not the worst thing i've played and would just be an outright mediocre game if it weren't agonizing to sit through, i really had to look up a guide to get to the end fast enough because of just how boring this game gets. the second half of this game is pure torture.

it has a few neat ideas, i really liked the design of the water prison with it's cool hope jumping puzzle and the introduction of the twin victims was very scary, i also thought the otherworld apartment was well designed visuals wise and the soundtrack was great as usual and i really think the room itself was the most fleshed out part of the game, because everything else is mostly incompetent and not very fun.

the areas are pretty linear, you go from the start to the finish and the game offers little in terms of rewarding exploration, which sounds weird because it does what the previous games did in theory, you explore a little and the game gives you small rewards like ammo and heals and other little goodies, which this game does but mind you this game's areas are twice as big. rooms are less condensed and compact like they were in previous silent hills and running back to get something you missed is the fucking worst because of how massive these rooms are. not to mention some of these rooms are downright pointless, a few only containing one item or a single enemy, like in the green zone where a lot of rooms become dead air when you kill all the dogs and bats or whatever those things are. sometimes rooms will just have nothing in them, like in the apartment level where you get to unlock every room, which made me happy at first because i love exploring but quickly became a chore because theres a ton of rooms and so many of them either have 1 item regardless of the rooms themselves being so big, or they have actually nothing. just nothing. there are a lot of nothing rooms in this game. pointless rooms. it's frustrating. makes exploration feel like a chore, which it becomes in the second half, dont you worry.

the combat fucking sucks. its not horrible but it sucks. it really does suck. really. Akira Yamaoka pushed for more action based gameplay in this title, and though he's a genius musically he's a complete novice in game design because all they did to change the combat was add a dodge button. thats it. they actually REMOVED a feature, which was, in silent hill 3 enemies required multiple stomps to fully finish and stomps didnt give iframes which added tension to the group encounters, but here enemies take one stomp like in sh 1 & 2 and give iframes again and the animation is longer than the whole trilogy. the dodge is mostly useless. you can dodge to the right, left and back but not only is it clunky as fuck and unsatisfying but you don't have to use it ever because the enemy ai is so bad. dogs can be annoying yeah but if you walk around them they cant hit you, and they always attack in the same amount of time meaning if you just run up to them they wont attack any sooner. there just is no point to this mechanic. there isn't a reward for doing it either, like theres no counter hit you can do for perfectly timing a dodge. it's useless.

didn't care about the story in this game. at all. tried to but it failed to really grasp me. they keep shoehorning in silent hill into the story when it really does not need to be a part of this at all, the mention of "frank sunderland" and the thing where henry talks about james and mary really annoyed the hell out of me because it feels like a "guys remember james sunderland? remember silent hill 2?" like yeah i do i wish i was playing that now instead of this shit, so yeah wasn't too big into the story like in silent hill 1 but unlike silent hill 1 this game loves to force story down your throat, the amount of text in this game is unreal. some rewards for exploration is just text. diaries, journals, scraps of paper on the ground. newspapers, toilet paper, idk any type of paper or writeable surface was written on and you could read it, sometimes you just have to like with the red notes which you have to read to progress because some of them have puzzle info in them but i got so frustrated and just kept skipping them because 95% of them are just dumb lore i dont care about with the 5% being actually important to gameplay, and thus i almost missed a few with puzzle pieces that were nessicary for competition, which WOULD be fine if the "scrapbook" system was good, but no, you have to know the NAME OF THE DOCUMENT YOU JUST READ otherwise you won't find what you're looking for. because there isn't a search by recently found button. why. speaking of lore about silent hill, i cant care about the cult plot. it's way too stupid for me. i like the emotional and psychological elements that were all over 2 and seeped into parts of 3. but this doesn't have it at all and just goes for cult horror, which again i think is stupid and don't find scary.

oh did i mention this game isnt scary? the only time i was even slightly frightened was when the twin victims first appeared and when their uncloaked kins started appearing in the last level. no other enemy or environment or even scared me. at all. which is in part due to the sound design and enemies. ohhh the sound design, no way akira yamaoka worked on this for this game because i strongly doubt he allowed the use of stock sounds for this game. you heard it here folks, this OFFICIALLY RELEASED SILENT HILL GAME MADE UNDER TEAM SILENT USES STOCK SOUNDS FOR ENEMIES IN THIS GAME. the dogs make cheetah sounds when you stomp on them, the bat things use fly noises when flying around but make bat screeches when hit, the monkeys make chimp noises but then make cheetah sounds when killed? the twin victims make some groaning sound that sounds like the sound pyramid thing made during that first pryamid thing scene, and the big tall women with sticks just make burping sounds when hit. not kidding. i laughed uncontrollably when i hit an enemy in a SILENT HILL GAME and they made a burping sound. thanks konami. most enemies are just kinda whatever with designs that scream "Masahiro Ito did not work on this game." dogs are green with long toungues, bat things are too small so the design doesnt matter, ghosts are random models floating, vines are.... vines, slugs are slugs, big tall women are big tall women with davey jones from pirates of the carribean skin and thats kind of about it, the wall men are the only thing that remotely look like a silent hill enemy and even then they feel like some knock off you get at the thrift store for super cheap. oh and how could i forget the wheelchairs. scariest silent hill enemy yet.

i guess since the wheelchairs are in the hospital now would be a good time to talk about eileen and the second half of the game. after you get eileen from the hospital you have to play the whole game up to that point again, doing a new puzzle in each area, said puzzles are super easy most of them tell you how to do them to you face except the last one which i had to look up because the game gives you no hint that you're supposed to interact with the hanging guys, i thought it was just a prop but it isn't i guess. henry's head doesnt even look at it. how would i know to do that? eileen makes exploration unbearable, and she actually locked me out of an ending because i left her out with walter in the water prison level because i needed to explore on my own and keep her in an area where i would remember and come back and she would be there, but he hit her so much she got all these bruises on her and i think it fucked up my ending but i really didnt care anyway because her characters pretty bland (impression i got from not really caring) and i hated her while playing, she's soooooooo slow and doesn't teleport to you when you enter a new room like maria did, nor does she get out of the way when blocking you like maria also did, only sometimes but it still gets annoying. having to babysit her is the fucking worst and i have no idea why i could just tell her to wait while i did stuff on my own, i guess maybe if konami didnt rush this out the devs could've played re4 and learned from the leon and ashley system and incorporated it here. you can give her weapons but it takes up inventory space (for some reason) and she barely even uses them later in the game for some reason, in the last two areas she doesn't even use them at all.

oh yeah inventory space. sh4 tried the resident evil thing of item management in a survival horror setting but it's so poorly implemented here, not only can you not discard unwanted items to make room for new ones without having to use them or put them in the box, but you cant combine items which takes away a level of complexity from the system. this was the bane of exploration, having to backtrack to a box is annoying in resident evil but at least you just have to open a door and boom it's there, in sh4 you have to get to a hole, sit through a cutscene, then a loading screen, (why couldn't the loading screen use the cutscene animation instead) then sit through another cutscene and then walk out of your bedroom, walk down the hall and take a right and then you're at the box. and to get back to the area you were just in you need to go into another room and answer a yes or no prompt and then sit through another cutscene, you can skip these but even then it adds a little bit of monotony when there should be none.

i'm tired of ranting about this game, goes to show how shit of a company konami is, first they strip silent hill 3 of being a potentially amazing game and a better sequel to silent hill 2, but now they rush a game that could've been pretty good and resulted in it being a game that's frustrating to play due to it being so rushed, with barely any trace of it being a silent hill game.

felt like it dragged a lot towards the end and has a lot of pacing issues regarding how much dead space is between each level, unlike silent hill 1 & 2 there isn't much quiet town exploration in this one which is nice as a switch up but i expected at least a bit of downtime between each level, felt like monsters were just everywhere and by the end of the game i was so sick of constantly hearing static in every room and just wanted the game to end, last area feels like it just goes on and on and on, i also dont like how the silent hill we visit feels like such a watered down version of the one we saw in 2, theres just a bunch of enemies and nothing to really pick up or do aside from the current objectives, not to mention running on the road towards the amusement park cuts to black and teleports you there after awhile, which is annoying because i wanted to see where the park was in relation to the silent hill seen in 2, like maybe it was off some path james wasn't able to go down before or maybe a road that was destroyed for james isn't for heather, yknow supernatural and dreamy stuff. smaller nitpicks like the bosses being mostly mediocre and enemies like the pendulum and uhh the smaller missionaries idk their names were just kinda annoying and a huge pain to deal with + whoever designed slurpers was a moron fuck slurpers they're literally minor inconvenience: the enemy type. i also wanna mention that the song for the first ending's credits had such unbearable vocals to the point where i had to skip the credits because of how annoying they were, which i havent ever done before for a silent hill game because i want to see the names of everyone who put hard work into it as a way to give them credit in a way, why vocals are included on this soundtrack confuses me i dont hate them but they're so unnecessary and all the osts were better without them, not to mention this ost is mostly trip hop which gets repetitive when just sitting down to listen to it. other than that fantastic game had a fun time with it ily heather <3