Written 04.10.2010 - Uploaded 04.10.2010
I'm catching up! This game I played maybe 10 months ago. After this I'm only slightly over 10 games behind.
Silent Hill 4 The Room is kind of a break-away in the series. Kind of, because most of the time is still spent running around in monster-infested areas. What makes The Room special is, well, a room. The entire plot is tied around one particular room (apartment really). Our protagonist has quite recently moved in, and already weird things are going on. He has been locked in by numerous chains and locks. Among the biggest of his other problems is a growing hole in the bathroom wall. This is how the player can be taken into worlds beyond the room. I do think it would have been mighty interesting if they had actually kept the entire game play inside the one room. There's a challenge. Anyway, it soon turns out much of the game's duration is spent in nightmare worlds.
The Room is not very different from previous installments in the series. The mystery of the room is what drives the game forward. This does work pretty well as a setting. Instead of wandering around from place to place until certain destination is reached, the player is given a more central goal. The mystery unravels itself slowly, and I shall not spoil it any further. I do think the plot was interesting enough to keep me going through to the end, regardless of some repetition in the game. That is, if you've read other reviews of the game, you may be aware that most of the game's areas are played twice. This didn't really bother me but you have been warned.
Game mechanics are quite familiar. We follow Henry from a third-person view as he explores his surroundings, picking up objects and hacking the not-so-occasional monster. In other words, what we do in most 3rd person games. Fortunately it did feel like the amount of combat had been toned down a bit. I also liked the basically invincible enemies because they were always threatening. Weapons arsenal has also been reduced quite a bit which is also a good sign. Combat in general seems to work a bit better than in Silent Hill 2 and there aren't really any annoying boss matches. Still, the monsters are not that scary and, the invincible ones aside, confronting them is usually not too much of a fright. For a horror game, The Room still does okay. I wasn't particularly scared at any point, but certain events in the game were certainly unnerving.
Much of horror in the Silent Hill series comes from the atmosphere and especially sounds. This is where The Room has gone a bit downhill, and the amount of really fucked up soundscapes felt lesser than in Silent Hill 2. Same goes for the visuals and even area design, which was a bit boring at times. Only the room itself was really memorable. Well. there is one other really memorable visual in the game, which I'll leave for you to find. Basically, while The Room is game mechanically mostly superior to its predecessors, it sadly lacks in atmosphere. I felt pretty confident most of the time when striding through its various nightmare worlds. The most disturbing stuff in this game are probably its various events and various documents found lying around (or slipped to Henry underneath his door).
Game mechanics wise, there aren't many exceptional things and not many dives either. Limiting the inventory to ten items was often annoying and forced me to run to the item storage inside the room. There didn't seem to be much of a reason for this, except perhaps limiting the player's ability to carry healing items and pistol bullets. The latter were not very necessary though - melee weapons were sufficient most of the time. When they were not, running in panic was usually the way to go. The room itself had quite a lot of wasted potential - not too many things were done inside it. By putting more game play inside the room, Konami could have most likely made the game stand out quite a bit better. This is what Silent Hill games need in general: more investigating, less combat. Actual puzzles in this game were practically non-existent.
Silent Hill 4 The Room is kind of easy to summarize. There is not much of anything that hasn't been seen before. The room itself is the only element in the game that has not been used often although Project Zero 3 follows a very similar structure. In both games, the protagonist goes into a nightmare world from his/her house. The Room tells a good story but then again all Silent Hill games do. It does feel like the story is explained more and in less subtle ways. For some this might be good news, for others not so. I'm kind of in-between. I did like the way The Room's story unfolds more than its predecessors'. While game play is not terribly exciting, it does an okay job and at the very least does not get into the player's way.