Silent Hill 4: The Room

slip on to the nicest fire fork you've forget to love and six gallons cheese the top value dance

It's an interesting game. Not up there with SH 1-3 but still fun and a fitting swan-song for Team Silent.

Maybe I’ve become desensitized to horror, but Silent Hill 4 wasn’t scary to me at all, just annoying. My irritation was caused by the ghost enemies in particular, who keep moaning all the time. They can’t be easily killed and they keep stalking you which makes traversing levels a pain in the ass. Technically, the game is a disaster. The gameplay is unenjoyable and unrewarding. You’re either bashing the enemies over their heads with melee weapons or shooting them with a gun. While it’s classic survival horror design that sounds good on paper, the execution makes it terrible. The protagonist’s movement is janky and the camera is all over the place. Managing the limited inventory and saving progress is way too cumbersome, as there’s just one item box and one savepoint. Acting is poor. The main character seems either oblivious or indifferent to what’s happening around him. Maybe it’s coincidental, but the plot rehashes ideas from the films “Seven” and “1408” which is uninspired and disappointing for someone who is already familiar with them. Also, there’s too much reading involved in the gameplay.

I owned this on Xbox but never got around to playing it, so there isn't any nostalgia in it for me or maybe making an exception because it has an amazing story. I really wouldn't know. It's fairly compelling as a narrative and has a somewhat creepy vibe, but it is so, so bad at everything else when viewed through the lens of 2025 standards.. I first played it on hard and turned it down to normal because the initial enemies took so many hits to kill, and the melee combat was so awful. Stilted controls and a very limited camera didn't help either . Beyond the cut-scenes it lacks atmosphere and scares. Previous Silent Hills had (for the time) fairly impressive and ominous shifts from the "normal world" into grim, distorted realities, whereas this just slaps lame stuff right in front of you without any rhyme or reason, or any effect. It's weird for sure, but it's also bland and even for a 2004 title it looks pretty naff. The textures are grainy, the image is washed-out and the lighting is unimpressive. This was an OG Xbox title, but even so it could have looked much better for the time. On the game-play side of it I stopped playing after a few dull enemy encounters, as it's quite poor in that regard. Your character lumbers about and isn't particularly responsive, and your attacks are turgid and shoddy. There's a bit where you have to go up an escalator and these creatures start forming out of the walls and swiping at you. The hit-boxes for their attacks are huge and annoying to evade, but you can't really attack them either. I tried shooting them but my character kept auto-aiming at ones I'd already shot and temporarily stopped, rather than aim at the next one along that then ended up walloping me back down the escalator. After umpteen times of this, and it also happening when I just tried to run past them or time dodging their attacks, I'd had enough. It really is quite poor and only massive nostalgia for it would make it worth buying in this day and age.

Okay, so like MGS 1-2, this is the PC port of SH4 that came out a long time ago. So, dont expect ressed up graphics, full on controller supporte an etc. Aside from being done to run on modern systems/Windows, what you see is what you get. Having said that, it still nice to have this game on GoG, along with the MGS games and it does make me wonder if Konami still has the PC ports of 2 and 3 lying around somewhere.