This review contains spoilers
SILENT HILL 4: THE ROOM IS A NIGHTMARE
I had heard people often say that Silent Hill 4 was the black sheep of the family. The family being the first four Silent Hill games made by Team Silent. I went into this game really hopeful, thinking that it would be a sort of..."Flawed Masterpiece". That people had just been too hard on the game and found too many flaws by directly comparing it to the iconic first three games.
Well, now that I have played as much as I could bear, I would say that I don't think people are hard ENOUGH on it.
As far as I had played, there were exactly four things I enjoyed about this game: the intro video, the apartment sections, the story (it was fairly intriguing), and the twin victims enemy (probably the most terrifying designs by Masahiro Ito).
Everything else was less than mediocre. The level design fluctuated between bland and flat to waaaay too overly complicated and frustrating. The water prison was a fucking nightmare to navigate and re-navigate. And then re-navigate two more times.
The puzzles were soul fracturing. I think exactly all of them made my eyes glaze over like I was in the middle of a lecture on advanced ASTROLOGY. Like I was required to look up my time of birth and how much the stars had shifted since ancient Greece to figure out my moon, sun, Mars, etc. Just to open a god damn lock on a fence. I shit you not, there's a section where you have to enter numbers on a keypad. But Henry (the protagonist) cannot input these numbers because "it's too dark and he can't see them very well".
And compared to James Sunderland and Heather Mason, protagonist Henry Townsend felt like a bowl of bread with some ketchup. Silent Hill has long been iconic for it's Lynch-esque stilted dialogue that invokes the surreal nightmare world in which the characters inhabit. Henry Townsend takes it too far to the point where honestly it's just garbage line delivery. I do not know who is "mostly responsible" for this, but the absence of any human being-like inflection or sentence utterances aside from "What the hell?" made me actively dislike him. Plus he looks like Zach Braff and it's really off-putting for a Silent Hill game.
Silent Hill 4: The Room had some really interesting conceptual stuff going on with the Rear Window apartment sequences. But everything else feels like some fan-made game that is in its EARLY STAGES.
I had heard people often say that Silent Hill 4 was the black sheep of the family. The family being the first four Silent Hill games made by Team Silent. I went into this game really hopeful, thinking that it would be a sort of..."Flawed Masterpiece". That people had just been too hard on the game and found too many flaws by directly comparing it to the iconic first three games.
Well, now that I have played as much as I could bear, I would say that I don't think people are hard ENOUGH on it.
As far as I had played, there were exactly four things I enjoyed about this game: the intro video, the apartment sections, the story (it was fairly intriguing), and the twin victims enemy (probably the most terrifying designs by Masahiro Ito).
Everything else was less than mediocre. The level design fluctuated between bland and flat to waaaay too overly complicated and frustrating. The water prison was a fucking nightmare to navigate and re-navigate. And then re-navigate two more times.
The puzzles were soul fracturing. I think exactly all of them made my eyes glaze over like I was in the middle of a lecture on advanced ASTROLOGY. Like I was required to look up my time of birth and how much the stars had shifted since ancient Greece to figure out my moon, sun, Mars, etc. Just to open a god damn lock on a fence. I shit you not, there's a section where you have to enter numbers on a keypad. But Henry (the protagonist) cannot input these numbers because "it's too dark and he can't see them very well".
And compared to James Sunderland and Heather Mason, protagonist Henry Townsend felt like a bowl of bread with some ketchup. Silent Hill has long been iconic for it's Lynch-esque stilted dialogue that invokes the surreal nightmare world in which the characters inhabit. Henry Townsend takes it too far to the point where honestly it's just garbage line delivery. I do not know who is "mostly responsible" for this, but the absence of any human being-like inflection or sentence utterances aside from "What the hell?" made me actively dislike him. Plus he looks like Zach Braff and it's really off-putting for a Silent Hill game.
Silent Hill 4: The Room had some really interesting conceptual stuff going on with the Rear Window apartment sequences. But everything else feels like some fan-made game that is in its EARLY STAGES.