It's a flawed gem that richly deserves a second chance.
Konami has made some questionable business decisions over the years, but my personal favourite is when it surprise re-released Silent Hill 4: The Room on GOG in October 2020. Yes, it decided the best time to bring back a horror game about being trapped inside your apartment was in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic when we were all terrified and trapped inside our apartments. Top marks for topicality, I guess?
Still, I was pleased to see the game again, because if Silent Hill 2 is Team Silent’s best game, then Silent Hill 4 is its most interesting game. ‘Interesting’ being a useful word to backhandedly praise something full of great ideas, but also peppered with missteps worthy of Konami’s pandemic release schedule. Which, naturally, makes it perfect remake material.
You play as Henry Townsend, a poor sap who’s been trapped in his apartment for five days. His phone is disconnected, his cries for help go unanswered, and the only exit is covered in chains, locks, and a message saying “Don’t go out!! Walter”. I love this message. It’s not written in dripping blood, or a jagged font or SUPER SCARY CAPITAL LETTERS or any of the usual lazy tricks. It’s borderline comic sans, an innocuous post-it note that’s all the creepier for it, especially later when you learn its grim context.
You explore Henry’s apartment in first person, a location that’s as deceptively limited and mundane as P.T.s famous corridor. Keep poking around and you’ll discover you can peer out the windows and do a little Rear Window-esque voyeurism of your neighbours. Call a phone number for a bar you see on a billboard and you’ll be rewarded with some horrible sound effects down the line. Delightfully creepy finds, but it’s a crying shame that we’ll never know what Team Silent could have done in a sequel without the constraints of the PS2 era. Like, say, being able to turn on Henry’s TV for some Remedy-style in-universe channel hopping.
Keep exploring Henry’s apartment, and you’ll eventually find a massive hole in the bathroom wall, and crawling through it takes you to the first location outside. It’s a little disappointing that the game betrays its single-location premise so quickly, but you’re naturally just as trapped as ever, discovering only a nightmarish subway station on the other side. The game switches to third person here, with a more disorienting camera and something that feels a lot more like ‘traditional’ Silent Hill, i.e. solving irritating item scavenger hunts while listening to a peerless horror soundtrack and bashing dogs to death with a stick.
(Image credit: Team Silent, Konami)
Four games in, the Silent Hill developers knew their titular town was becoming overfamiliar. Making your apartment both your prison and your safe space, then offering portals outside like the world’s most misguided remake of Mario 64, was a great opportunity to explore fresh locations. Sadly, it’s not an opportunity they make enough of. The opening subway station just feels like a rehash of a location in Silent Hill 3, and it seems Team Silent couldn’t get through an entire game without at least one trip to Horror Cliché Hospital. The rust, grime, and what-in-God’s-name-is-that monster design was still excellent and these developers are rightly revered for their peerless atmosphere, but only the child prison stands out as a truly all-time great new level up there with the series’ peaks. (Yes, a child prison.)
A remake could cut the overdone locations—the hospital section in Bloober Team’s Silent Hill 2 remake is already 3000 hours long anyway—and could make good on the concept’s potential. 4 is already at its most thrilling when it deviates from the Silent Hill formula, so why not let the World of Horror developers throw some more inspired gameplay experiments in? I’d love to see their pixel art take on the overfamiliar town. Or write the Doki Doki Literature Club guy a check and have a visual novel where you’re trapped on a date with one of those awful zombie nurses.
Blasphemy? Spitting on Team Silent’s grave? Possibly, but that’s why 4 is such perfect fodder for a remake. Bloober Team’s take on Silent Hill 2 has done well critically, although we were a little cooler on it, but it was hamstrung by remaking a classic that many of its fans consider sacrosanct. If they’d replaced the apartment block with, say, a section where you take Pyramid Head go-karting, there would have been blood on the streets. Silent Hill 4, however, possesses a far less rabid fanbase, which means there’s loads more creative freedom to do something truly wild.
(Image credit: Team Silent, Konami)
Throughout the game you find portals that take you back into the safety of your apartment. Here your health slowly restores and it’s also the only place you can save your progress. It’s deliberately creating a feeling of security and calm in you, all to get your guard down and make it more of a betrayal when the room starts turning against you too. You can see a lot of P.T.s ever-changing corridor taking influence from this, as your one safe place becomes yet another nightmare, no longer restoring health and increasingly bombarded by evil spirits. It’s a brilliant way of raising the stakes and escalating the tension, even though its execution is a little wobbly. Often you’re battling these ghosts by, er, lighting candles at them.
I’d love Konami to give this to a developer that has proven they know how to truly haunt a house, like the monsters behind Phasmophobia. Or what about a mechanic where you have to properly investigate the spirits squatting in your apartment if you want to be rid of them? Last year’s Paranormasight: The Seven Mysteries of Honjo was a brilliant mix of nerdy detective visual novel and horror title which did some clever things here. At one point you defy a curse by turning off the audio in the settings menu so you can’t hear it—Hideo Kojima would be proud.
Room for improvement
(Image credit: Team Silent, Konami)
It’s the second half of Silent Hill 4 that’s most in need of a glow-up. Henry tries to save a vital NPC by sloooowly escorting them through all the previously explored levels. And it’s the miserable kind of escorting where the NPC moves like they’re wading through treacle and stops following you if you go through a door too fast.
Luckily, escort missions have come a long way since 2004. Heck, just one year later, Resident Evil 4 got this right, giving you the ability to give your companion simple orders or opportunities to hide them. You could go the full The Last of Us route of making them invincible, though that’s a bit of a gameplay cop-out. But being able to offer them weapons to defend themselves Dead Rising-style would cut down the tedium significantly.
Despite all my whining, Silent Hill 4 has more than enough going for it to be well worth your time. It’s scary, atmospheric, tells a terrific tale, and might even feature Akira Yamaoka’s best soundtrack (I’ve been looping the above track, The Last Mariachi, while writing this, which is probably doing wonders for my mental health). It’s just that its worst design choices drag it down, and even its best ideas feel like they could be executed far more strongly—the monster that stalks you through the second half would be incredible in the hands of the Alien Isolation devs or the team that gave us Mr X in Resident Evil 2 remake. Konami should skip Silent Hill 3—poor Heather Mason has more than suffered enough—and give us a remake that turns Silent Hill 4 into the great game it always had the potential to be.
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