is that while Silent Hill and Ebisugaoka have well-developed identities that contribute to their stifling and unsettling atmospheres, the bits that we see of Ashfield just come across as kind of ‘generic American city’. Which can actually be something of a positive, as it could be used to show how even seemingly ‘normal’ places can have a dark underbelly. It just feels a little boring, though, and I wish the city had a little something more to define it and set it apart.

The controls and combat are among the most criticized elements of the game. For me, they’re more of a mixed bag. I don’t have any issues with the controls in the first-person sections in Henry’s apartment, in part because there is no combat so they are able to remain simple and serviceable. The problems crop up in the third-person Otherworld areas. Silent Hill 4 does not entirely make use of fixed camera angles in these segments, as the camera will largely follow the player as they progress through the level, but there are many specific places where the camera angle will suddenly change. This wouldn’t be an issue with tank controls, but SH4 goes for a more modern movement system. This results in a sometimes disorienting experience where a change in the camera angle will send Henry off in an unintended direction. Like in many Silent Hill games (excluding SHf), SH4 makes use of both melee weapons and firearms in combat. The melee combat is definitely very clunky, with awkward swinging and timing that can be difficult to get accustomed to at first, but honestly that is kind of expected with Silent Hill. What disappointed me is how unnecessary it ended up being to expand beyond simple melee. I spent the first part of the game rarely using guns in order to conserve on ammo (something I learned about the hard way in previous survival horror games)…and then spent the rest of the game also rarely using guns, this time because I had become so used to the melee combat that it became a breeze. There were only a handful of particular rooms where I felt any need to make use of firearms such that I ended the game with an absurd amount of bullets left (over a hundred, I think). Even the attempts to add variety to the melee combat through the addition of many available weapons (shovels, axes, baseball bats, and even powerful but breakable golf clubs) didn’t do much for me. I stuck with an axe for pretty much the entire game and at almost no point felt like I needed to switch things up. To me, it seemed like there was a lot of wasted potential to the game’s combat system.

The enemy designs are hit or miss for me as well. The Twin Victims, which look like the heads of two children conjoined on a large legless torso that walks around using its long arms, are among the creepiest and most disturbing enemies I have encountered in the survival horror genre yet. The way they don’t move until you come close, instead standing completely still and pointing a finger at Henry while muttering under their breath, is incredibly unsettling. The indestructible ghosts are also quite creepy in the way they float around and deal damage just for being in their proximity. (The blaring industrial drone that accompanies them doesn’t hurt either.) Eventually they just start to feel like nuisances, although there are some new ghosts introduced in the second half that have more interesting behavior and stronger story relevance. The Gum Heads and Wall Men, both of which are gray-ish humanoids, aren’t the most unique designs but at least their behavior can be interesting. My biggest problem, though, is with the two most common enemy types – the Sniffers and the Hummers. Both just look so generic to me, with the Sniffers being green-gray dogs and Hummers being bats. These designs aren’t necessarily terrible on their own (they wouldn’t be out of place in a Resident Evil game), but in a series known for its grotesque and weird enemies they don’t really feel like they belong.

*Henry fighting a Twin Victim. Image courtesy of Reactor.*

The Negatives:

Outside of the final segment, the second half of the game is a pretty significant letdown compared to the first half. This ultimately comes down to two major design and gameplay choices that were made by the developers. One of these choices was to require the player to repeat nearly every single Otherworld level from the game’s first half. That’s right – almost the entire second half of Silent Hill 4 consists of backtracking. Each Otherworld is given some new puzzles to complete, but the layouts and environments are otherwise the same as they were before. It’s a boring decision (one that feels like it may have been the result of time and/or budget crunch) and it’s honestly kind of deflating when you realize that this is the direction the game is going.

To make things worse, there is the second design decision that defines the game’s second half – making the whole thing one extended escort mission. I have mentioned my distaste for escort missions before (and especially for how RE4’s was handled). Luckily the subject of SH4’s escort mission, Eileen, isn’t as annoying as Ashley, but she comes with her own problems. When Ashley got hurt, you could heal her with items from your inventory. From how I understand it, Eileen cannot be healed. (Putting a candle near her supposedly can have an effect, but I’ve heard that it is only temporary.) This can be troublesome, as the amount of damage she has taken has a direct influence on your ability to get the game’s good ending. Even just leaving her alone in a room can have an adverse effect on her health, meaning that you pretty much have to bring her into battle. Unlike Ashley in the OG RE4, you can give Eileen a weapon to help fight enemies. Her AI is strangely aggressive, however. Instead of just attacking the same enemy or enemies that Henry is taking on, she will run off to pick a fight with other enemies on her own. Not only does this leave her open to damage while Henry is unable to protect her, but it can also slow the player down when they are trying to make a dash for the next door. This happened multiple times when I was attempting to outrun a ghost, where instead of following Henry she would wail on the specter until it was knocked down, wait for it to get back up (given that ghosts are invincible), and then keep repeating the process. The only way to get her to stop was to straight-up take her weapon away. Perhaps worst of all, Eileen is quite slow. It is so easy to accidentally lose her or to leave her behind when passing through a door, which brings the player’s progress to a crawl as they are forced to modulate their speed and keep backtracking to find her and let her catch up. I do think that with some tweaks the escort mission could have been more bearable, but as it stands when combined with the repeated locations it makes the second half of the game something of a slog.

My other main negative for SH4 is, strangely enough, the enemy sound design. Pretty much every other game I’ve played for this column series so far has excelled in this area, using unsettling or unusual enemy noises to enhance their disturbing atmospheres. This makes SH4 falling flat in this area all the stranger, especially given how atmospheric and creepy the game is otherwise. Perhaps the prime example of this issue is with the Patients, the main enemies in the hospital Otherworld. The Patients are these tall, hulking, humanoid creatures that certainly look intimidating and can be difficult to handle from a combat perspective. And then you hit them with your weapon, and everything deflates as you hear them…burp. It just does not fit at all, and it makes the enemies seem comical rather than threatening – particularly in one area where you battle three of them on a long stairway, and when you knock one off its feet it goes sliding downward and loudly burps with every single step it hits. To make matters worse, there is no variety in the effect. It is the exact same burp sound in each instance. It frankly feels like you are fighting Shrek rather than a grotesque Silent Hill monster. Many of the other enemy types aren’t all that better, using what are clearly stock sound effects with little to no variety. Sniffers almost always use the exact same stock big cat snarl, for instance, while the Gum Heads sound like chattering apes. The way these effects are incorporated feels weirdly out of place and frequently undermines any creep factor these enemies might otherwise have. Sure, the moans of the ghosts and the muttering of the Twin Victims are quite disturbing, but they aren’t enough to counteract the issues I have with the other enemies’ sound design.

The Conclusion:

So where does all that leave things? Silent Hill 4: The Room is a game of really high highs and really low lows, and overall I think they average each other out to create something in the middle. The slog of the second half and an under-tuned combat system are detrimental enough to keep SH4 below my favorites of the genre. But the villain, plot, nostalgic charm, disturbing atmosphere, and inventive use of ‘the Room’ are all excellent enough to put it firmly above my least favorite as well. I think the best way I can describe it is by saying that I liked the game a lot but didn’t quite love it. There is a lot of potential there that could be turned into a masterpiece with some tweaks and reworking of the late game structure, which is why I’m personally hoping that Bloober Team gets the chance to remake this one someday.

Interestingly, I keep comparing this game in my mind with Silent Hill f. Both are among the most divisive games in the Silent Hill franchise. Both take place largely outside of Silent Hill, Maine. Both heavily experiment with the Silent Hill formula. And outside of their final sections I find the second halves of both games to be inferior and more frustrating than their first halves. Silent Hill f is definitely the more polished of the two, but there is a pervasive weirdness to SH4 that ultimately leads me to give it a slight edge.

Survival horror and adjacent games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil: Village, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Amnesia: Rebirth, Amnesia: The Bunker, Tormented Souls, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, Alisa, Dead Space (2008), Alone in the Dark 1, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Darkwood, ObsCure, Cold Fear, Lempo, Stasis, Stasis Bone Totem, System Shock 1 and 2, Metro 2033, Look Outside, Fear the Spotlight, Heartworm, Little Goody Two-Shoes, SOMA, Empty Shell, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Clock Tower: Rewind, White Day: A Labyrinth Called School, Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse, Condemned: Criminal Origins, Sorry We’re Closed, Fragile Reflection, Bioshock 1, Bioshock 2, You Will Die Here Tonight, Cronos: The New Dawn

My Current Survival Horror Ranking:

Resident Evil (HD Remaster) (9.5/10)
Silent Hill 2 Remake (9.5/10)
Signalis (9/10)
Resident Evil 2 Remake (9/10)
Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (8.5/10)
Crow Country (8.5/10)
Silent Hill 4: The Room (8/10)
Silent Hill f (8/10)
Resident Evil 4 (7/10)

Up Next: Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse

Header image courtesy of GamingBolt.

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Afraid and Alone #8: Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)

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