Silent Hill 4: The Room

Silent Hill 4 gets a lot of points for trying an original approach. You start in a "hub world" of your apartment, where some sinister lock keeps you inside and you cannot contact the outside world. Enter a portal to different levels. The apartment portion is a neat 1st person adventure approach. Some interesting and creepy stuff can happen there. The levels are ok, nothing great. Making healing items rare, but heal for free if you can make it back to the apartment is a more tense approach. Unfortunately, it all goes to crap halfway through. You're stuck with a permanent escort quest, you reuse all the same levels, it turns into annoying attrition as you cannot heal at the apartment anymore, and you're attacked by new annoying enemies. What really kills the 2nd half, is that it becomes an attrition slog where you desperately need certain limited items that you've been finding all game, but you're never told their value and aren't expecting the sudden halfway point shift in gameplay. It's very easy to waste all the items early on when you don't need them and don't know you'll need them later. Important effects of certain items are never explained. A seemingly harmless item will screw you over in the long term if you pick it up. Burping nurses are dumb. There's enough good here for a mild recommendation to series fans, but do yourself a big favor and set the difficulty to easy to avoid the immense frustration of the 2nd half.

KEEPS CRASHING.

As much of a step up as this is from previous PC releases, it is not the new definitive way to play the game. When compared to the PS2 original, or even when comparing it to an emulated copy, the PC version is missing effects like blur for depth of field and soft shadows even when playing at the original resolution. This port also has issues with surround sound audio where, instead of gradually shifting from one ear to the other when turning around a sound source, it harshly cuts. I hope that over time either GOG or modders will truly bring the game to parity with the original version, but until then I recommend other means of playing it.

At Last...

This port has some issues, especially compared to the PS2 version, but fortunately there are mods to fix them and improve the experience. However, one thing that is absolutely a dealbreaker to me, which can't be fixed, is that the game does not support any sort of real analog movement whatsoever. This means analog movement is just mapped to the WASD keys, and with this game not having tank controls, makes it feel very imprecise.