Andrew Toups (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} mistertoups) wrote,@ 2004-09-15 15:01:00 |
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Silent Hill 4: The Review
Warning: There are a few spoilers in this. If you don't want the game spoiled at all for you, here is more short review: This is the scariest game I've ever played. Maybe that's just me. Either way, go out and play it. Buy it, rent it, steal it, do whatever. It's worth it.
Silent Hill 4: The Room is a conflicted game. It wants desperately to be a Silent Hill game. All the surface elements are there; the game goes out of its way to reference events, names, and locales from the rest of the series. All the typical visual motifs (corpses hung up in grated metal boxes, zombie dogs, decaying urban surroundings, etc.) are insistently repeated. Yet it draws much of its atmosphere, structure, and play mechanics from drastically different sources than the rest of the franchise. At its heart, it is questionable whether or not Silent Hill 4: The Room is really a Silent Hill game at all; for the first time, we are forced to ask "What is a Silent Hill game?" The frequent visual, aural, and textual references to the rest of the series at times feel like red herrings to throw us off the scent, to distract us from the fear that is at the game's core, so that it may strike us even more off guard.
Now, when I say that Silent Hill 4 may not actually be a Silent Hill game, I'm not referring to its new control scheme and combat system, or its inventory management system, or any of the mechanical elements. Even the Room itself, though central to the game's structure and drama, is ultimately not what makes this game different. These, in a way, are red herrings in and of themselves. What sets the game apart is the type of fear it delivers.
The Hitchcock Line and The Malkovich Line
Prior to this game, the Silent Hill series has been remarkably self-contained, even incestuous in terms of its fear aesthetic. The Silent Hill idiom was clearly set by the first game, and the subsequent games followed it religiously. Understanding this fear aesthetic is as simple as looking at the street names in part one: Midwich, Koontz, Crichton, etc. The fear in Silent Hill has always ultimately been the fear of the unknown, the fear of what is beyond the borders of reality. This fear is colored differently in the different games -- part two focuses more on melancholy and hopelessness, part three on dread and anger. In its Subway stage, Silent Hill 4 itself references some perennial series influences, Stephen King and David Lynch, but these references are more appropriate for the rest of the series than this game. Again, I smell a red herring.
If they wanted to be more accurate, they should have called them the Hitchcock line and the Malkovich line.
Now, the obvious influence of Being John Malkovich isn't hard to see. The portals are the most clear connection, but the sheer absurdity of premise, and the similarly bizarre internal logic of that movie reach their way into The Room as well. Being John Malkovich is a surreal movie. And Silent Hill 4 is a surreal game. It is surreal in ways the previous games never were. You would never think about comparing Silent Hill 2, for instance, to Being John Malkovich. But, here we are.
What about Hitchcock? Think about it. Strip away, if you will, the "otherworldly" aspects of the plot. Dispose of the alternate realities, the strange noises, the awful monsters, the inexplicable physics of the game. Silent Hill 4's plot is that of a suspense-thriller, a murder mystery. The most obvious Hitchcock connection, of course, is Rear Window*-- this game expertly captures both the voyeurism and paranoia of that film.
Voyeurism and paranoia were never big movements in the Silent Hill songbook, until this game. This is an important way in which this game differs from the rest of the series, if not the essential way.
In any case, the heart of Silent Hill 4 is neither in its plot or its aesthetics. I don't want to imply that the game itself is at heart like a Hitchcock film; its plot perhaps is. Nor do I want to imply that it is essentially the same as Being John Malkovich; its aesthetics are, at times. But the usual Silent Hill influences are still there. What's important is that some new ingredients have been added to the stew.
Other Lines of Influence
Silent Hill 4 is also the first game since part one to actively seek influence from actual video games. I mean this as a good thing; while the rest of the survival horror world has evolved, Silent Hill has been content to fully explore its unique terror aesthetic, and, as part three's overall lack of dramatic punch suggests, the series has stagnated as a result. I believe that someone close to the top of the chain of command on the development team was playing a lot of Eternal Darkness, and decided that they could do that game one better. And, they did.
I say this because the structure of Silent Hill 4 is fundamentally similar to the structure of Eternal Darkness. Both games are based around a hub; in Eternal Darkness, the hub is the Roivas mansion, and individual episodes take place as vignettes that Alex reads in the Tome of Eternal Darkness. It starts to really get frightening when she gets to the story of her colonial era ancestor, Maximillian Roivas, which takes place in the mansion. The first truly dramatic and horrific moment of the game, sanity effects notwithstanding, starts when you discover the otherworldly city beneath the mansion. This takes place within the frame of Maximillian's story, but when you finish, you are back in the same setting. And you think to yourself: "is that horrible thing still under the mansion now?" The hub, traditionally, is a "safe space" for your avatar; the castle in Mario 64, for instance. Eternal Darkness gets some of its fear-factor from slowly invading that space, making it something threatening in and of itself, until its safeness is completely eroded.
Silent Hill 4 does the same thing with its titular Room, only it does it better, more intensely, more elegantly, and most important of all, more terrifyingly.
I will address a mechanical issue of the game now, because it illustrates my point: the puzzles. The puzzles in this game are simplified and dumbed down significantly from previous installments. You won't find yourself doing complex word or math problems, or trying interpret bad poetry scribbled in blood on the wall, or throwing a box of orange juice down a trash chute. It's almost enough to say that the puzzles don't exist, except that they serve a crucial function to the game's dramatic power.
Nearly every puzzle in the game demands that you return to your apartment room to solve it. They are generally cleverly and organically integrated in ways that make sense, and it doesn't hurt that most of the game's environments are spatially related to your room in one way or another. This is, ultimately, the reason for not only the decreased emphasis on puzzles, but the increased focus on combat (the aforementioned visible life meter and altered combat scheme), the limited inventory, the self-drawing maps, and nearly every other significant alteration to the series' mechanics. Silent Hill 4 is structured so that frequent trips back to your room are important and central to progressing both the game and the plot. The puzzles are the link between the alternate world and Henry's world, and they are the crucial gameplay mechanic which keeps the game grounded.
This is, of course, because the Room itself is central to the game's and structure and plot. I said previously that the Room, in and of itself, is not what sets this game apart from its predecessors. This is true, but misleading. The Room is indeed the heart and soul of Silent Hill 4, and it plays a crucial part in delivering the fear that makes this game unique.
(The puzzles, by the way, are also pretty fun, if not occasionally frustrating. But this is par for the survival horror course.)
What is a Silent Hill game?
A miserable little pile of secrets?
Well, no. That is, perhaps more accurately, a Castlevania game. But I am getting distracted.
I said before that Silent Hill 4 is a conflicted game. Let's take a look at some other ways in which it is conflicted, torn between its lineage as Silent Hill and its desire to be its own game.
First, there is the issue of groundedness. The key to Silent Hill's brand of horror is the way it is grounded in reality. Well, not so much reality as plausibility. For instance, in the first game, you start in an entirely plausible town block, and then more and more implausible elements creep their way in (the enormous sinkholes, pterodactyl creatures, etc.) This culminates with transition to the alternate world, which shares the physical structure of the plausible one but with a dramatically altered appearance, and even absurder obstacles. Then, you fight a boss, and wake up in the normal world again. This ebb and flow characterized the pacing and rhythm of the Silent Hill franchise; it was the device which sustained the unnerving feeling of tension.
Silent Hill 4 is problematic (which is not to say unsuccessful) in this area because it is simultaneously the game most and least grounded in plausibility than any of the others.
It is the most grounded in plausibility because of the Room itself; it is lovingly detailed to be as plausible as possible; if you live or have ever lived in an apartment room, it is not difficult to identify it with your own**. The "blank slate" nature of Henry's character also allows you to better identify with him and his plight. This is really the only way it is grounded in plausibility, but, it is a powerful one; more powerful, in fact, than the simulated city streets, hospitals, and sewers of the previous games.
It is the least grounded in plausibility because, well, this is game is damned ridiculous. Even in the "plausible" space of the game, immediately you find that your door is inexplicably chained shut. Shortly after this, a goddamned hole breaks open in your bathroom wall; and it's not just a goddamned hole, it's a goddamned hole to an alternate reality. Then there are the alternate realities themselves. The previous games had smooth transitions between the real world and the otherworld. This game frequently jerks you between the two - nearly the full totality of the game's environments are located in alternate world. The game continually steps this up, adding more and more ridiculous touches -- the twin monsters, that fleshy snake-like thing in the subway, the nurses who make burping noises when hurt, the animated wheelchairs, the enormous head of Eileen you encounter in the hospital, and, finally, the spiritual infestations of your room***. This all results in a game whose dynamics are structured and paced dramatically differently from the previous Silent Hill games. It is full of sudden spikes and sharp angles, fractured shapes and figures. Where Silent Hill eases the player between the plausible and the unreal, The Room is uncharacteristically blunt and crude.
Along with this newfound focus on the surreal, the rhythm and flow of The Room is ultimately what forms its unique fear aesthetic. Where the first three games relied on fear of the unknown, this game's modus operandi is the fear of the unacceptable, the fear of the absurd, the fear of the surreal (as opposed to the unreal). The aforementioned ridiculous touches -- and indeed, the sheer ridiculousness of the game itself -- are what give birth to this fear. They all challenge the basic consistency and coherence of the game world. The giant Eileen head, for instance, is effective because it is both unexpected and inexplicable, and, on a fundamental level, just wrong. How could such a thing ever be? Never mind corpses hung up in a cage. Those seem downright normal compared to some of the curves this game throws at you. Again, the influence of Eternal Darkness is felt here, because that was ultimately the sort of fear that that game aimed for. And again, The Room is much more successful.
Now, Silent Hill 4 is conflicted in other ways. Let's talk about the enemies.
There are the monsters. I'm going to make a bold statement and say that the monsters were never really an important part of Silent Hill. This is not to say that they are insignificant -- we all know that, at least in the first two games, they held great symbolic meaning. But, in a way, that is kind of my point. The monsters aren't important to actual the game narrative (by which I mean the portion of plot that develops as you play). They are symbols, or better yet, they are decorations. They help explain the backstory. Their importance to the experience is optional. They are neutral obstacles for you to hack through to progress. Sometimes they are scary, but not always.
Contrast them with, say, the zombies in Resident Evil. Maybe what I am saying will make a bit more sense, then.
Silent Hill 4 is remarkably explicit about this. More than in any other game in the series, a good portion of the enemies are nearly literal decorations. The slugs, for instance. They just sort of sit there; sometimes they fall down. You don't even have to have a weapon equipped to kill them, you can just stomp on them. Similarly, the "mushroom" stalk creatures feel more like shrubbery in a Zelda game than a menacing creature. Even the more active creatures are generally pushovers, in more or less the same way the monsters were not difficult in Silent Hill 2. Their significance to the game's backstory is certainly there, but ultimately of secondary importance. In this regard, Silent Hill 4 is very faithful to the dogma of the series.
Except, of course, for the ghosts. They change things, a lot.
The ghosts, even if they were killable, would still be very difficult enemies. You take damage from simply standing next to them, they are very fast moving, and their actual physical attacks are devastating. They can phase through walls (with what may be my favorite visual effect in all of the Silent Hill games). Sure, Silent Hill 3 had a few difficult enemies tossed in, but the ghosts are incredibly unorthodox for a Silent Hill game.
As opposed to the regular enemies, the ghosts are significant to the actual game narrative. Taking a cue from Siren, they all have individual personalities, stories, and relationships to the game environments. Perhaps most important of all, the most dangerous and frequent ghosts are the ones of the characters whom you meet in each level that are murdered earlier in the game. They are successful as dramatic narrative devices, a brilliant (if borrowed) way to tell a story in-game. They serve the same function that the Room serves when you are away from it.
Tying it all together
So, to simplify things a bit, we can say that Silent Hill 4 consists of two parts: elements and influences from the Silent Hill idiom, and the aforementioned influences of Hitchcock, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Darkness. There are two dramatically different threads of fear running through this game.
And, amazingly, it works. It works really well. Instead of just not getting in the way of each other, they complement each other, in something like a harmony of fear. I've never felt anything like it.
Perhaps I simply buy into the conventions of the genre too easily. However, I can confidently say that Silent Hill 4: The Room is without a doubt the scariest game I have ever played.
I have left out a few things, so I guess I should mention them here. The game's first half is remarkably fun for a survival horror game. The game's second half, wherein you must renavigate all of the game's environments with a crippled partner, is unremarkably tedious for a survival horror game. Neither of these facts are very important to what this game is about. It is equally compelling in both halves. If it can be said to have a serious flaw, it is that the second half of the game is so relentless in terms of fear that progressing further becomes really stressful. It was psychologically difficult for me to finish, but the game was compelling enough for me to push on through regardless. This of course won't be true for everyone, but I should mention it.
But, those are just details. The verdict?
The game is successful in harnessing the fear that was the previous games' hallmark, while developing a new type of fear which is more subversive, more unexpected, and more disturbing. It's something of a one-two punch; and this is important, because for Silent Hill veterans, it's hard to find the same old tactics very scary anymore****. What this means is that even if you don't find that game itself scary, you will still likely be scared. If you are no longer affected by the usual Silent Hill scares, this game still delivers.
The net result is a game that is intense, compelling, and potentially scary while you play, and downright terrifying when you aren't. What's more, it is a complex and sophisticated game, if not in its actual gameplay, then in its structure and pacing.
GAME NUTRITION BREAKDOWN:
Concept: 10
Content: 8
Execution: 9
Rei Ayanami Chic: 10
Profoundly disturbing face outside the window: 10
Overall, I give it my highest rating, two stars:
**
--
Andrew Toups often feels as if he is trapped in his apartment room, too.
* It's only fair to mention that they do, if fleetingly, make a reference to Rear Window if you examine the photo of the apartment complex at the right time.
** Last night, as a matter of fact, I had a dream that dark, cracking veins were forming on the wall opposite my bed in my bedroom. Just like the ones that indicate the presence of an evil spirit in the Room. I should note that I never have dreams about videogames, the sole exception being a single, brief dream about Eternal Darkness. Which says something to me about what both of these games are trying to do.
*** These infestations, by the way, are the game's answer to the sanity effects in Eternal Darkness. Again, they have done Silicon Knights one better; the player has no "this is not really happening!" to help shake off the psychological impact. To contrast, at a relatively early part in the game, I was bopping about in the room, minding my own business, when suddenly I see a disembodied head casually float down outside one of the windows. Instead of my character reassuring me by saying "this is not really happening!", I instead found myself saying "did that really just happen?!?"
**** I imagine this is why they did away with the flashlight and the radio; the series has finally outgrown those conventions. When you think about what Silent Hill 4 is essentially about, they are almost entirely irrelevant. The same could be said about the less detailed sound and environment design, too. I mean, they would have been nice, I suppose. But not very much is lost when they are taken away.
SPECIAL BONUS:
Here is a song, recorded with my band, about the Silent Hill series. I give you: Dead, Not Sleeping. (Special thanks tothatbox for hosting!)
Warning: There are a few spoilers in this. If you don't want the game spoiled at all for you, here is more short review: This is the scariest game I've ever played. Maybe that's just me. Either way, go out and play it. Buy it, rent it, steal it, do whatever. It's worth it.
Silent Hill 4: The Room is a conflicted game. It wants desperately to be a Silent Hill game. All the surface elements are there; the game goes out of its way to reference events, names, and locales from the rest of the series. All the typical visual motifs (corpses hung up in grated metal boxes, zombie dogs, decaying urban surroundings, etc.) are insistently repeated. Yet it draws much of its atmosphere, structure, and play mechanics from drastically different sources than the rest of the franchise. At its heart, it is questionable whether or not Silent Hill 4: The Room is really a Silent Hill game at all; for the first time, we are forced to ask "What is a Silent Hill game?" The frequent visual, aural, and textual references to the rest of the series at times feel like red herrings to throw us off the scent, to distract us from the fear that is at the game's core, so that it may strike us even more off guard.
Now, when I say that Silent Hill 4 may not actually be a Silent Hill game, I'm not referring to its new control scheme and combat system, or its inventory management system, or any of the mechanical elements. Even the Room itself, though central to the game's structure and drama, is ultimately not what makes this game different. These, in a way, are red herrings in and of themselves. What sets the game apart is the type of fear it delivers.
The Hitchcock Line and The Malkovich Line
Prior to this game, the Silent Hill series has been remarkably self-contained, even incestuous in terms of its fear aesthetic. The Silent Hill idiom was clearly set by the first game, and the subsequent games followed it religiously. Understanding this fear aesthetic is as simple as looking at the street names in part one: Midwich, Koontz, Crichton, etc. The fear in Silent Hill has always ultimately been the fear of the unknown, the fear of what is beyond the borders of reality. This fear is colored differently in the different games -- part two focuses more on melancholy and hopelessness, part three on dread and anger. In its Subway stage, Silent Hill 4 itself references some perennial series influences, Stephen King and David Lynch, but these references are more appropriate for the rest of the series than this game. Again, I smell a red herring.
If they wanted to be more accurate, they should have called them the Hitchcock line and the Malkovich line.
Now, the obvious influence of Being John Malkovich isn't hard to see. The portals are the most clear connection, but the sheer absurdity of premise, and the similarly bizarre internal logic of that movie reach their way into The Room as well. Being John Malkovich is a surreal movie. And Silent Hill 4 is a surreal game. It is surreal in ways the previous games never were. You would never think about comparing Silent Hill 2, for instance, to Being John Malkovich. But, here we are.
What about Hitchcock? Think about it. Strip away, if you will, the "otherworldly" aspects of the plot. Dispose of the alternate realities, the strange noises, the awful monsters, the inexplicable physics of the game. Silent Hill 4's plot is that of a suspense-thriller, a murder mystery. The most obvious Hitchcock connection, of course, is Rear Window*-- this game expertly captures both the voyeurism and paranoia of that film.
Voyeurism and paranoia were never big movements in the Silent Hill songbook, until this game. This is an important way in which this game differs from the rest of the series, if not the essential way.
In any case, the heart of Silent Hill 4 is neither in its plot or its aesthetics. I don't want to imply that the game itself is at heart like a Hitchcock film; its plot perhaps is. Nor do I want to imply that it is essentially the same as Being John Malkovich; its aesthetics are, at times. But the usual Silent Hill influences are still there. What's important is that some new ingredients have been added to the stew.
Other Lines of Influence
Silent Hill 4 is also the first game since part one to actively seek influence from actual video games. I mean this as a good thing; while the rest of the survival horror world has evolved, Silent Hill has been content to fully explore its unique terror aesthetic, and, as part three's overall lack of dramatic punch suggests, the series has stagnated as a result. I believe that someone close to the top of the chain of command on the development team was playing a lot of Eternal Darkness, and decided that they could do that game one better. And, they did.
I say this because the structure of Silent Hill 4 is fundamentally similar to the structure of Eternal Darkness. Both games are based around a hub; in Eternal Darkness, the hub is the Roivas mansion, and individual episodes take place as vignettes that Alex reads in the Tome of Eternal Darkness. It starts to really get frightening when she gets to the story of her colonial era ancestor, Maximillian Roivas, which takes place in the mansion. The first truly dramatic and horrific moment of the game, sanity effects notwithstanding, starts when you discover the otherworldly city beneath the mansion. This takes place within the frame of Maximillian's story, but when you finish, you are back in the same setting. And you think to yourself: "is that horrible thing still under the mansion now?" The hub, traditionally, is a "safe space" for your avatar; the castle in Mario 64, for instance. Eternal Darkness gets some of its fear-factor from slowly invading that space, making it something threatening in and of itself, until its safeness is completely eroded.
Silent Hill 4 does the same thing with its titular Room, only it does it better, more intensely, more elegantly, and most important of all, more terrifyingly.
I will address a mechanical issue of the game now, because it illustrates my point: the puzzles. The puzzles in this game are simplified and dumbed down significantly from previous installments. You won't find yourself doing complex word or math problems, or trying interpret bad poetry scribbled in blood on the wall, or throwing a box of orange juice down a trash chute. It's almost enough to say that the puzzles don't exist, except that they serve a crucial function to the game's dramatic power.
Nearly every puzzle in the game demands that you return to your apartment room to solve it. They are generally cleverly and organically integrated in ways that make sense, and it doesn't hurt that most of the game's environments are spatially related to your room in one way or another. This is, ultimately, the reason for not only the decreased emphasis on puzzles, but the increased focus on combat (the aforementioned visible life meter and altered combat scheme), the limited inventory, the self-drawing maps, and nearly every other significant alteration to the series' mechanics. Silent Hill 4 is structured so that frequent trips back to your room are important and central to progressing both the game and the plot. The puzzles are the link between the alternate world and Henry's world, and they are the crucial gameplay mechanic which keeps the game grounded.
This is, of course, because the Room itself is central to the game's and structure and plot. I said previously that the Room, in and of itself, is not what sets this game apart from its predecessors. This is true, but misleading. The Room is indeed the heart and soul of Silent Hill 4, and it plays a crucial part in delivering the fear that makes this game unique.
(The puzzles, by the way, are also pretty fun, if not occasionally frustrating. But this is par for the survival horror course.)
What is a Silent Hill game?
A miserable little pile of secrets?
Well, no. That is, perhaps more accurately, a Castlevania game. But I am getting distracted.
I said before that Silent Hill 4 is a conflicted game. Let's take a look at some other ways in which it is conflicted, torn between its lineage as Silent Hill and its desire to be its own game.
First, there is the issue of groundedness. The key to Silent Hill's brand of horror is the way it is grounded in reality. Well, not so much reality as plausibility. For instance, in the first game, you start in an entirely plausible town block, and then more and more implausible elements creep their way in (the enormous sinkholes, pterodactyl creatures, etc.) This culminates with transition to the alternate world, which shares the physical structure of the plausible one but with a dramatically altered appearance, and even absurder obstacles. Then, you fight a boss, and wake up in the normal world again. This ebb and flow characterized the pacing and rhythm of the Silent Hill franchise; it was the device which sustained the unnerving feeling of tension.
Silent Hill 4 is problematic (which is not to say unsuccessful) in this area because it is simultaneously the game most and least grounded in plausibility than any of the others.
It is the most grounded in plausibility because of the Room itself; it is lovingly detailed to be as plausible as possible; if you live or have ever lived in an apartment room, it is not difficult to identify it with your own**. The "blank slate" nature of Henry's character also allows you to better identify with him and his plight. This is really the only way it is grounded in plausibility, but, it is a powerful one; more powerful, in fact, than the simulated city streets, hospitals, and sewers of the previous games.
It is the least grounded in plausibility because, well, this is game is damned ridiculous. Even in the "plausible" space of the game, immediately you find that your door is inexplicably chained shut. Shortly after this, a goddamned hole breaks open in your bathroom wall; and it's not just a goddamned hole, it's a goddamned hole to an alternate reality. Then there are the alternate realities themselves. The previous games had smooth transitions between the real world and the otherworld. This game frequently jerks you between the two - nearly the full totality of the game's environments are located in alternate world. The game continually steps this up, adding more and more ridiculous touches -- the twin monsters, that fleshy snake-like thing in the subway, the nurses who make burping noises when hurt, the animated wheelchairs, the enormous head of Eileen you encounter in the hospital, and, finally, the spiritual infestations of your room***. This all results in a game whose dynamics are structured and paced dramatically differently from the previous Silent Hill games. It is full of sudden spikes and sharp angles, fractured shapes and figures. Where Silent Hill eases the player between the plausible and the unreal, The Room is uncharacteristically blunt and crude.
Along with this newfound focus on the surreal, the rhythm and flow of The Room is ultimately what forms its unique fear aesthetic. Where the first three games relied on fear of the unknown, this game's modus operandi is the fear of the unacceptable, the fear of the absurd, the fear of the surreal (as opposed to the unreal). The aforementioned ridiculous touches -- and indeed, the sheer ridiculousness of the game itself -- are what give birth to this fear. They all challenge the basic consistency and coherence of the game world. The giant Eileen head, for instance, is effective because it is both unexpected and inexplicable, and, on a fundamental level, just wrong. How could such a thing ever be? Never mind corpses hung up in a cage. Those seem downright normal compared to some of the curves this game throws at you. Again, the influence of Eternal Darkness is felt here, because that was ultimately the sort of fear that that game aimed for. And again, The Room is much more successful.
Now, Silent Hill 4 is conflicted in other ways. Let's talk about the enemies.
There are the monsters. I'm going to make a bold statement and say that the monsters were never really an important part of Silent Hill. This is not to say that they are insignificant -- we all know that, at least in the first two games, they held great symbolic meaning. But, in a way, that is kind of my point. The monsters aren't important to actual the game narrative (by which I mean the portion of plot that develops as you play). They are symbols, or better yet, they are decorations. They help explain the backstory. Their importance to the experience is optional. They are neutral obstacles for you to hack through to progress. Sometimes they are scary, but not always.
Contrast them with, say, the zombies in Resident Evil. Maybe what I am saying will make a bit more sense, then.
Silent Hill 4 is remarkably explicit about this. More than in any other game in the series, a good portion of the enemies are nearly literal decorations. The slugs, for instance. They just sort of sit there; sometimes they fall down. You don't even have to have a weapon equipped to kill them, you can just stomp on them. Similarly, the "mushroom" stalk creatures feel more like shrubbery in a Zelda game than a menacing creature. Even the more active creatures are generally pushovers, in more or less the same way the monsters were not difficult in Silent Hill 2. Their significance to the game's backstory is certainly there, but ultimately of secondary importance. In this regard, Silent Hill 4 is very faithful to the dogma of the series.
Except, of course, for the ghosts. They change things, a lot.
The ghosts, even if they were killable, would still be very difficult enemies. You take damage from simply standing next to them, they are very fast moving, and their actual physical attacks are devastating. They can phase through walls (with what may be my favorite visual effect in all of the Silent Hill games). Sure, Silent Hill 3 had a few difficult enemies tossed in, but the ghosts are incredibly unorthodox for a Silent Hill game.
As opposed to the regular enemies, the ghosts are significant to the actual game narrative. Taking a cue from Siren, they all have individual personalities, stories, and relationships to the game environments. Perhaps most important of all, the most dangerous and frequent ghosts are the ones of the characters whom you meet in each level that are murdered earlier in the game. They are successful as dramatic narrative devices, a brilliant (if borrowed) way to tell a story in-game. They serve the same function that the Room serves when you are away from it.
Tying it all together
So, to simplify things a bit, we can say that Silent Hill 4 consists of two parts: elements and influences from the Silent Hill idiom, and the aforementioned influences of Hitchcock, Being John Malkovich, and Eternal Darkness. There are two dramatically different threads of fear running through this game.
And, amazingly, it works. It works really well. Instead of just not getting in the way of each other, they complement each other, in something like a harmony of fear. I've never felt anything like it.
Perhaps I simply buy into the conventions of the genre too easily. However, I can confidently say that Silent Hill 4: The Room is without a doubt the scariest game I have ever played.
I have left out a few things, so I guess I should mention them here. The game's first half is remarkably fun for a survival horror game. The game's second half, wherein you must renavigate all of the game's environments with a crippled partner, is unremarkably tedious for a survival horror game. Neither of these facts are very important to what this game is about. It is equally compelling in both halves. If it can be said to have a serious flaw, it is that the second half of the game is so relentless in terms of fear that progressing further becomes really stressful. It was psychologically difficult for me to finish, but the game was compelling enough for me to push on through regardless. This of course won't be true for everyone, but I should mention it.
But, those are just details. The verdict?
The game is successful in harnessing the fear that was the previous games' hallmark, while developing a new type of fear which is more subversive, more unexpected, and more disturbing. It's something of a one-two punch; and this is important, because for Silent Hill veterans, it's hard to find the same old tactics very scary anymore****. What this means is that even if you don't find that game itself scary, you will still likely be scared. If you are no longer affected by the usual Silent Hill scares, this game still delivers.
The net result is a game that is intense, compelling, and potentially scary while you play, and downright terrifying when you aren't. What's more, it is a complex and sophisticated game, if not in its actual gameplay, then in its structure and pacing.
GAME NUTRITION BREAKDOWN:
Concept: 10
Content: 8
Execution: 9
Rei Ayanami Chic: 10
Profoundly disturbing face outside the window: 10
Overall, I give it my highest rating, two stars:
**
--
Andrew Toups often feels as if he is trapped in his apartment room, too.
* It's only fair to mention that they do, if fleetingly, make a reference to Rear Window if you examine the photo of the apartment complex at the right time.
** Last night, as a matter of fact, I had a dream that dark, cracking veins were forming on the wall opposite my bed in my bedroom. Just like the ones that indicate the presence of an evil spirit in the Room. I should note that I never have dreams about videogames, the sole exception being a single, brief dream about Eternal Darkness. Which says something to me about what both of these games are trying to do.
*** These infestations, by the way, are the game's answer to the sanity effects in Eternal Darkness. Again, they have done Silicon Knights one better; the player has no "this is not really happening!" to help shake off the psychological impact. To contrast, at a relatively early part in the game, I was bopping about in the room, minding my own business, when suddenly I see a disembodied head casually float down outside one of the windows. Instead of my character reassuring me by saying "this is not really happening!", I instead found myself saying "did that really just happen?!?"
**** I imagine this is why they did away with the flashlight and the radio; the series has finally outgrown those conventions. When you think about what Silent Hill 4 is essentially about, they are almost entirely irrelevant. The same could be said about the less detailed sound and environment design, too. I mean, they would have been nice, I suppose. But not very much is lost when they are taken away.
SPECIAL BONUS:
Here is a song, recorded with my band, about the Silent Hill series. I give you: Dead, Not Sleeping. (Special thanks to
thatbox for hosting!)
