Unless you’ve been living under a rock, chances are you’ve heard about the numerous Silent Hill projects headed our way, including a new movie from Christophe Gans. It’s a resurrection of sorts for a long-dormant series that hasn’t had a full scale entry since 2012 (yeah, you read that right). Sure we had P.T. in 2014, which was a proof-of-concept demo for a Hideo Kojima directed entry titled Silent Hills, but other than that? Nothing. Outside of Silent Hill collaborations with other games, the series started to seem like it was gone for good.
Funny thing is, this wasn’t even the first time Silent Hill was considered dead. In 2004, the masterminds behind the original three games known as “Team Silent” got together and decided to take the series into an experimental new direction. Little did they know, it would be the last Silent Hill game from them, marking the end of an era.
Enter Silent Hill 4: The Room for the PlayStation 2 and original Xbox, a game that started production at the same time as Silent Hill 3. After two games trapping us in a spooky town, the head honchos over at Team Silent decided to throw every preconceived expectation out of the window and get a little bit wild with the franchise. Gone was the titular town, and instead the game would be set in the city of Ashfield; in particular the apartment of main character Henry Townsend, which has been sealed off… with him inside.
Rather than following another character who’s traveling to Silent Hill to uncover some supernatural mystery, Silent Hill 4 centers on Henry trying to understand the circumstances that caused him to be trapped inside his home. It’s a really cool inverse on the formula and allows for unexpected diversions in game play. For example, when Henry is exploring his apartment, it’s done entirely in first-person. It’s only when he enters a hole in the wall that the game jumps to a more traditional third person perspective. This is where Henry begins his descent and explores a hellish nightmare with his neighbor Eileen involving serial killers, sacraments, and allegories of rebirth and purity. I won’t recap it here, but suffice to say in some aspects Silent Hill 4: The Room decided to explore more worldly horror and less wacky cults and sexual repression/guilt.
Silent Hill 4 even branches away when it explores traditional gameplay. The Silent Hill games were notorious for cryptic puzzles that sometimes were real head-scratchers (the puzzles themselves necessitated a difficulty setting), but The Room instead focused heavily on combat. Like it or not, it was the direction survival horror was heading in at the time. Only one year later, Resident Evil 4 would blow the doors wide open to heavy action influence in the genre and Silent Hill 4 ultimately felt held back by its limitations to the genre of yesteryear with fixed camera angles and absolutely janky controls in both first and third person. It’s a fascinating relic of its time.
Adding to the notoriety of this installment was that it was the final game developed by Team Silent, as Konami wanted to let Western studios take a crack at the IP, which would start in 2007 with Silent Hill: Origins, the most by-the-numbers entry in the series. It’s a shame because Silent Hill 4: The Room showed that Team Silent still had plenty of ideas of where the series could go; be it anthology installments like this or mythology installments like Silent Hill 3. There were rumblings that the team were prototyping a fifth main installment of the series but nothing ever quite took off so Konami closed the book on their era of Silent Hill and the team went off into numerous separate directions. We were to never get a Japanese-developed Silent Hill game again.
My personal experience with Silent Hill 4: The Room is a unique one. I was but 11 years old at the time of release and only owned an original Xbox. Which means my only experience with the Silent Hill franchise up until that point was with the rerelease of the second installment, Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams. Exploring the aisles during my weekly trip to the local Blockbuster Video, I stumbled across Silent Hill 4: The Room in all its terrifying glory. Its cover depicts a screaming face emerging from a door wrapped in chains in a shade of red; one would be mistaken for thinking the game had a nu-metal soundtrack with how early 2000s the whole thing looked. I was enamored. I asked my father to rent it and I binged it that weekend, absolutely fascinated with its disconnect from the rest of the series and the more violent approach to horror. It was the right game at the right time in my blossoming love of the horror genre.
With the news of Silent Hill f being the first mainline installment in well over a decade, with a story penned by Japanese writer Ryukishi07 and a 1960s rural Japan setting, I can’t help but feel a sense of excitement for the series to get back to its roots while hopefully exploring new territory. It gave me reason to reflect and appreciate Silent Hill 4: The Room in greater retrospect and value the ideas it had even more. We didn’t know how good we had it. And at the time, we had no idea it would be the last good installment for nearly 20 years.
Who else would love to see a Silent Hill 4 remake down the road?
