By Sean Ewing

The original Silent Hill lit a firecracker in the pants of Survival Horror. It proved that a game could do more than scare you by throwing things at you accompanied by a sharp sound effect. Ever since then, the Silent Hill games have been known for giving you the kind of scares that last long after the tv is off, and even in the safety of daytime, anyone who’s played a Silent Hill game will feel at least a twinge of discomfort at hearing a static-y radio. Silent Hill 4 lives up to this high standard, but in some ways, it falters pretty heavily when compared to the previous offerings.

The game stays true to the tradition of casting a regular person as the hero. No Special Forces agent, no killing machine, just an average person, no different from you or I. This installment casts the player as Henry Townshend, a young man living in the South Ashfield Apartment complex, in room 302. He wakes up one morning to find a mass of chains wrapped around his door, and his windows won’t open. He’s trapped in his apartment.

As you look around, you find a bizarre hole in his bathroom. Crawling through that starts Henry on a truly disturbing and strange journey to figure out what the hell is happening. The story and atmosphere are definitely the strongest points of the game. The weird and terrifying story will engage most gamers who enjoy horror movies, and should keep you playing till the end.

The story and the environments do a great job of drawing you in, and getting you emotionally invested in the story. Konami makes sure you see these environments plenty of times. The second half of the game basically has you backtrack through all of the previous areas you’ve visited, albeit with a new twist, but still, they are nothing new. The final area is appropriately out there, and actually does a good job of bringing the story together.

The gameplay is pretty solid, overall. This game breaks a lot of original ground, some of it works tremendously, and some of it falls flat on its face. The only way to save your game is to return to room 302 through one of the mysterious holes littered around the environment. This is also where you can dump items and sort your inventory out in your box. None of the previous games had an inventory limit, and it really hurts the proceedings here. For instance, you can’t stack bullets, if you want to carry 36 pistol rounds, you have to carry three sets of twelve, and that gets irritating quickly.

One thing of note is that in previous games you had a radio to warn of you incoming enemies, here there is no such warning, but enemies themselves make enough noise where you can hear them coming. Still, the white noise emitted by the radio really added something, and it feels a little strange without it. Also, while there is a wide variety of melee weapons, there are only two firearms in the whole game, and you don’t get one until an hour left in the adventure. Still, it’s hard to complain about weapon variety when you can smash a zombie in the face with a nineiron.

Graphically, the game is an absolute bombshell on the Playstation 2, and the Xbox and PC versions look as fantastic as you’d hope. The character models look amazing, and the attention Konami paid to the littlest details makes a huge difference. Even something little like the plain shirt Henry wears looks fantastic, enough so that you can see the stitching on it if the camera is right.

Konami continues to do what they are known to do with the Silent Hill games, and they continue to take terror to a mundane situation. This really is the finest point of the game, that it’s just a regular guy who wakes up in a bizarre and surreal situation, and learns about the supernatural evil infesting his room, and the very natural evil in human beings. Silent Hill 4 is an excellent, if flawed survival horror game and should be welcomed by any fan of the genre.

Final Grade: B+