OK, let's just be up front about it here. Silent Hill 4 sucks. Everything I like about the series was arbitrarily removed this time out. Including:
- The Town: Silent Hill 4 does not actually take place in Silent Hill. It takes place in the distorted memories of some crazy guy, which for all practical purposes mostly means some apartment building a few towns over.
- Puzzles: The main reason I play the Silent Hill games is that I'm an adventure game addict who has to resort to drastic measures at times. For the most part, this series is pretty darn good at delivering on this front, but Silent Hill 4 contains NO PUZZLES. The closest thing to a puzzle in this game is a steady stream of find the key, bring it to the lock run-arounds.
- That Icky Feeling: The main reason everyone ELSE plays the Silent Hill games is that they are extremely good at conveying such a thick atmosphere of despair and decay that you can't take them in large doses. People play these games because these games make you want to stop playing them as soon as possible. It's strange, but true... and doesn't apply here. The only time I felt the urge to quit playing SH4 was when it sank in how incredibly boring and pointless the second half of the game would be.
- The radio: You don't carry around a little radio whose static lets you know monsters are around in Silent Hill 4. Granted, I've never been all THAT big on this particular gimmick, but it's an odd tradition to drop.
- The flashlight: Granted, I liked this toy better in SH1 than the PS2 games, when you actually had the ability to turn it off and barely make things out, but the flashlight is one of the most important, and visually interesting things about these games. SH4 however is completely well-lit.
- The fog: See previous point. Seriously.
- The maps: In most games like this, you have a map. Every time you enter a new room, it gets added to your map, and you might be able to find some item in the game that gives you the whole thing sans doors. Not so with Silent Hill. With these, you have no map at all until you find a tourist brochure, a blueprint, or some other sort of realistic map (and they ARE realistic). Then as you wander around, finding all the various alterations made to these maps for the sake of gameplay (broken doors, big gaping holes in the ground, etc.) your character squiggles little notes on these maps to indicate them. This rules. I love this. Silent Hill 4 doesn't do this. Just your standard auto-map feature.
- The questioning of whether what the main character is seeing is accurate: All of the other Silent Hill games have this little seed of doubt to them. Even when you take the shifting setting and evil cultist magic at face value, in the other Silent Hill games, there's always something screwed up about the main character, something that doesn't click when you look at how other characters react to you, some evidence for an alternate explanation or two of what's going on (see: The Theory). SH4 though is completely straight-forward, with no room for alternate interpretations of anything, and honestly, an insultingly convoluted explanation of everything.
- The inappropriate intro music: SH1 had this weird sitar music during the intro that didn't quite seem appropriate, but had a funky enough vibe not to be TOO strange. SH2 had a rock-ish remix of this. SH3 went all out and turned it into some sort of power ballad with lyrics. SH4 cut it out completely... well, almost completely, there's that lullaby song at the very end, but the cycle of increasing inappropriateness is broken.
- The silly silly optional ending: SH1 gave us the wonderfully amusing alien abduction. SH2, the dog ending (and a revisited alien ending if you didn't get jipped like I did). SH3... as of this writing I haven't bothered getting it, but there's another silly thing. SH4 though, all serious, dull, straight-forward endings.
- Good camera angles/effects: We no longer have that over the shoulder grainy camera going. Now it's clear as a bell, pulled back rather far, and not nearly as artsy.
- Nurses: Every other Silent Hill game, each for a different reason, has one monster type which looks like a relatively normal, albiet twitchy, plain ol' human nurse. While I personally have never found myself attracted to any videogame character, these provoke some fairly amusing commentaries from people, but here the closest equivalent is big ugly and belching.
So, what does SH4 offer up to compensate for removing all these things? Two little gimmicks. First, we've got the ghost pinning bit. The most annoying, and most common sort of monster in SH4 are ghosts. They pass through walls, they drain your HP steadily just by being in the room, and you can't kill them. However, there are actually just a small number of particular ghosts, each of which appear in several locations. Later in the game, you can find a handful of magic swords, which can be used to pin these ghosts to the ground. Pin a ghost, that particular ghost won't bother you for the rest of the game. Spiffy notion really, reminds me of burning zombies in the Resident Evil remake.
Then there's the room. The full title of the game is actually Silent Hill 4: The Room so as to highlight this gimmick. Save points in SH4 don't let you save your game. Instead, they spit you into your apartment, from which you can save the game and manage your inventory. More importantly, they let you putter around in your apartment. There is 10 times as much detail in your apartment than any other part of the game, and a first person camera to check it out with. More importantly, there are various ways to see the (almost) perfectly normal outside world. You can look out the windows at the street below, peer out the peephole in your door, listen to the news on the radio, or spy on your neighbor through a crack in the wall. It's a very nifty feature, and quite well implemented... until about halfway through the game when they stop putting anything in to check out like this. Shame really.
Oh, and one other thing. The symbolism here sucks. Big time. First, it's all excessively blatant and repetitive. Umbilical cord, umbilical cord, umbilical cord... Any monster which isn't tied into the umbilical cord imagery meanwhile (aside from the ghosts) doesn't make any metaphorical sense at all. Having creeky wheelchairs cruising around would be perfectly sensible in any of the other games, but there is absolutely no reason for them to be tooling around here.
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