Silent Hill 4: The Room
The Silent Hill series began with quite classic horror games, offering no less traditional setting - a deserted, abandoned city covered with eternal smoke, in which reality mixes with fantasy. By the way, he had a real prototype of Centralia, located in the US state of Pennsylvania. In 1962, an underground fire broke out there, which has not stopped until now, and as a result, residents quickly left the city.
But in the future, the series began to move away from this setting. The third part became rather intimate, and although in the course of the action reality and the world of nightmares were still intertwined, the plot of the game took place in a shopping center, in an office building, or in subway tunnels. The fourth game - Silent Hill 4: The Room - begins in one small apartment ...
Don't leave the room, don't make a mistake
The plot of Silent Hill 4: The Room begins with a story about the Apartment. Its protagonist is 34-year-old Walter Sullivan. He is also the central antagonist of the game.
Walter definitely cannot boast of a happy childhood. Immediately after his birth, the mother and father abandoned the child in apartment 302 in one of the houses in Ashfield and disappeared in an unknown direction. The boy ended up in an orphanage with the romantic name "House of Desires", which was controlled by the "Order" sect.
The cultists brainwashed the child so much that he decided that his mother was the same apartment 302. He tried to "reunite with his family", but the new tenants were against it. However, Walter still found a way to awaken Mother - this required a bloody religious ritual. So he killed 9 people. After he was seized by the police and sent to prison, where Walter and committed suicide.
But the Mother Apartment has awakened after all.
Unfortunately, at this moment Henry Townshend lived in apartment 302. Actually, he will be the main character of Silent Hill 4: The Room. The place of "registration" has a depressing effect, Henry constantly sees nightmares, which are becoming more realistic every day. And so, one not-so-good morning, he wakes up and sees that the apartment door is hung with chains, the TV and telephone do not work, the windows cannot be broken, and only one of the walls is gaping from nowhere.
Henry enters it - and finds himself in parallel worlds. Now he needs to get out of this kaleidoscope of horrors and return to reality, ideally still keeping his sanity.
What Scares Silent Hill 4: The Room
The first three Silent Hill games used the standard concept of a human encounter with the unknown to create creepiness. A mysterious city, strange monsters, ghosts - all this was frightening for exactly the same reason that we are afraid of the dark. It is not known what to expect at all from what is happening.
Silent Hill 4: The Room decided to showcase something more frightening - a sick and twisted human mind. Each of the worlds that Henry Townshend enters, each of the monsters and non-playable characters he encounters, are the embodiment of Walter Sullivan's nightmares and aspirations.
As it turns out during the game, Walter Sullivan killed much more than nine people. He has many more victims, and each of them perishes in an incredibly sophisticated way. Parallel worlds are created for them. So in each of the "chapters" the player will meet with a character who will die at the end. And this is also frightening, because you understand the inevitability of a person's death and realize the reason - they all became victims of a sick mind, so purposeful and crazy that it is able to create whole nightmarish worlds filled with blood, pain and endless horror.
How to Play Silent Hill 4: The Room
The game was released back in 2004, so you should not expect any technological perfection, or even the ability to dashingly shoot ghosts and monsters. Although Silent Hill 4: The Room introduced a first-person view - for the first time in the series - the gameplay mechanics remained completely intact.
"Room" is a classic action adventure game with puzzle-solving elements. The main character, under the control of the player, will have to explore the levels-worlds, trying to figure out the meaning of what is happening. For this, by the way, traditional quest mechanics are used, that is, it is proposed to take items, carry them in your inventory and activate them in the right places.
The inventory is very limited, so some items will have to be left for storage in the Apartment. True, the further - the more crazy this place becomes. However, you can even save only in the Apartment, using the main character's diary for this.
There are also action moments - with shooting and all that. But there are relatively few of them, most of the gameplay is still devoted to solving puzzles. The action becomes a little more in the second half of the game, when a girl begins to accompany the hero.
