Silent Hill 4 - A Good Ghost Story

Silent Hill fandom in this day and age is known far and wide within gaming as being extremely angry, even by video game fandom standards. This is distinct from merely Silent Hill fans as individuals. As a community, the kind who would describe themselves as remaining torchbearers for this franchise, they are collectively just a bizarre tragic-if-it-weren't-so-toxic combination of furious at most of the franchise's entries and eternally certain that this is the year that it comes back—Kojima's gonna be invited to make one and make it all better. Long before there were any Western developed entries to decry though people concerned themselves with assuring you the first three were good, the fourth was awful. As you can probably guess from the tone I'm striking, I quite disagree.

To contextualize why I like Silent Hill 4 so much though I kind of have to talk a bit about the design of Silent Hill to that point, which should maybe explain why I like it and why this entry is so contentious. Silent Hill was a game made in the wake of Resident Evil's success. It was a fixed camera "survival" horror game with rotational (tank) controls. Where it strayed from Resident Evil generally was in having almost no regard for resource or inventory management. You could run out of ammo, but you had effective melee weapons. The combat wasn't the fun part, but it was something that a sufficiently determined player could brute force even if they inexplicably ran every gun in the game totally dry. This is ignoring that the games were also much more generous with ammo on a standard playthrough. Silent Hill also allowed the player to carry an infinite amount of items, no old school RE "store most of your stuff in a box and decide what you need to do before doing it." This would have made for a dull series if they weren't immediately known for their atmosphere. Where Resident Evil picked up a reputation for being "B-movie" trashy zombie flick style horror, Silent Hill immediately gained a reputation for atmosphere and more cerebral psychological horror. That reputation reached its apex with 2, and 3 was generally well liked but hasn't had quite the same lasting fascination. Still, all three were critically acclaimed at the time and are well liked in retrospective appraisal. All three were relatively mechanically similar: simplified inventory management from Resident Evil, post-2 simpler non-rotational controls. They were games meant for drinking in their style and atmosphere with a lesser emphasis on the combat, more there to keep you on your toes. Enemies there to frighten you with their upsetting designs, but not really to pose a tremendous threat outside of very specific circumstances.

By 2004 though, this genre was generally regarded as growing stale. While Silent Hill 3 was praised for its atmosphere and superlative technical achievements on the PS2, the tenor around the genre as a whole was that it needed a shakeup. Enter Room 302, a proposed Silent Hill spin-off that was meant to explore new ideas for how the series could work. By all accounts being worked on alongside Silent Hill 3, the game would emerge in October 2004 as Silent Hill 4: The Room and mark a number of departures for the franchise. Where prior games had the player exploring various landmarks within the town of Silent Hill, the town is never properly entered in 4. Where inventory management had never been a factor in prior games, the player now had a strict 10 item limit and had to return to store items in a box in the titular room on a regular basis. These changes are in service to a very simple concept at the core of Silent Hill 4: the Room is home.

To give the high concept here, Henry Townsend is trapped in his apartment. Mysteriously, his front door has been covered in chains and padlocks. He has been trapped here for days. Eventually a hole appears in one of the walls which doesn't lead to anywhere it logically should in the complex. Without any recourse other than to explore the mysterious hole, Henry begins seeking an escape through it. It's a simple way to pull the player in; the holes continue to appear, they take you to various places and the mystery of the room grows stranger. A strong hook is worth a lot in a horror story and The Room has one of the stronger ones of any horror game of the era.

No matter how much progress you make, eventually circumstance always requires Henry to return to the Room. While the out of Room segments play out from a traditional third person fixed camera perspective common to the genre, the Room segments are played entirely from the first person. The Room is claustrophobic and grimy, but over the course of the game it becomes clear it is your place of solace. Being in the Room will heal Henry. Nothing can hurt you there. While the player is bound to have misgivings about the Room seeing as Henry is trapped there in a run-down apartment that hasn't been renovated in decades, it can be hard to ignore the feeling of comfort it can give you to return to a place with no enemies and that inherently heals you just by being there. The safety the Room offers is more appreciated once ghosts start appearing. Henry doesn't just show up in totally abandoned areas when he goes through these holes, often there will be a person or two. Inevitably shortly after meeting them Henry will lose track of them, only to find them victims of various forms of grisly murder. Inevitably you will see them again, as nigh-unstoppable ghosts. They are powerful and you have no conventional weapon that can put them down for more than a second or two. Returning to the Room, in many cases, is your best escape.

If this game sounds interesting to you I would say quit reading or listening right here and go play it because I'm about to spoil it. You have been warned.

The game decides around the halfway point to then take a huge turn. As the plot begins to reveal itself the Room ceases to be a place of safety. Being in the Room is no longer inherently a benefit and hauntings begin to occur. Being near any of these hauntings is a health drain, they recur at random and the items to remove them are limited (though by no means scarce). Suddenly, the game cranks up all the levers on forcing the player to manage many different kinds of danger. By this point Henry finds items that can put a stop to the ghosts that roam the game's locales. These "Swords of Obedience" are very limited, there are 5 total and, while they can be retrieved, that inherently reactivates the ghost they were used to pin to the ground. Each ghost can only go so many places so the player is forced to make careful decisions about what ones are worth dealing with and what ones are so dangerous they must be kept pinned down. The game also chooses this point to have Henry escort another character through these worlds. She can't be killed prior to the final boss, but her well-being is intrinsically tied to the ending and how well you can keep her alive is going to be another plate the player must keep spinning if they want to get the game's best ending.

Silent Hill 4 thrives, lives and dies on that feeling, that power it has to give the player a sense of space and comfort and then rip it away. It is perhaps less symbologically dense than its predecessors, but in my opinion more than makes up for it by having the most interesting set of concerns for the player to deal with. The way the Room turns on the player is such a fantastic mechanical betrayal. I think my favorite way that it tricks a certain kind of player is around that midway point as well. Partway through the player will be offered a shabby doll by a mysterious man resting on some steps in one of the mysterious worlds the holes take you to. You can take it or refuse, but a savvy player will likely assume it must be taken, it's likely key to a puzzle or something. It's not. The shabby doll is a trap laid for players who consider themselves knowledgeable in horror games. A normal person's instinct would not be to take the weird doll offered by an unsettling stranger. The doll is haunted. The player must then for the rest of the game decide if they would rather keep it in their inventory and waste one of their precious inventory spaces, or leave it in the box in room 302 and hope that they can deal with the haunting it's going to repeatedly cause there. It's a brilliant way of the game continuing to turn the screw.

These are reasons I love the game, but it's also obvious why long-time Silent Hill fans often despised it. Silent Hill 4 is a weird ghost story, full of incredible atmosphere, but one that's also wrapped up in a mechanically much harsher game. While that's hardly the only issue that was taken with the game (much hay was made of the generally less interesting non-ghost enemy designs especially) I do think that the totally alien emphasis on the gameplay had definitely turned away series fans at the time. I, however, think that it's a gem. Rough cut, surely, but a gem and honestly one of the only games in the series I ever feel strongly drawn to replay. Many of the rest I'd be perfectly happy to just watch a playthrough of, but there are few horror games quite like it in terms of the kinds of turns they take mechanically and how those intermix with player psychology. Silent Hill 4 really pushes you to make harder decisions about how to deal with its mechanics than any of its predecessors or successors. If you've never played it, or if it has been a long time, it's absolutely worth going back to.