i don't want to get too reliant on ignesque "this is the dark souls of rimjobbing your mother"-type comparisons, but i can't think of a more eloquent way to sum up the magic of wrestling empire than "wwf no mercy by way of postal 2".

my wrestler for most of my playthrough was sally, a transgender woman formerly known as "bathroom bill". she was embroiled in a violent irl feud with another wrestler who was Almost Definitely A Butch Lesbian. problem was that sally had found herself in some sort of sickly stockholm unrequited love. how could you not when your job is to wrestle a hot chick? in a feat of dramatic (read: psychotic) frustration, she visited her rival in the hospital and beat her to death. sally then retired and spent the rest of her days chilling in the hotel across the street from the arena because there are no cops in this game.

i'm so glad i found this game. imo you haven't lived until you've crucifix dropped someone into a set of metal stairs.

100% convinced henry had a lobotomy shortly before the events of the game because there is no other explanation for the complete nothing going on inside of that man's brain.

you can see team silent pushing up against the boundaries of silent hill in the fourth entry even more than they already were in the third. there are enough unnecessary connections to the previous games and jarring aesthetic choices (why the burping enemies? who the hell...) that if you told me this was the first outsourced silent hill title, i might have believed you. as it stands, silent hill 4 has about 1 interesting character, a half-competent soundtrack, 2 scary monsters, 2 cool areas and 2 good cutscenes spread across the longest runtime of the original tetralogy. about half of that runtime is spent battling jank or tedium. in other words, the polish i would expect from the series is barely present. "well, then isn't this game a total failure?", you ask doltishly. while the answer is probably yes, i pushed through the slow start and found that it's not all bad.

the apartment gimmick (ie. the part people praise about this game) got tedious very quickly, but the massive escort mission (ie. the part people hate about this game) was the most fun combat in a team silent title. it's got this resident-evilian "oh jeez oh no how long has it been since i saved" tension to it. post-y2k survival horror games tend to be too easy and i found it refreshing to have to play smart to keep your girlie safe. she's pretty and i like her. would smooch, including her giant, terrifying evil head. iykyk. and although i shittalked the aesthetics twice already, that giant head is an example of some of the stuff 4 gets right in that department. the unrelenting barrage of torture stimuli that henry goes through (stone-faced, of course) is pure infernality in its best moments. hell, there's such strong atmosphere that the feeling carries into its worst† ! the water prison/child torture dungeon and the two-headed freaks that roam it are almost fucked enough for me to blanket recommend this game.

however, the story that should be there to motivate you to push through the archaic puzzles and more difficult combat zones is where this game falls apart. to put it simply, it's deeply fucking stupid. buildups, payoffs, drama, mystery and intrigue, it's ALL absent and what we instead get is the world's most uninteresting man being uninteresting as he goes on his unenthused way through a series of hellholes, learning about a mentally deficient serial killer along the way. you can really feel the weak hinges of the plot threatening to break - those hinges being a throwaway newspaper clipping from silent hill 2. if it weren't for eileen, i would have no investment in the story (or gameplay!).

i wonder if this game could have been better if it had a sequel, more dev time, or its own franchise. as it is... it's undercooked. just play fatal frame iii instead.

†: its "worst" obviously being the monkey-infested building world or the hospital where you get chased around by scooby-doo-tier monsters.