Silent Hill 4: The Room

[Max Gardner]

Silent Hill is unique.  It's the only video game franchise that's consistently more frightening than any horror movie in recent memory.  It's relentlessly disturbing and unpleasant.  It's not a game you play for entertainment, exactly.  The latest release, although radically different from the previous entries in many ways, succeeds, at least, in being intensely stressful.

The basic idea is that Henry Townshend has been trapped for the past five days in his apartment and is slowly going nuts.  His door is chained shut from the inside.  His windows are sealed.  He can't get anyone outside to hear him.  He's having nightmares.  Naturally, when a gaping black hole suddenly appears in his bathroom wall, he takes the opportunity to crawl into it, being desperate for escape and not too bright.  Other characters central to the plot include Eileen, Henry's next-door neighbor, and Walter, a serial killer whose suicide was briefly mentioned in Silent Hill 2.

Very creepy stuff.  The whole "inescapable location" theme is unsettling.  Check it out if you don't particularly care about sleeping well.

[Dunners]

I was excited about this until my friends said it wasnt very good. Since he's japanese(And from japan) He said it was a completely diff game and they just slapped the silent hill title on it.

His sources were from japanese language reviews  and while I know th eonly way to be sure is to try it out yourself its nice to get some insight too.

[Max Gardner]

It wasn't particularly well-received in Japan.  The producer of the series says that this is because Japanese gamers don't know what they want.  Most new games in Japan are extremely short, simple, pretty action games a la Bujingai: The Forbidden City.  Silent Hill 4 is highly experimental, taking the series in a different direction from the previous entries, which were fairly straightforward Resident Evil clones in terms of gameplay mechanics.  Some parts of it work.  Others don't.  The game doesn't take place in Silent Hill, but has everything to do with previous events in said pleasant vacation spot.  All in all, it's interesting.  Certainly worth checking out for the story alone.

[Dunners]

ahhh, yeah that sounds interesting. I guess we wont know until we play after all.