Silent Hill 4: The Room

Do not listen to the fanboys! Everything in this game is bad. Controls, graphics, story, characters, combat, horror, puzzles, level design. Literally everything you can imagine about a game is bad. This game did not fail by trying to be unique as people will have you believe. There is no tension and there are no good scares. You'll either be bored or annoyed. Never scared. Please save your money.

I loved SH2 (original), so I was excited to try this. Sadly, now I see why this game is rated the worst in the mainline -- so unless you are a playstation fanatic with nostalgia (see reviews here), you should avoid this game, there are far better horror games for your money. As a port, it's functional, but even with customizable key bindings, the controls are very rough. Navigating menus, selecting/equipping weapons, very cumbersome. Combat has no real challenge/excitement, just equip a weapon, spam click until the autoaim kills the monster. It's very clunky even by standards of its time. Various prompts constantly break up gameplay. Terrible indicators on what can/cannot be interacted. There are some scary monsters, but they quickly lose their shock when they are constantly spammed. The HUB world is a pain to navigate (cool idea though, going back to a room you're trapped in, I wish there was more to interact with here in this appartment). The writing/story is AWFUL. Unrealistic characters, weird horny stuff (I'm not a prude, but it's like a pre-teen wrote some of these things), a contrived plot of "dark religious cult" (feels like a parody almost). The environments have great ambience, but once you start backtracking you'll get frustrated quickly. Also, it has an extremely boring "water prison" level (why is it always the water level). As far as sound goes though, they couldn't even get footsteps synced. SH4 doesn't hold a candle to SH2 or SH3, it's a bit surprising how much worse it is. There are some good ideas, but nothing really pays off in a good way. Gameplay is frustrating. Writing is bad. And the worst offense -- it's not scary. I was laughing AT the game more than moments of even slight "creeped out" feelings... If you want to relive your Playstation childhood, this game will be exactly as you remembered it. Unfortunately, the game itself really doesn't hold up -- and I would warrant that it never did given that it came after some real masterpieces.

The controller and mouse decided to live their own lives and spin left pretty much constantly making it impossible to interact with the environment also looking up/down just seems like a guessing game to how it works.

Silent Hill 4 is a great installment in the silent hill franchise. Only real issue is that unless you want to mouse+keyboard it, setting up a controller is a massive investment to figure out. Initially, using left stick also switched between items, which made combat/item usage neigh impossilble. To fix everything, I had to download 2 seperate programs (after googling and downloading other software that didn't do what I wanted), to get it functioning. This took me 2ish hours? I almost just decided not to play it at all it was so annoying. not sure what the fix here is, but buyer beware that extra steps will likely be involved here to get a controller to be used properly

Happy Spooktomber, Konami take my money !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!