E-Mail This Article to a Friend The sounds of silence Silent Hill 4 offers a room with a view … of death BY MITCH KRPATA
	Silent Hill 4: The Room Published and developed by Konami. For PlayStation 2 and Xbox. Rated M for Mature.

I'm so torn on the subject of Silent Hill 4: The Room that I'm going to have to leave this review to the angel and the devil that perch on my shoulders, arguing about every decision I make. Let's listen.

Angel: Although Resident Evil is credited with ushering in the modern age of survival horror games, it's been running on fumes since the release of Code Veronica. There's something inherently campy about zombies, anyway. By contrast, since its inception the Silent Hill series has consistently been the creepiest game franchise out there, and Silent Hill 4: The Room is no exception. It's flat-out terrifying.

Devil: What's terrifying is how a series can be successful enough to warrant a fourth installment when the underlying gameplay is so limp and uninspired. You mentioned Resident Evil. I'll go back even further, to Alone in the Dark. That game came out over a decade ago and was more advanced in its gameplay dynamics and puzzle-solving than Silent Hill 4.

Angel: But Silent Hill is more about mood and atmosphere than anything else. Look at the art design. Walls are caked with blood and rust, lamps cast pathetic pools of light that fail to penetrate the darkness, and the creatures are like something out of H.P. Lovecraft's darkest nightmares. Wraiths claw their way through walls, shrieking their unholy shrieks; two-headed demon children pursue you through corridors. There's not a moment where you're released from the nightmarish world Konami has conjured.

Devil: Look, nobody's a bigger fan of nature's mistakes and God's forgotten children than I am. I'm a freakin' devil. But consider your actual interaction with these foes. You stand there whacking them with a pipe, or a bat, or whatever else you may have, until they fall down. If you've got ammo, you can stand still and shoot at them. This is not fun combat. It's more like a chore. The enemies are scary the first time they show up, and after that they serve only as a nuisance. Many of them don't even stay dead.

Angel: That's part of the brilliance! The implacable foes and their unrelenting thirst for your blood maintain a sense of dread the whole time you play. You know that nothing you do will be sufficient to stop these creatures, so you have to keep moving. And we haven't even talked about the storyline yet. It's amazing how many truly sick things are revealed over the course of the game. There's a cult, child abuse, serial killers, voyeurs, and even a character who keeps an umbilical cord in a box in his living room.

Devil: I'm not trying to take anything away from the story. The central conceit – that your character, Henry Townshend, is trapped in his apartment by supernatural forces – does have a certain claustrophobic charm, if you don't think about it too much. But let's say someone asked you what this game was about, and you told them that you play as a guy who keeps leaping back and forth between the real world and a nightmare world via a mystery portal in his bathroom. What do you suppose they'd say? It's a little goofy, isn't it?

Angel: It's easy to say the game sounds goofy as we sit here chatting in the sunlight. But to someone playing the game alone in a darkened room, it's not nearly as easy. I recall this big lug upon whose shoulders we sit nearly knocked me to the ground jumping in fright a few times.

Devil: And he almost knocked me off by sighing so theatrically every time he found himself wandering another boring level, in search of some stupid item he needed to open a locked door. Remember the apartment-building level, where there were three identical floors of long, L-shaped corridors? And the key to the puzzle he couldn't figure out was that one refrigerator in one out of the dozens of apartments could be opened and had a vital item inside?

Angel: But on the other hand –

Devil: No, shut up. I'm not done. What about the non-playable character who said something like, "I've got this critical item. I'll give it to you if you get me something to drink. Mmm, chocolate.…" And the solution was to give him the chocolate milk from your apartment fridge. That's supposed to be a puzzle? How uninspired can you get?

Angel: That just led to a greater feeling of satisfaction upon finding that same NPC in flames with a number carved into his chest. You make good points, but I can't forsake the masterful job Konami did in crafting a truly frightening horror experience with Silent Hill 4.

Devil: No more than I can forgive the boring, repetitive gameplay.

Angel: I guess we'll have to split the difference and call this a mediocre title with some redeeming value for horror fans.

Devil: I can live with that.

Score: 6.0 (out of 10)