The final SIlent Hill game made by Team Silent and wow.. what a really weird note to disband on. It does away with previous horror formulas and creates it's own ways of scaring you. I love how the game tells it's story, rather than outright tell you, you have to make an effort to collect all the notes within the game that explain all of the backstory and what's going on around you, it's genuinely such a fast and hard way to hook someone which makes it my favorite story in the series right behind 2. It's seriously that great. I love how immersive the apartment and locations are (especially the apartment world). I do have issues with this game though, the combat is braindead easy, ruining the horror of enemies almost immediately, it's a lot more.. "action" orientated, don't get me wrong though. You're not crashing a car into a gas station with giant explosions while gunning down hordes of enemies (there's only two types of guns in the entire game and they're both handguns). I mean there's just a lot more enemies to deal with. Henry's voice actor is just.. not good. I was looking forward to him the most in this game and well.. I was left sorely disappointed with his laughably questionable deliveries and monotone reactions. Also the limited inventory just absolutely breaks the pace of the game when you have to go back into the your apartment, dump everything into a chest, and go back to the otherworld. It does away with a lot of the horror elements created by previous games but to make up for it, it creates new horror elements that make this game still one of the best ever. In a world where every Silent Hill game after this redoes the concept of Silent Hill 2 over and over again but shittier and shittier, a game like this is so over hated. More Silent Hill games should do more unique situations and stories like this in the future and I'm hoping Silent Hill f does exactly that instead of just another Dollar General Silent Hill 2. This game is great, horrifying, and the most unique horror game to this day.

this game is the most upsetting thing i’ve ever touched in my life and nothing else even comes close to the amount of stress and discomfort this shit put me through.

one might be hesitant to start this one as the first half is incredibly banal, yes it possesses an interesting and unique aesthetic and concept but in execution it’s boring, the combat and movement is jank, the puzzles are weird, and the overall vibe is not silent hill in the slightest. in fact, it’s too easy. far too easy. the apartment serves as a saferoom that is accessible almost everywhere and heals you fully, making the game a cakewalk and allowing you to hoard healing items since you’ll never end up using them.

that all changes when you reach the second half of the game, and your “safe space” turns hostile, no longer healing you and randomly spawning disturbing anomalies throughout that you must track down and eliminate using limited resources that aren’t always easy to find. it’s not like you can avoid this place either since you still have to go back to save, swap out items, and collect lore dumps.

it doesn’t help that you must also watch over your neighbor and escort her throughout the entire second half of the game, doing everything in your power to prevent her from taking too much damage otherwise you receive the bad ending. that alone is enough to make this one of the hardest survival horrors of all time, but also the most tense and stressful.

this game is also just plain terrifying. with a legitimately scary antagonist and some of the creepiest and most disturbing set pieces and events in the franchise. the atmosphere and scares in conjunction with the gameplay makes for the most gut-wrenching, stressful, frustrating, sweat inducing gaming experience of all time.

The emptiest game I've ever played, I don't mean this figuratively but literally. The majority of this game consists of walking from one empty hallway to another in order to simply go somewhere or solve insultingly simple puzzles, there is nothing to explore, nothing to fight, and the few times it bothers to shove enemies in its empty halls are nothing to speak of either because they're either the exact same goddamn dog enemies or the even rarer ghost enemies. I have never played a game this hopelessly pointless and boring. To call something like it creative is an insult to creativity itself because this is nothing more than an undercooked Silent Hill title.

The survival horror deep dive continues. I always heard silent hill 4 was one of the most divisive titles in the series and so I thought it would be appropriate to dive in blind and figure out first hand how bizarre The Room really gets.
For what it’s worth, I really enjoyed the title but it warrants it’s place as one of the “weirder” silent hill installments, which is an achievement in itself for a series so deeply routed in elusive and symbolical horror.

The characters here are a bit more lacking compared to the previous titles, and I thought some of the subtlety that made the stories of the first games so brilliant is kind of lost here, but it still does something quite unique with it’s premise and I feel like that deserves some praise on it’s own.

The first person segments are a bit clunky, but they still feel a bit ahead of their time with how they elevate the story. The creepy factor in silent hill 4 is really something else and the difference can be felt straight from the intro screen.
Even in it’s premise Silent Hill 4 seems to want to do something completely different than it’s predecessors, from the mysterious plot to the drastic location change.

As with the subtlety, the creative flair seems to be a bit divided as well. There’s still a lot of that classic silent hill imagery and foggy horror, but there’s a lot of disconnect with huge, open and sometimes obnoxious areas. This detracts from the claustrophobic factor that made the games stand out in their horror.

The game also loses a significant amount of steam in the half way point, and could have benefited from streamlining the story and characters. Despite how much I really liked the character of Eileen, glorified escort missions rarely work for me, unless they’re handled smartly. In Silent Hill 4, it works some times, but most of your playthrough you’ll be rambling back through floors realizing you lost her 3 rooms back, or circling around enemies trying to get the AI to follow you so you can go in a room.
Change is a welcome factor, and this doesn’t ruin the experience at all, this mechanic just runs it’s course very quickly and the fact you have to run through every area a second time can make it frustrating.

Nonetheless, Silent Hill 4 complements these divisive changes with a familiar gritty tone, a genuinely scary villain and a sense of dread and horror that follows you even into the save rooms and the titular apartment you’ll spend a good amount of time walking around.
Some justifiable flaws here and there, but still a super fun survival horror experience.

This is a very strange game that somewhat confounds me. On one hand, SH4 very much fits in comfortably with the original trilogy as a familiar Silent Hill experience in atmosphere and writing, but on the other hand the developers seemed to forget to include "gameplay" and "level design" as a part of their list of priorities when making this game.

While I'm certainly not playing a Silent Hill game for excellent combat mechanics, SH4 is such a massive step down from the previous two games that in terms of gameplay that's it felt like something went drastically wrong. The PC port could certainly be part of the issue, as the controller optimization felt like a mess, making an already frustrating game to control all the more worse, but the core gameplay I am certain would have been unpleasant regardless of where it was experienced. The game's enemies are a joke and only ever a frustrating obstacle. There is absolutely nothing fun about dealing with any of the combat in the game and it is pretty much always better to just run past something, harkening back to Silent Hill 1.

I could get into minute specifics about a number of awkward and terribly implemented gameplay mechanics if I wanted but it's better to summarize it I think, and say that it is almost unbelievable how much worse everything feels to do in this game compared to SH2 and SH3.

Not only is this game a chore to control but the level design is abysmal; there are a number of 'rooms' you walk through in the various worlds through the hole outside Room 302 that are void of almost anything. A good portion of this game feels like just running through empty nothingness, which could be intentional and is even somewhat appreciated at times considering how generally obnoxious it is to really have to do anything in this game, but if anything it just felt... strange to me, as if there was something missing. This only becomes more apparent when you are forced to run through these worlds a second time, which is when I was really ready for the game to be over.

Despite all this, SH4 still managed to keep me somewhat engaged, as the storytelling of this game is just as strong, really, as it is in the previous entries of the series. The unsettling, disturbing atmosphere, deeply unnerving sound design and well-paced placements of cutscenes kept me wanting to keep playing, and this part of the game is entirely up to par with what I have come to expect from this franchise.

I'm not here to analyze the game's story or anything, I did quite like it and liked how it was told through notes and such. The entire concept of "The Room" was very interesting and implemented pretty well, especially near the end of the game, when everything comes together. While I think this is the worst of the original 4 Silent Hills, this game absolutely has merit and I would certainly recommend that anyone who has played the others try this out as well.

6.5/10

A lot of people bash SH4 for being different and while I understand it, I feel like it's unjustified.

The first half of Silent Hill 4 is amazing. Everything I could ask for. The Room being in first person allows you to see every little detail about Henry. He's not a great protagonist, but it's really cool that you're able to play an exploration game for a bit. The puzzles both in the apartment and the otherworld are very clever and fun! The level design is well thought and the story will easily get you hooked.

The second half is where most of the problems start, because they spike the difficulty in enemies, damage, resources, reducing safe spots and the worst of all; the hook is dead. You now know what the numbers meant, the rest of the game is trying to dissect and analyze a character which is something that I personally feel should be done after you're done with the game. Honestly, I feel like the devs also knew this? which is why they make you.. pretty much replay the entire game with a few differences.
The second half of SH2 feels more like a New Game+ and I don't think I really enjoy it, specially because now you get a follower with you that can and WILL take damage. Something that is really questionable given all these spike difficulties, where's the need to another one?

I feel like it's a really good game that was rushed by Konami because.. well, Konami. It makes me really sad that most people dislike it to the point they say Silent Hill is only a trilogy, as if The Room was as different and bad received as the other games, which is simply untrue.