Silent Hill 4: The Room
Gamer Jason Moll
Platform PS2

You play the role as Henry Townsend, an ordinary guy facing extraordinary and horrific situations. He is trapped in his room inside an apartment. The entrance to his room has been chained and bolted from the inside to keep the door from opening. He cannot open his windows and strangely, no one from the outside can hear him yell for help. Inside his bathroom wall is a huge hole. Thinking that it will lead to the outside, he enters it only to find out that it is a portal to alternate realms. This is where Silent Hill 4 begins, in the comfort of one's own home.

When inside Henry's room, this portion of the game is played at a first person perspective to produce a claustrophobic feel of how cramped it is. Your health automatically replenishes when you're inside the room, and this is where you will be doing all your savings. Go inside the bathroom and enter the hole to begin your journey into the dark realms of the alternate universe.

The gameplay then switches to a third person perspective (the camera is behind the character) when you are out of Henry's room. Almost every aspect of the traditional Silent Hill gameplay remains intact except for a few drastic changes. The use of the radio and flashlight are gone because there aren't that many dark corners to light and the music does the job of the radio. I find it more realistic to hear an eerie down tempo beat that warns of an approaching enemy rather than the static sound of a radio. Even your inventory is now limited to a number of items; the rest are stored inside a box in Henry's room for a more Resident Evil approach. The combat system has seen the most change by adding a swing meter. If you hold down the attack button, you generate power for the meter. Once full you will be able to deliver a powerful blow to any enemy using any melee weapon.

Later in the game you will meet up with Eileen, Henry's next-door neighbor who is also in the same situation he is in. She can assist you during combat by swinging whatever weapon she can carry against enemies or act as a decoy for you to swing away at those who are distracted by her.

For every successful horror title, there are always some monsters lurking in the dark corners behind it. I can sum up all the monsters in SH4 in one word: "Twisted." Bodies with two huge heads that resemble a baby's and has two long arms for legs, a pale, eight-foot-tall woman with splotches of blood around her face, a skinless gorilla with a protruding head on the side of its neck. These are some of the monsters you will be facing and a few more, which may seem unstoppable, like the ghosts. It is only with certain special weapons that you will be able to grant them eternal rest or massive amounts of pain.

Silent Hill 4 isn't the type of game you would want to play casually. It requires a lot of attention and possibly a lot of time to solve its many mind-boggling puzzles (really, they are that hard). What players will probably have to deal with the most is its difficulty. Health replenishing items were abundant in the previous SH titles; you could find as much as ten or more healing items in one location. In SH4, most of your healing is done in Henry's room. The difficulty level increases a notch once your ability to heal in your room seizes in the latter half of the game. If this isn't bad enough, the number of ghosts that can pass through walls increases while a guy wearing a blue jacket starts to prowl the realms beyond your bathroom walls. With this noted, you are in for a unique Silent Hill experience where difficulty takes a stroll in the dingy realms of this Survival/Horror title.