Silent Hill 4 The Room: SH Retrospective
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- Опубликовано: 6 окт 2024
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The Room has always been a divisive title in Konami's seminal psychological horror franchise, and given the quality of later games, that's really saying a lot. So let's dive in and find out what all the fuss is about!
Avoid Story Spoilers! - 10:48
Team Silent Involved - 01:15
Story - 04:17
Gameplay - 12:28
Visuals - 26:48
PS2 Port - 34:48
PC Port - 36:32
Comparison - 37:07
Conclusion 37:54 
Игры
The Room is a thoughtful exploration of depression, isolation and voyeurism. I would disagree with placing it totally outside of the canon, in terms of its exploration of a character's psyche it is squarely in the lineage of Silent Hill 2, which also deviates from the cultic narratives of 1/3. Henry is a flat character, but that is consistent with his implicit psychological disorder. Its mechanics deviate a lot more from the formula, this is true, but I think they make sense thematically even if they are less enjoyable than in the other games (namely the escort mission as a mechanical implementation of Henry's attempt to connect to another human being). There is also interesting mirroring going on between the protagonist/antagonist.
Maybe it's just me, but I also find the grungier vibe of the game to be considerably more scary than Silent Hill 1-3.
Gotta disagree with this vid, The Room is a unique gem not to be missed. Debates about what qualifies as a proper sequel to an established franchise are usually sterile, and regardless of what the fans want creators get bored of making the same thing.
owl of minerva thank you for going to the mat for this game and schooling him on the stuff I was too tired to do so
You know man your right I've been making that same argument to some of my friends for years.👍
Same opinion, I think that most Silent Hill fans who don't like this game miss the point of this game by miles.
This is not the "personal experience" of one main character whose motivations are revealed throughout the game.
It's more like you're playing as this self insert character who's just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others have been in that place before and it's the player's job to make sure that this guy doesn't suffer the same fate.
It's a murder mystery with Japanese horror elements.
The character that you want to find out more about is most certainly not the protagonist, it's the villain; and boy oh boy does he steal the show.
The world and the lore are different because it's an entirely different experience.
For the 1st time, it is not about Silent Hill, and it is not about the main character's personal story. It's more like you're running away from this murderous psychopath who's planning on making you his final victim, and you're technically experiencing it in real-time.
Henry is not mentally ill, his drive to "go do stuff" is his desire to escape his apartment. his motivations are very self-centered, and his only real concern is self-preservation.
Did this "need to be a Silent Hill game"? Not really, but explaining all the paranormal things in it won't require a lot of work if someone just mentions that it takes place in the Silent Hill universe. This way, the time dedicated to that could be repurposed to flesh out the characters and focus more on the actual murder mystery. Plus, I think that AR here is a little confused geographically, as I don't remember wish-house and the water tower being in the town, they were more on the outskirts.
Having said all of that, I think that WS is one of the most fascinating villains of the first 4 games. Little girls, weird cults, and deceased wives don't feel "challenging" to me as a player regardless of their physical transformations. Not as much as, say, an adult fanatic murderer who realized at some point that he wouldn't be able to finish the job because the police have got him, and saw that the only way forward is killing himself, coming back as a ghost, and finishing the job that way.
And he literally made use of that to the best of his efforts too, making himself one of his own victims to complete his ritual ASAP.
I find that the reason why some SH fans didn't like this game to be the same reason why most hardcore franchise fans of anything don't like installments which "deviate" from the established formula. That being the fact that it was "different".
Thank you!!! Yea this guy really missed the metaphorical properties this game has.
Rant/somewhat conjecture: Well, a good reason as to why the locations look so outlandish is because they're locations that are filtered through distorted perceptions of past memories of Walter. He views the apartment as his mother, which is why everything is covered in viscera and you hear the occasional heart beat throughout the building (as if in a womb). The spiral prison is no different. The actual prison is different, but you're not traversing through the real location but rather a fictional version that manifests and represents emotions/memories of the place. And one of the bigger themes of the game is vouyerism, with Henry possessing vouyeristic tendencies (i.e. spying on Eileen), so I assume that's why they tried to make his voice sound awkward (even if it didn't stick the landing). As for Walter dying and coming back as a ghost to kill the remaining sacraments in dream-like worlds, I felr that criticism was a bit odd. You may as well make the same complaint about Nightmare on Elm Street. As other commenters have stated, the team was trying to be experimental, rather than rehash what the first three games already brought to the table. I think it would have been detrimental to have the game take place in the same location that we've already been through. It adds to the mystery regarding the power of the town and how far it can reach. I will concede that it does damage to the theory that Silent Hill acts like a purgatory for wrong-doers (like in Silent Hill 2), but the same could be said for the first and third game. I honestly think the purpose of Silent Hill changes with each game, now that I think of it. Before this post gets too long (longer than it already is) I'll just say this: Silent Hill 4 feels very dreamy and Lynchian (to an extent). Characters act oddly to certain situations (like Henry reacting to the door being chained), odd voice acting that seems so unnatural but dreamy at the same time, locations having impossible layouts, and the game putting a greater emphasis on dreams/dream worlds. I guess it's a Silent Hill entry that won't appeal to someone who's used to concepts and stories being forthwith with storytelling. It's one of those games that feels like much more is going on beneath the surface and leads to everyone coming to different conclusions (almost like how Mulholland Drive's story is told almost in a similar way. You get the skeleton of the story, but you have to come to your own conclusions regarding the symbolism, imagery, and everything you didn't notice the first time). I'd Silent Hill 4 a perfect game? Absolutely not. I have my own issues with things that could have been better/better written, but it's an entry that's absolutely underrated and misunderstood. And to think a non-Team Silent team wrote this and it wasn't absolute horse shit like the later entries? That's just impressive. And 4 still is the more disturbing/horrifying entry. But that's my rant. Lol.
I love it myself. 2,3, and 4 are in my top 20 games of all time I have so much nostalgia for them. And when I was playing 4 back in the day it was creepier cause i was a middle schooler and my friend lived in a apartment with his mamaw identical to the one in 4. Legit looked down to a T the same.
I also like downpour when others hated it. I don't like it anywhere near as much as first 4 but I enjoy it a lot still.
Great comment!
Well done
You get this game better than most.
I really think you brushed passed the best part of the game. Honestly the creepiest part of the game is the inside of the apartment itself. It's so quiet, and you hardly expect much to happen, but later on when shit randomly starts happening, and the tone inside gets darker, you start to really dread crawling inside the hole to go back to your apartment. The upside of putting the player back inside the bedroom everytime they go back, is that they need to work up the courage everytime to walk into the living room.
That's something that was formula breaking and very impactful.
Degrading the safety of the safe room. Even today most safe rooms are always safe, or become so after killing a baddie. SH4 was one of the few that was like no the baddies are coming into your safe room and soon you'll have no where else to go.
@@SoulDevoured i just wish there were was more stuff to do in the room
@@RobertEdwinHouse9 Agreed. That's the only problem with the design. So much downtime in the room.
The reason Henry acts the way he does isn't just because he's an introvert, it's because he's dreaming for most of the game, but he's not actually getting any sleep. He remarks that he never gets hungry and he never gets thirsty, and even though he sleeps he doesn't actually feel rested. He's essentially sleep deprived when he's in the room and he's dreaming when he's not, and when you dream the rational part of your brain is turned off, causing you to not react normally to things that would typically be shocking. And when you're sleep deprived the same thing happens, your brain just isn't able to process information as well and you view the world similarly to when you're asleep. Also the game isn't really about Henry, he's just a surrogate for the player, the game's really about Walter, same as how Silent Hill 1 wasn't really about Harry, it's actually about Alessa. While Harry is admittedly a more fleshed out character than Henry, he really doesn't have much going on either during SH1, again largely because he's a surrogate for the player. I still don't care much for Henry as a character, but it's not like zero thought was put into the way he acts.
Damn. Solid explanation and I completely share your synopsis.
So that makes it ok to have shit voice acting?
@@TheJbirddude867 I think you're missing the point.
Ok but there's one very basic and very important thing SH4 does extremely well as a survival horror game: it's scary as fuck.
@@patrickconnolly7385 Monster design, level design (The forest level would be the only one I'd call "bland" or "uninspired", the rest are definitely very creepy and some of them get very trippy, which I love), and probably the worst (best) scary element of them all: SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER to get your own apartment, the only safe heaven in the whole game, getting infected by those fucking ghosts/demons. Then you wake up in your bed and start hearing that horrid baby cry just to find out there's a small children shadow being projected on your closet, or seeing Walter's face on one of yours bedroom's portraits, or hearing someone creepy dude (was it Walter too?) telling you through the phone you're always being watched, or being there just looking through the window and all of a sudden a fucking severed head falls out of nowhere... We're talking about that kind of shit that makes you think "Noo no, fuck this shit I don't wanna play this anymore"... but you'll eventually come back.
It's scary until you come across the burping patients.
The only scary part of the game was the intro
@@RobertEdwinHouse9 Clearly you didn't play the game then
@@nrgentertainmentartist8668 i literally beat it twice its not scary
James's father is not the only connection to SH lore in The Room. Walter Sullivan's murders are mentioned in a newspaper slip in SH2, found in a dumpster at the Apartment Complex (and by the game show host in the elevator). This is why there is a "Twin Monster" enemy. The main character - Henry, isn't experiencing their own inner/personal nightmare (like SH 2), but instead living in someone else's nightmare. Also, I think Henry was intentionally made to having difficulty exprecing emotion, as his character is a loner and socially anxious, who prefers to watch from affar.
Perfectly said
Agree with you so much. Henry fitted perfectly in this game. I could really feel that he couldn’t rest and was like very static
There is way more than that:
- The items next to Walter's corpse inside Henry's apartment are the exact same items you collect in Silent Hill 2 in order to get the Rebirth ending in which James tries to revive Mary by performing a ritual.
- Walter's very first victim is Jimmy Stone. A priest from the Valtiel sect who wore a pyramid-shaped hood and you can find a picture of a priest wearing such robe in Silent Hill 2's Historical Society level, the picture is called "Crimson and White banquet for the Gods".
-Dahlia Guilespie is literally the person responsible for convincing kid Walter that his mother was room 302 as a backup plan to revive "God". I'll just suppose that he missed the file in the game.
- Walter splits his soul in half (Adult and Kid) just exactly how Alessa did in the first game.
- Laura mentions that the nurse who used to take care of Mary is named Rachael. There is a woman with the same name living in Ashfield apartments. And she also happens to be a nurse.
-Garland's pet shop.
like... just way too much stuff that he probably missed.
Room will forever be my fav of the series, even with all its flaws. As someone who struggles with agoraphobia, I found the story oddly relatable
I'm one of the people who liked the room,i really enjoyed the strangeness of it i think
I love the game still, but it’s not god tier or anything.
You're not alone, friend.
@@connectivitytissues1429 i didn't even know the Room was disliked,until i heard people say about it,but i think there is just as many who like it as don't
@@danhulson8703 I've heard as much, and a lot of the criticism is valid, yet I still like the game... warts and all...
P.s. I just started Resident Evil HD... I 🥰 survival horror...
The story of this game is incredibly underrated. I feel like it is especially poignant right now with so many people literally trapped in their own apartments.
Silent Hill 4's story > Silent Hill 3's story
NihilisticIdealist 😐
The only thing I disliked was that 89% of the story was in papers and letters not in cutscenes like Flashbacks.
If you read every letter and try to feel the characters then you have a great story.
Altough i do get the "it wasnt really Team Silent cuz not all original members were involved" (at least the big names) thing, i have to disagree. Where do you draw the line? Team Silent was originally led by Toyama, who left after 1, and took some members with him, so why are 2 and 3 considered TS made? Sato worked on 1 and 2, but didnt even touch 3, why does it count then? Again, where is the line drawn? Are we assuming 1-3 are that good just thanks to Sato, Owaku and Ito? As amazing as they are i think thats a bit of an unfair mindset to have towards the rest of the Team as a whole. Still, good vídeo overal m8, i just think you were a bit more biased overall on this one compared to prev ones.
91Turles agree
Each individual have it's own role just like in the army, one outlet fucks up then the whole army suffers the consequences. With that, teams have their reputation to hold up and with 1 through 4 they managed to maintain that amazing reputation. Even when a company changes all of it's people still maintain to preserve the original''s creative essence and just improves upon it, it surely deserves to keep the name. Also there is a more simple explanation about TS they been a inside house dev team working on SH games so the name really fits the bill. Not sure what is so confusing about it to some to fail to see the simple picture as it is.
Not to mention his incredibly dismissive comments about Murakoshi and Yamaoka's involvement. Like, despite the fact that Murakoshi wasn't the scenario writer of SH2 (he was the Drama Director and Animator, which I assume means he directed and helped animate the cutscenes) how would a scenario writer have no input on series canon? Or how would Yamaoka not have contributed to any "original" SH story when he was also the producer of SH3? Maybe I'm just interpreting those comments as dismissive, and they weren't meant to be, but it still feels like a stupid thing to say, kinda like the swamp land comparison.
I think I can answer this question. Team silent isn’t any specific person in the group, rather it’s the name of the team behind the silent hill games. Games 1 2 3 & 4 were all made by this team but after SH4 Konami disbanded team silent. This means that team silent simply doesn’t exist past this point, hence why all future games aren’t considered to be made by team silent.
Only 1 and 2 are the good games
What do you expect? It's Silent Hill. Not everything is supposed to be spoon fed to you. You have to piece a lot of the story together yourself. It actually makes you think. It's subtle and vague. That's how the lore of Silent Hill has always been.
Foreal dude, unnecessarily mean and definitely biased
@@sygyzy0933 He's just salty cuz he sucks at the gameplay clearly.
For you, as it seems, a good SH must be the same as the previous 3 ones, the plot must give answers to everything, AND canonical.... for myself, i like to think of SH as a black hole that attracts all suffering minds to "him"...
Playing this game honestly gave me a type of anxiety that other Silent Hill games couldn't. The story is honestly fucking terrifying and the twist towards the end is just fantastic and has been a irrational fear of mine.
********SPOILER**********
Finding out that Walter was dead the whole time in a secret room tucked away in your apartment just scared the fuck out of me. Like it still haunts me. That and the hauntings that happen throughout the game is one of the scariest and most unique video game mechanics I've ever seen in a game. The anxiety I got from seeing one of the demons crawling through the wall was like having sleep paralysis.
Overall, this game just creates a fear that just doesn't happen in other games. It's the type of fear you get when you look at an unnerving photo or piece of art. It's like extreme paranoia. It's perfect in my opinion, and it leaves a HELL of an impression, moreso than any other game in the franchise could do.
Same! The cutscenes where the victims became ghosts disturbed 11 year old me so bad lol. None of the other SH games disturbed me like that.
I just love the apartment itself. At first it's quiet and boring, you think something will happen inside it, but nothing ends up happening so you let your guard down, then as the game progresses it gets creepier and creepier...then shit starts happening which scares the ever loving shit out of you because you don't expect it.
The apartment itself is the best part of the game, because when you go through the hole in the bathroom, you expect enemy's, but when you get up from your bed you do not.
For sure 4 has a different kind of fear, I'd say it has more terror than the first 3.
Man, I usually like your stuff but im gonna have to disagree with you on some things.
1. It was always meant to be a Silent Hill game, and it's been canonically referenced in 2 and 3. Team Silent literally couldn't work on it because it was made around the same time as 3, with less time and lower budget for Konami's profit. And they've spoken again and again that they wanted to make it something new and not repeat the same formula. Plus quotes everywhere about it: 'In a sense this is true because the game began life as simply Room 302. However, it was always at least a spin-off of Silent Hill and the most important thing was simply that it be different to the previous games. Certainly if Silent Hill had not existed we would not have gotten the idea for The Room, so in that sense they have always been together.'
-Interview with Masashi Tsuboyama and Akira Yamaoka.
2. Walters actually a ghost, and everywhere Henry visits is a concoction of his psyche. Thats why its all called Walter's Otherworlds, its all his either warped childlike rememberance or manifested trauma linked to those places, especially something as traumatic as the Water Prison. There's kid Walter, there's Ghost Walter, then there's actually dead Walter sealed in your wall. And the rumored one that was arrested, but Joseph cleared that it was a possessed decoy that killed himself later.
3. The cult was pretty big, especially when Claudia and Vincent revived it, and there were sects. Some sects were even opposing eachother.
4. Henry is a socially anxious, possibly has something neurodivergent, and traumatized. He has no friends, no family that checks in on him when he disappears. He's kind of a mirror of Walter in that way, except he helps everyone he comes across despite it. The story isnt about him, as much as a vehicle we see Walter's story through.
5. Them making your apartment a safe healing haven only go there halfway through the game to stop being healed and get your ass haunted was an AMAZING move.
Anyway, I didnt wanna be one of those ranting commentors but its hard when some stuff is factually wrong. You're not wrong about the shitty sides of the gameplay. But this story was bomb af and you shouldn't disregard it just because its not a copy of 1-3. This is some of the best the series has to offer.
Preach
Exactly. It's like hating SH2 because it was not like SH1...the other thing is this is the most "Japanese" game of the series, tematically and visually. This game maybe not better than the first 3 games BUT compared with the garbage we had after, SH4 is a masterpiece.
> Tiny UI elements break the immersion.
> Not being able to pause time and space while bringing up a fullscreen UI element to "think about your killing implements" when you choose items is a step back.
I'm not convinced you care about immersion per se, what you seem to want is for these games all to just retain the same elements every single time, probably while making little improvements or refinements. I noticed similar arguments while watching the 7 hour RE retrospective supercut. Complaining that all the games after RE4 were too similar to RE4 and how it felt like you kept playing RE4 clones, while at the same time wanting all the games to be like RE1. You seem to really want a series to always be very similar to wherever it started, and I just can't get down with that, that to me is how a series becomes dull and dies.
I hold no sacred cows for any genre or any series because the best games in those series always take me by surprise. The first Resident Evil took me by surprise because it was different than anything I'd played, and RE4 was the same. Then RE2 remake seemed to blend the two so well that it felt like an entirely new thing once more, while RE7 made more "proper" Resident Evil horror (rather than action) combat feel really good, rather than just a thing I put up with. The best games in any series never seem to give me what I want, they give me what I need, and based on how they always seem to surprise me, all I know I need is something new, even if it sometimes isn't as good. A refinement here or there (original RE2 for example) can also be fantastic, but beyond that, I love when developers try new things.
ruclips.net/video/GqL8Hsjcp5U/видео.html this is a much more honest and better researched video than this one
This is about Silent Hill, tho lol
2:30 Avalance: "I mean sure, technically the guy grabbing everyone's coffee in the office was a contributing member of Team Silent, but I doubt very much that his involvement made or broke the series."
You severely underestimate the role that coffee plays in any long term creative project. I think that if you were to talk to the members of Team Silent they would tell you that the guy who kept bringing them coffee deserves a medal.
I seriously love Silent Hill 4. The soundtrack was amazing and the locations were downright creepy. The enemy designs are also some of my favourite out of the entire series. Even the sound effects used to scare me with this game. Definitely an underrated gem.
This game was great at creating a sense of dreadful tension, when having to deal with the ghosts, especially if you planned on pinning them down with the Swords of Obedience. This was the creepiest Silent Hill game for me. The moaning ghosts, hovering towards Henry, mixed with the rising noise filter always gave me chills.
All ghosts are walters victims, too.
When I played all these games as a kid, SH4 was the one that scared me the most. Being stalked by unkillable ghosts made me dread leaving the apartment, but returning to the apartment after a level was even scarier, usually, thanks to the hauntings.
The fact that he never went over the sword mechanic is suspect to me, which he should LOVE as it's an incredible risk/reward system that fits perfectly into Survival Horror theming as it takes advantage of every part of the genre: It uses precious inventory space, it's a limited way to fight back and make a secure space, it stays in place so it creates a natural back tracking incentive, which makes you think about its use in a tactical manner, the amount available to you are extremely limited, and retrieving them to use in another area revives a threat.
Anyone who's a fan of horror or survival horror should adore the swords at the very least on a conceptual level. The fact that he didn't mention them even ONCE tells me he likely didn't get near the end of the game, let alone finish it. Makes sense, he was convinced he was "playing well" because he carried a bunch of ammo with him at all times and wondered why he had to go back to free up space so often.
All the ways this game is similar to SH2/3 (combat, level layout, cutscenes, etc.) are poor by comparison, but the unique horror elements are (IMO) the most effective in the series.
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Ultimately I think that comparing the games in this series with eachother generates an unfair bias. "Horror" and "fun" are subjective, but we forget that when we are measuring by 1's and 0's.
The ammount of opinions and disinformation presented here as facts is simply staggering. So much for that Tomm Hulett stuff, eh?
I've never heard of anyone who struggled as hard with grasping the basics of this game as you did.
No he just sucks at the fighting in these Silent Hill games
This video was very biased and very nitpicky and mean
@@sygyzy0933 Exactly. He claims to love games but all he does is talk about himself and his very biased, over-emotional and VERY cynical opinions. I'm done with this guy - adding him to my "do not recommend" list.
@@Todo-1996 He whines about being confused about the writing. Dude, me and everyone I've known who's played SH4 says that it's over-explained to the point of being repetitive in its exposition. Anyone who can't follow is purposely not paying attention.
@@TheMightyPika Yeah and I feel like he's mad because this game doesn't hold your hand like silent hill 3 does.
If you're confused about the locations and constructions of these environments, then you should know that these environments are actually in Walter's head/memory/dream. That's why some things look so weird. Also the cult is not actually involved with Walter anymore by the time this game takes place. Walter is trying to be reunited with his mother, but is actually performing a ritual to summon the cult's demon god without knowing it. In fact I wasn't confused by the story and notes at all. I had a pretty good idea what those notes meant even before I came to the end.
Definitely. It was pretty clear what was happening.
Each to their own. I really like 4. The storyline and general atmosphere is so dark. The room itself with you looking through your keyhole, out of the window etc and eventually dealing with haunting is a cool touch. And the ghosts and twins are some of the creepiest enemies in the series.
Though few of your criticisms are right. But you kept bashing the game for it's problems in an extremely long 41 minute review. You missed out on positives.
1- First one is ghosts they can't be killed they look quite terrifying, creppy music starts when you are near them and they also deplete your health.
2-Environments may have weak lightning but are quite well designed for horror game. Few areas within each world are quite scary such as basement in subway, few hospital rooms, apartment underworld version.
3-Hauntings in 2nd half is one amazing addition. Apartment which you consider safe in 1st half becomes a threat in 2nd half. It doesn't replenish health and a new haunting awaits you every time you revisit it for inventory management. Many hauntings are quite scary.
4-Ghosts of victims who died in front of Henry specially Cynthia's ghost is fucking nightmare.
5-Monsters such as Twin victims, monster which comes out of wall my favorite. Other monsters are stupid and have funny sounds.
Lastly game has flaws because it had a very rushed development cycle of around 1 year so this did not give team sufficient time to optimise stuff.
Also, if you actually did your research and paid attention to the games as you played them, you'd know there's a memo in Silent Hill 3 that SPECIFICALLY mentions the orphanage in the woods AND the tall cylindrical water prison tower that ARE BOTH IN SILENT HILL 4.
I love your reviews but this one was totally biased. I get that if the game seems boring to you you are not gonna be that invested on it but mate you are not just playing the game you are reviewing it so please talk about all the game has to offer and not only the bad. You didn't mention the ghost and the sword mechanic, all the nasty stuff that happens to your apartment after the second half, how you need to take care of Eyleen or even commented on the gunplay or bosses. This was totally unprofessional and SH4 deserves another review, you think the game is bad and you wouldn't recommend playing I really don't mind I also find this game the worst of the bunch but only pointing out the bad is not fair to the game.
The fact that he put more effort into Umbrella Corps and being unbiased in that video is actually embarrassing.
There's one major positive to this game thought I feel you missed out on. It introduced quit possibly the best musical piece in the series, Room of Angels. Whether it's with vocals or just the instrumental, it's honesty an amazingly powerful song. As to whether it fits this exact game, I can't say, but it came with this game and for that I can thank the game for it.
I think the song Your Rain is very underrated as well.
Compared to all the pretenders that came after, SH4 is still a jewel in the crown of psychological horror. It stands the test of time. Nobody cares about Downpour or Shattered Memories. This was the last True Game in the Silent Hill series. The backlash is testament to that. Still, I appreciate your critique. Honesty is a rare thing in our cruel, twisted world.
I disagree. Shattered Memories was fucking amazing and the reviews show. It's a hidden gem with such a great soundtrack (Hell Frozen Rain, Acceptance, When You're Gone, Always On My Mind) and a gripping story.
I admired Downpour's attempt at world building in a post cult Silent Hill. It's just the Order was my favorite part, and the only reason the supernatural remains in Silent Hill.
i’d say a lot of people care about shattered memories, a lot of people see it as the best post-team silent game actually
downpour is… definitely a less popular entry though
Hmm, well I always liked Henry's quiet character, it's one of the reasons I prefer this to the "blondes have more fun" shenanigans of SH3. I think it makes sense that he's so introverted, as though it's symbolic of him being trapped inside his apartment, literally and perhaps figuratively. He lives alone after all - It just seems very fitting to me.
It's no SH2, but The Room is a decent game, if a little depressing (and annoying as fuck when you have to take Eileen with you while being pursued by Walter through the second half of the game). I do think it's the scariest of the lot, too. The creature design in SH4 is genuinely horrifying, the entire game I was tortured with anxiety - which is obviously not for everybody lol.
For anyone watching this video to decide if SH4 is worth your time, I would look elsewhere. I happened to like the game, and it's fine if you don't, but a lot of the criticism here is pretty nitpicky and paints an incomplete picture of the game, imo. Check it out on your own and decide for yourself. It's not the kind of game I think you can get a feel for by listening to someone else talk about it. Watch a bit of a playthrough of it if you have to, seriously.
for me, Silent Hill 4 is still part of the official Silent Hill Family; it might be the black sheep but it still feels more like a silent hill unlike Homecoming and Downpour
I will forever defend Homecoming, not Downpour, I enjoy Downpour… But that doesn’t mean I will include it in a real Silent Hill conversation. I will however always include Homecoming in the SH conversation though. Not only is it a legitimate Silent Hill game but it’s honestly the single most underrated in the series. As such, I won’t say it’s as great as Silent Hill 1,2 & 3 but I will say it’s about even keel with Silent Hill 4.
i am pretty sure that the places you visit seem so much bigger and more intimidating because you are experiencing them the way Walter did when he was a kid. that "prison" was huge and isolated because that is how he saw it. that massive "killing room" that was taken straight out of a horror movie. the orphanage was one small building with a playground in the middle of a giant forest. the apartment buildings were all scary looking and had crazy stuff happening. to a kid all of this would make sense but Henry is only seeing in his nightmares the exaggerations that a child's imagination can produce, especially one that was traumatized and brainwashed. just as the saying goes how the world is so much bigger and scarier when you are a kid.
I like that interpretation, never thought it that way.
The dogs are blind. They home in on you if you run but can usually just walk right past them. Ghosts were really the only thing I run from in this game.
Or equip the Saint Medallion, it slows them down (nearly stopping them in place) and drains their HP, also protecting your from their aura.
How is SH4 not meant to be a SH game if back in SH2 there are mentions to Walter Sullivan and the murder of the twins? All true SH fans knows that.
Also "There was a hole here, its gone now" in that cafeteria that looks so much like the second area of SH4?
Change the title to "Silent Hill 4 The Room: SH RANTrospective". Because that's what this video is: 40 mins of ranting and nitpicking.
Yeah, this is why I can't take this review seriously at all. Because, this dude clearly has a bias against this game as he constantly tries to refuse to acknowledge it as main series game alongside 1, 2 & 3 and yet even as someone fan pandering to those game doesn't even acknowledge the elements from those games that tie into 4. If this was meant to be an objective review, it's exceptionally poor as it deserves to only assault Silent Hill 4 while refusing to acknowledge it's use of horror and enemy design and if it was meant to be a fan review it's also poor because it completely undermines Silent Hill 2 & 4.
I can only hope this style of content isn't his usual thing.
Dude put up quotes from like four different people saying that it wasn't originally supposed to be a SH game and you're still disputing it? Idk what to tell you...
@@strahinjagov There are quotes from Team Silent that contradict these same statements. Also, it does not matter whether it started off as a SH game or not, TS members have stated it was meant to be a spin-off at the very least, before they decided somewhere early in development to make it a main entry in the series. So all in all, it does not matter.
One thing you have to give this game credit for is it didn't try to follow the same story as James Sunderland, Henry is just some guy pulled into the story just like Harry was.
Well, it took the same "unrelated, almost a spin off" approach that Team Silent took with 2 also.
Its nice seeing fans of this great series discussing about the games and forming their own opinions on the subject. But this theory that Silent Hill 2 is a "spin off" it will never work. In work of fiction there was never a rule dictating that a main entry in a series needs to feature the same cast of characters or direct connections to the previous main entry. It just doesn't exist. If you truly believe that main entries like Fatal Frame II, Obscure 2, Doom 3, Bioshock Infinite, Quake 2...hell the second Friday the 13th movie... and all Final Fantasy main entries for that matter, if you truly believe those to be all spin offs then we have ourselves the perfect recipe for delusion.
Your description of the "dream worlds" being too fantastical is very reductionist to me, as is the idea of reducing them to "dreams". What makes the otherworld in 1, 2, and 3 any different? I'm sure that the Orphanage doesn't really look like that, just like Toluca Prison obviously looks nothing like what we explore in SH2. Just because people are seemingly teleported into them makes it different? Every environment in 4 barring the Forest is on a level of surreal beyond the areas in other games, it's more like it's Otherworld for the entire game. Also, saying that it has "nothing to do with the series elements" when it's a psychological horror game primarily focused on the psychology of a serial killer and a man who never leaves his apartment with the backdrop of an occult ritual to manifest a terrible god?
Quite frankly I do not think you gave this game's story as much focus and effort to explore as you did for 1-3, especially 3. Most of what you said about it's inconsistencies and "lack of explanation" is wrong, you just missed it.
Well in sh4 they are actually dreams. In the other games in the series, the other world exists in the real world. The people in silent Hill are the ones who influence and populate it.
@@AvalancheReviews I appreciate the response. I dont think they are just actual dreams. In HP Lovecrafts work, dreams refer to a real, tangible sort of other layer of reality. Now this is getting into the "alternate dimension" discussion of SH and The Otherworld, which I have no stance on, but I'll just say that I think it's meant to be inconsistent and unclear how these things work, as it heightens the terror and surreal mystery. Laura doesnt see any of the horrors that James does, and Silent Hill usually looks different simultaneously to Angela, Eddie, and James. I dont think 4 is any different just because they are referred to as dreams.
@@AvalancheReviews Except you're missing/forgetting things. Harry himself also referred to it as a nightmare. Which is actually an apt term for what's going as the town is being pulled into Alessa's Nightmare, created and sustained by her psychic power, the power of the town and possibly the power of the fetus God within her.
Walter's world is that but on a smaller scale. Instead of forcing his nightmare on the world, he's pulling people into his world while they sleep. Hence why Henry always awakes up in his bed upon returning to his apartment. In fact, you can see Richard sleeping in his apartment during the events of the first Town level despite you know, being in that place at the same time.
As for the worlds, themselves, much like the twisted versions of Silent Hill locations in SH1 are born of nightmares and memories of Alessa twisted into a nightmare, the SH4 worlds are born of nightmares and memories of Alessa twisted into a nightmare. The Water Prison wasn't actually the Orphanage but a separate building, implied to be an old water treatment plant that was abandoned and taken over by the Order to serve as a private place where the kids were taken to be punished which frequently happened because the Orphanage was run by the Order as a place to break down children and indoctrinate them to the Order's beliefs. So it's unsurprising that a small child would turn such a place into a nightmarish sprawling prison.
Oh and with regards to the Cult's state during SH4, remember Walter was indoctrinated by Dahlia years before the game starts. In fact, if you go back to SH1 it actually explains a weird scene in that game. The scene where we see the memory of Dahlia realizing she could use Alessa to birth God. Because originally she was planning on using Walter and the 21 Sacraments to do it.
So basically Walter's a leftover of the cult doing his own thing as multiple early victims were cult members and it's implied that they wanted him to do the Sacraments on the Mother Stone, not the apartment. Therefore it doesn't actually matter what the state of the cult is in SH4 because Walter hasn't been a part of the cult for years if he ever truly was.
@@Krieklow You know HP Lovecraft took most of his ideas from other, better writers right? He's not the bible on all things horror. If you want that, quote Edgar Allen Poe next time and try reading The King in Yellow by Robert Chambers, a real writer from before Lovecraft's time that writes SO much more fluidly and entertainingly then he does.
@@cave_dweller6 In no way did I say "Lovecraft is the horror bible" you jackass. You know that Edgar Allen Poe wrote literally nothing like Lovecraft's Dream Cycle, which is directly what SH4 was inspired by, and that by spouting bullshit about subjects you have no knowledge of, you make yourself look dumber instead of smarter? Lovecraft was a huge Poe fan and took some inspiration from him, but in terms of the actual "plot" and lore of any of Lovecraft's famous stories they are nothing like Poe. Lovecraft did take big inspiration from Dunsany and Chambers, but his notable work was still strongly distinct from any of theirs.
But by all means keep up with the epic reddit facts you learned that make you feel clever for repeating them, even though you have clearly not actually read Lovecraft OR the artists that inspired him.
I can't imagine likening over two dozen talented programmers and artists to "the guy who gets everybody coffee" just because I don't like their game/want to downplay their relevance to the overall team that worked on the series.
Damn, he never addressed you lol
he is an emotional bitch sometimes😂
Out of the Silent Hill games I played, I found 4 to be the scariest. I think the way the game subverted your safe hub into something really dreadful and scary to return to later made the game extremely horrifying to play in the later chapters. It's one of the horror games that became scarier the longer you played it to me, which wasn't the case for Silent Hill 2 and 3.
Room was the scariest SH for me and underrated af.
randy bear IKR
The concept was great. Game play was shietttt
I'm an alien and yes brah it crap.
I loved this game so much
@___________ 3 is easily the scariest in the franchise
I enjoy your videos, dude, but this has to be the worst Silent Hill 4 review I've seen. It seems like you let a lot of your personal bias against this game get in the way of properly criticizing it.
Well , he sais in his videos that his rstrospectives aren't realy reviews of the games . Just him talking about how he remembers and feels personaly about the game
Yeah I’d say you don’t understand the video tbh.
Walter Sulivan was mentioned in SH2. Maybe SH4 didn't start as silent hill game but it was changed into a silent hill game early in development in my opinion. as for core members, the director of SH2 was involved in SH4.
The cult of silent hill recruited Walter from childhood and during this time the events of SH1 and SH 3 didn't happen yet.
It started as The Room 302. But the project was scraped and they made a Silent Hill game, with a bit changes.
@@desktopthegamer3411 that's been debunked
The developers made those statements, but they also clarified what they meant in follow-up interviews. The project started out as a spin-off of Silent Hill that would have taken place in the same universe as Silent Hill, but feature different concepts and lore. Shortly into the development and writing process however, they realized the story they were creating was very much intertwined with Silent Hill's lore, and so they decided to make it part of the main canon of works, tying it to SH2 as well as the history of Silent Hill.
Unpopular opinion but SH4 is my favorite in the franchise. Definitely not the most polished or complete game in the series, and it sure made some odd choices, but I feel it is a game that was very ahead of its time in terms of story and atmosphere, which is why it has aged very well and gathered a sort of "cult following" (me included). PT is the most obvious example of how the room became very influential with time, many of its concepts were used and adapted on PT.
Not only it has the best and most interesting story in the series with a amazing shift of protagonist (where the protagonist is actually the villain), but the best atmosphere of all. Its actually the only SH I felt genuinely scared while playing. It was not a pleasant or funny experience, but a rather oppressive one. There's not one bit of ludonarrative dissonance in this game
Essay over
I just love SH4 ok please leave me
Ehhh.... 10 minutes into this video and I have to say I'm very disappointed at how biased and bashing it is.
Guess we can't agree on everything
But just to keep a note: SH4 started as a whole new game but became a part of SH during pre production, which is why it is heavily based on story and concepts already approached and mentioned in SH2 and 3. And no, it was not made by a different team, it is and always was a Team Silent Game. Even SH2s director worked on it. I don't know where you got all this wrong info from...
Ian Z LOL wow
Edit: sorry for not contributing anything substantial and just resorting to a snarky one-liner. But hey man, I feel that's a pretty mean and short-sighted thing to say. "YOU'RE not a true fan!" That's pretty mean. Consider that the Western-developed SH games all copied the formulas and fan-favourite Silent Hill tropes to be safe, and those are pretty universally regarded as not great contributions to the series. Maybe OP loved the first three SH games and valued SH4 and PT for changing the expected formula in unexpected ways. That's exactly how I felt about SH4 and PT.
I agree. This game was my introduction to the series and something about it put me in an entirely different world while playing. I got a similar feeling from SH3 but I appreciated SH4’s self contained story and found it more immediately immersive.
The protagonist was arguably also the villain in SH2.
Same, it was my first SH game, and it’s the eeriest to me. And the soundtrack is so beautiful too. Walter’s story brings me to tears, and the feeling when you find out Cynthia is gone is when you realize shit just got real ;-;
This video title should have been "All the errors and things I didn't like about SH4"
I hated parts of this game too, but I can't help but feel like you commented on a lot of things without fully understanding it, at least not as deeply as the prior games. So much of the game's world is built on Walter Sullivan's traumatic experiences throughout his life- the orphanage, the prison, etc. His obsession with finding his mother also runs throughout the game, too, hence the weird umbilical cords in each of the areas. It's really clear on a first play through, but maybe I'm remembering things through rose tinted glasses. I'm also surprised that you didn't discuss the ghosts. That was one of the biggest changes in this game compared to other Silent Hills but it goes unmentioned.
Your complaints about this game being so different from the rest of the series is essentially why Konami keeps giving us the same recycled format of following Silent Hill 2 beat by beat. Silent Hill 4 was great and had the same tone as the rest of the games. I love that they were doing something different and yes the cult is in the game - Walter Sullivan was essentially a backup plan to Alessa birthing the god.
Why are you conflating the difficulty with the tone/story/etc?
Those things have nothing to do with what he's talking about, or the difficulty.
“Different” doesn’t mean good. SH4 has mixed reviews because it’s a meh game, not because it’s different from SH2.
Shut up
Say what you want man, but I think Walter Sullivan's backstory/motivations were realer than any of the characters in the past games. And is actually one of the most tragic stories to come out of this series (after james' of course). Most of it is told through old journals and newspapers though.. but I like that investigative aspect of the game too. You actually feel like you are peeking into the mind of this horrible serial killer everytime you explore the "nightmare world" and pick up information about his crimes and his past. You think you are about to go face to face with a monster but in the end, all you find is an extremely lonely and horribly abused man-child who just wants to be with his mom... It's actually an awesome and effective abstract storytelling, perfectly in line with the rest of the Silent Hills. But you really have to look at it as its own game, with its own world, without certain preconceptions of what it has to be, to really appreciate it.
What you’re referring to it’s not the orphanage around minute 9, it’s the water prison, a disused water treatment facility shaped like a giant concrete cylinder. This facility is actually mentioned in SH3, in a document by Joseph.
What you have to remind yourself is that Henry is visiting Walter’s nightmare world and more than likely the look of the facility in Walter’s nightmare world is exaggerated in comparison to its real counterpart, especially because he was locked in there as a child several times and there’s trauma involved with it in his subconscious.
Just like there’s no saying the prison in SH2 is actually like that since that part of the game is literally James descending and getting deeper into his own psyche.
Also, Henry is supposed to be a big introvert & socially awkward, so his traits explain his reactions, although bad voice acting & direction is also involved as to why he’s so bland but there’s clear intent from the Production team to show you that’s he’s an introvert & socially awkward.
This is no dig but I feel like you didn’t understood big chunks of the game & understandably so, the story while great is a little bit more complicated than previous games but after everything dissected it does not contradict the prior 3 games and actually adds more lore to them.
Another thing, the ritual plan was put into motion, as in brainwashing little Walter before the events of SH1, so I don’t understand your comment of the cult being weakened after Harry & Heather dealing with them, that comment of yours would make sense if the ritual plan started after SH3, but it didn’t. Regardless of the cult getting weaker, Walter continued the plan due to his personal goal of reuniting with his mother and not because he had any links left to the cult or by the cult’s demand.
Also, this is no dig to your work. I like your videos and they’re very well put together and you generally have a great script and good understanding of Silent Hill lore and games but I feel like you misunderstood big chunks of this game and this is one of those games that can only be fully appreciated in its right context.
Give it a few more tries in the future, might be a fun one to revisit and maybe produce a part 2 to this video.
Keep up the good work!
I think its pretty unfair to judge SH4 on the basis of "it was never meant to be a Silent Hill game" when really, that change was so early in development that its almost irrelevant (Mr. Konami didnt just arrived one day, saw a nearly finished game and said "yeah, can you make it a SH game now?").
Also, the game was always going to be linked to SH anyway even if it stayed as "Room 302" cuz it was always meant to be a sort of spin off of the series and born from a desire to try smth different with the SH formula.
What is smth?
@@-pressxtostart- I think it's something
The game is called Silent Hill 4. It was officially launched as Silent Hill 4. So what if it originally wasn't going to be part of the series? It doesn't make it any less of an entry, just like Nintendo officially released Super Mario Bros 2 despite the original game being nothing like a Mario game. Fact is fact. This game is SH4. Deal with it
I think the "This game is not, and was never going to be, a Silent Hill game," thing comes more as an observation than a declaration, or at least that's how I took it. Just like how people will say that Mario 2 is a mario game in name only, this game is also only an SH game in name. Both share elements and staff with their parent series, but neither were conceived or developed as an entry, up to a certain point. Fact is fact; sh4 was started and greenlit as an unrelated game. Deal with it, or whatever :p
@@cryobot6641 yet it's Silent Hill 4. Dealt and done. Say what you will, whether it was originally conceived as such or not, the fact that the OWNER of the IP called it SH4, it is and should be the last say on it. Fanboys or haters can claim whatever they want, it's not going to change how or what this game is. Also, Jared is excessively hating on this game in the review as if his momma got slapped during the development of this game lol
In my opinion, SH4 has one of the weirdest, most Lynchian and alien narratives/atmospheres in a Silent Hill game, and it's worth playing for that reason alone. Obviously it's rough around the edges with burping monkeys and shit but after the Western SH releases just modeled themselves after the fan favorite Silent Hill tropes, I'm personally glad we have a weirdo entry like SH4, it's pretty crazy that something like this exists at all to me.
This sounds more like a "RANT" than a "Retrospective"...
True, very biased and nitpicky
SYGYZY0 You’ve commented the same comment everywhere. Jesus dude.
@@Blarglesnarfe you caught me 🤷♂️ I just wanted to get my point across and confirm if I was tripping or not
Garbage retrospective, no wonder considering this dude thinks Resident Evil 4 is a bad game.
You're tearing me apart Eileen! It's bullshet, I did not hit her. I did not. Oh hai Walter
lol
a man of culture
The plot is still very honest J-horror to me, different from the crappy western Silent Hill games down the line. It has big problems sure, but the premise with the Room itself is so interesting to me.
Both Downpour and the Room are underrated bc it's not from team silent
Both games has solid enjoyable story with some interesting game mechanics.
@@DD-hx8td I'm not sure I'd say Downpour was enjoyable. And there is one big misconception there, SH4 was made by Team Silent, just with different people at the head because the rest of the team was working on SH3. This is why we call them a B-Team, same group, different individuals where it would have potentially saved the project.
@@satorukuroshiro so they where working on 2 games at the same time.
That explains the broken combat
@@DD-hx8td Let's be honest, it explains a lot more issues than just the combat.
@@satorukuroshiro the story was good but not explained well, the level design wasn't so good , and limited inventory in a silent hill game
I've got to be honest man, this feels a very subpar review and that primarily is due to the fact the way it's delivered seems like you clearly wrote it with a bias before you even played the game. The fact you opened your review with completely inane details such as which Team Members worked on the game as if that somehow justify's your opinion of it would seem to indicate you weren't looking at this game fairly. The fact of the matter is, the story for this game was seeded all the way back in Silent Hill 2, and regardless what form it was meant to be delivered it was clearly always meant to be canon.
As for the method of story telling really is a matter of preference, fractured story telling is something either you can get on board with or you can't. That's personal preference and not a matter of fact. Also, it's dumbfounding that your confused as to why all these notes are found in Henry's apartment when it's made abundantly clear throughout the game the apartment is a haunted vassal for Walters memories and his life and Walter or possibly Joseph wants you to see it. Silent Hill 4 clearly goes for Claustrophobic Horror, it wants you to take in every small detail that the apartment is packed to breaking point with and it wants to unsettle you when the game violates that space and changes those details.
I do apologise for the critique of your review as it does merit some a few points like some of the baffling game design decisions, however it's also severely undermined by your refusal to acknowledge 4 as a main entry in the series and blatant attempts to categorise it as something lesser or inferior. I will however wish you all the best in future.
Well written critique; you shouldn't apologize for it, how else is he going to improve if someone doesn't point out the flaws?
I also think this retrospective is considerably biased, too focused on "I know I won't be able to convince you guys that I am right" or "people are going to write this or that in the comments, I can already see it", or "people are going to scream when they disagree with me". It' a tad immature.
@@TalkingAboutGames Jared seems like one of those people who dissmises every game after SH3 from the get go, and also one of those "muh cannon" guys. I always treated SH as kind of an horror anthology loosely connected by some characters. "SH4 cant have a giant tower in Silent Hill because it was not in previous games!!!!" by that logic SH2 cant have Brookhaven hospital because we don't see it in SH1... His previous video about HD Collection was also very biased and misinformed.
@@DzikiWaclaw SH as a loosely connected horror anthology; that's actually a really good way to consider the series as a whole.
@@TalkingAboutGames Bless thank you, man. I don't want to give off the impression I've got any animosity towards Jared but Silent Hill 4 is a game that while is deserving of critique I just feel deserves to be seen in a fair light because as far as creative design goes it really has so much more to it than this review would imply.
@@DzikiWaclaw I completely agree with this, Silent Hill has always been fairly loosely connection and I love that. It makes the series open to interpretation and discussion without treating it's players like idiots by pointing it out and that's why Silent Hills community is one I adore. I'm not what you'd call... sophisticated so I can barely scratch the surface of what's going on in some of these games but it does get me to think and it always keeps me coming back.
I thought that the concrete tower in 4 was mentioned in 2 or 3 where a reporter talked about how the cult had a large circular building.
this is not an impartial review
Is it supposed to be? It's a guy who put his opinion out there. There's no such thing as an "impartial critique," really anyway.
He puts the work into his videos so his opinion gets attention and yours doesn't. That's all this is.
1:25 Konami wanted to make a spin-off. But then desided to scrap the project and make a Silent Hill game with a bit newer aspects. So it was susposed to be a Silent Hill game.
Yup, the only argument was over what the silent name should be ,its a bit of a false dilemma he's created by saying it was originally a sh game. Neither was the first it was supposed to be a Stephen king's game to 'the mist'
@@instinctivelychelsea2905 No it wasn't. That's an old fanwank myth.
@@CustardBustard isn't there interview's of people who worked on the game proving what the commenter said to be right though?
I know "Silent Hill 4" did not start as a Silent Hill game, but I think it ended up as one very nicely. SH 1 and 3 were the start and conclusion to the main story, and SH 2 was one individual's experience in the town, but SH 4 was the town reaching beyond its own boundaries to infect other places, like a spreading infection. After SH 4, all the games were a rehash of SH 2.
The developers said it themselves on well documented interviews: "Silent Hill 3 was the game that our fanbase wanted to play, but we didn't wanted to make. And "Room" was the game that we wanted to make, but our fanbase didn't wanted to play."
In the end SH4 ended up being a better game than SH3 which was making the series stale and made many fans realise "Ok this is getting old".
I’d have to slightly disagree with you on this game. I really liked the story premise of the game, it had a sense of despair to it. Also, I really enjoyed the environments in this game
Did he seem biased to you and unnecessarily mean?
SYGYZY0 everyone is biased. It’s his opinion. I just disagree with a lot of what he thought about the game.
@@SuperBruce53 you're right, but the reason it stood out to me and why I felt I needed to say anything is because it seemed out of proportion
Love your reviews but I just wanna say that as a "spin off/not a SH in spirit" it is MUCH BETTER than any of the western Silent Hill games. Art style alone, it's a feast.
"What part of Silent Hill is supposed to house this huge towering orphanage? According to the lore of the game, this orphanage does exist in Silent Hill, but does it only exist in the dream world? Because otherwise I think we would have noticed the thing that spirals into the clouds. And if so, how the hell are they getting kids in there?"
Okay, one, its name is "Water Prison World", so it's not an orphanage, it's a prison that the cult have likely repurposed to hold misbehaving kids from the actual orphanage (which we see in Forest World). I expect it's located somewhere in Toluca Lake, probably nearish the orphanage, and they likely get kids in there by boat. It's only five stories, it hardly "spirals into the clouds", but as for why we've never noticed it, I feel like it's the same reason you can't see much of anything else in Silent Hill: the lake is covered in a dense fog. According to the wiki, people outside the cult think the prison is a water treatment facility, which I guess explains why nobody thinks it's weird that it's there. Of course this raises the question of why there are two separate prisons in Toluca Lake, this one and the one we visit in Silent Hill 2, but I'm not going to get into that right now.
The prison in Silent Hill 2 doesn't exist at the moment as it was replaced by the museum. The whole location is only a delusion created in James' mind. That's why I believe SH4 Prison was built in replacement for the destroyed SH2 prison. I don't know if I'm right though, I didn't dig into it closely.
@@Luce129 That makes sense. That also explains why the elevations are so off; James drops down like nine holes and leaves through a door at water level.
I feel like there's too much bias going into these Retrospectives nowadays. Still not too bad of a watch though.
Thank you, I really thought it was just me that noticed the staggering amount of bias and hate in this video which is very unusual
Your videos are more often than not fantastic, but every once in a while you get on a little whining spree and let your biases cash checks your ass can't back up with logic. This one's a big no from me, dawg. Also seems weaselly to give the big heart to all the comments that explicitly agree with your take, rather than ones that are well-reasoned despite which side (if any) they come down on - it exposes a bit of vanity.
A year late but I totally agree. I really enjoy his videos, and have watched some multiple times, but his bias has always been apparent, and sometimes it really affects the criticism in his videos. Take the tangent about SH2 fans in that video, or his reductive description of survival horror in countless videos, it just taints some of the videos for me and is something I've come to expect watching them.
I don't think the Orphanage actually looked like that in Silent Hill, it most likely was an interpretation of Walter's feelings about that horrible place.
I absolutely loved this game when it released. It nailed the "haunting" feeling while playing SH quite perfectly. I always had the feeling I was being watched while I played The Room. It caught quite a bit of flack but I've personally always loved how this game felt like the perfect "side quest" for Silent Hill... Great video, as per usual! I would LOVE to see Alan Wake & or the Max Payne series get retrospectives on this channel.
Cynthia Velasquez is just a normal girl (woman) she's acting the way she is because she believes it's just a dream
This game traumatised me the most of all the SH games when I was younger, thanks to the ghost/victim enemies of the game. I can still remember the vivid nightmares this game caused. Coming from a guy who loves the horror genre and has played practically every horror game released to consoles. 😂
team silent literally said the room was originally a silent hill game
Spinoff but yes. They did.
It started off as a test for silent hill 4.
They were like "we've had a sulebt hill game about parenthood, marriage and guilt, puberty and growing up. so what's next?" They decided to make it about claustrophobia. They ended up getting a bit carried away and at times questioned if it's a silent hill game or not. Personally I think its not a Silent Hill game and doesn't need or be played to call yourself a silent hill fan.
Those two headed babies that point at you are the scariest enemies in any Silent Hill game, maybe the scariest in any horror game. They freak me the fuck out man.
it's a walking nightmare lol
I like Jared's reviews and his point of view, but some of his comments just makes me roll my eyes. I'm not a fan of this conceptualization of "true Silent Hill", "true survival horror" etc. Those things are in constant evolution (or change, if you prefer) and the origin of a concept it's not it's "true" form. Is it's origin. Also, why a power gauge on a screen takes someone out of immersion on a game, but stopping time around you in your inventory, as you reload your gun or using a healing item doesn't? Real time inventory should be a must for Immersion then. Yet, it's a videogame. Visual indications on things are necessary, I guess. But that's just me. At any rate, I still enjoy Jared's work and I can say this was another good take on the SH series.
I disagree entirely. This was an incredibly shitty take on SH4, one that really shows barely any understanding of the game itself. In his big megavideo on his retrospective review, I hit on some things from the HD version that were not warranted criticisms, and in SH4. I think he is waaay off the mark in the SH4 retrospective for sure.
9:00 You find it hard to suspend your disbelief cause there are wormholes that take you to a dreamworld even after Silent Hill 3 where Heather defeats a god by hitting it in the face with a katana or an iron pipe? Yeah I already don't like this video. It's too hard to take it seriously when you're saying stuff like this.
Strawman much? One is a main story concept, the other is a gameplay mechanic that doesn't necessarily take place. One is written in stone while the other is player choice. But okay.
@@Claidheambmor It's not a strawman, dumbass but keep being an idiot.
Here is the obigatory silent hill 4 was always supposed to be silent hill 4, the rumor that it was supposed to be another game but got changed to one was based on an translation error, comment you where looking for.
There's a reason why I fail to see the validity of the many nitpicks you've thrown out here. One, for example, is that Henry was meant to be a shell for the player, much like Gordon Freeman. In other words, Henry is you. Otherwise he'd be his own character like Heather or James, and that makes it harder for the player to amalgamate with him, which is essential in the sense that the developers wanted the characters around Henry to drive the story, not himself, and for it to be a more personal experience than usual.
I also disagree with pretty much all your points. Most of them feel very biased or based on your own incompetence at the game, and lack of research or misunderstandings of the game's concepts and mechanics. You expect the game to play in the exact same fashion like its predecessors, forgetting that the developers' main focus was to deliver this series into a new direction, and experiment with it. You refusing to try and understand this fact and forgetting about it in favor of half-assed criticism just comes off as fanboy-ish and narrow-minded. I almost felt the same way about some of the game's aspects on my first playthrough, but everything clicked after that as I began to realize everything in the game serves a purpose and is made exactly the way it is deliberately. I also noticed many things I missed and still do to this day, and out of all the first 4 SH games that I've spent so many hours on each, this is my favorite one. People give it way too much flak and it is left misunderstood for the wrong reasons. Like it or not, this game WAS indeed developed by Team Silent and yet you're going out of your way to negate this fact.
P.S. Have no idea why you played the Xbox port, but this game emulated on PCSX2 1.5.0 not only looks and sounds miles better (namely the lightning, colors, contrast and shadows you mentioned and NO dithering), but is also extremely stable and features more hauntings. That, or play it on the original PS2 hardware, I myself don't see the dithering as an issue.
I never understood the idea that SH4 was not meant to be a SH game. this is blatantly false. evidence for this is both in the games themselves and behind the scenes footage/interviews of Team Silent. In SH2 you can find newspapers referring to Walter Sullivan(SH2 came out years before SH4). and watching the making of SH3 you can see renders of Walter Sullivan on the computers in the Team Silent Office. So yeah, Silent Hill 4 WAS always meant to be a Silent Hill game and was being made as far back as Silent Hill 2 - 3. Fake News.
Agreed, I believe the biggest misunderstanding people have is that it was the Direction the game was originally going to take, as opposed to the entire game itself. Team Silent originally had some different plans mainly for enemy types and the story, but it was always meant to be a story firmly within SH lore. As I understand it, the implementation of the ghost victims were amongst the biggest changes that eventually took place.
While I do love the story that Silent Hill 1 and 3 tell, the whole "evil cult trying to summon satan" concept generally doesn't really resonate with me, personally. I'm a fan of this series for games like Silent Hill 2 and 4, and also Shattered Memories is surprisingly excellent (though seriously flawed, but then it's a Wii game). I would say that Silent Hill 4 does a lot of things well, and a lot of things poorly, and I personally think that the good parts far outweigh the bad. The premise is enough to sell the game for me: locked in your room, able to observe the outside world without affecting it, and you can travel freely to and from various dream worlds where you and other people are being hunted by Freddy Krueger. Meanwhile your room can be haunted in various ways that you need to deal with, and puzzles include going back to the room to do something mundane like washing grime off a coin or getting a bottle of chocolate milk to bring back to the dream world. This concept is just massively appealing to me, and they execute on it pretty damn well I think. So at least in my opinion, problems like clunky gameplay, a nonexistent protagonist, most of the plot and lore being provided through contextless text dumps, and even the entire second half of the game being one big escort mission backtrack-fest, aren't problematic enough to ruin my enjoyment of the premise and story on display here. I know for a fact that a lot of people agree with me, and a lot of people disagree. No accounting for taste, I guess.
This comment alone summed up both positive and negative aspects of the game better than this 40 mins video. Bravo.
I agree
This game isn’t as bad as he’s saying.. the problem with so many reviewers these days is their blinding love for the originals which will make future gameplay changes or different narrative choices deal breakers for them
Aside from Silent Hill 2, this is my favorite Silent Hill game and one of the best horror games that a lot of people don’t talk about. I feel like the escort mechanics and replaying the levels twice that turned people off but I thought not only was it a terrifying game but entertaining and had me on the edge of my seat the entire game. Also this game might be the scariest SH overall except maybe SH3. If you’re a horror fan then you HAVE to check this game out. It’s on PS2 and the original Xbox.
SH4 is the second best SH, right after SH2.
It's the most anxiety inducing, creepiest and uncomforting SH game there is.
The main reason SH2 is better imo is due SH2 having a better story and characters.
I agree!
Objectively correct ranking of Silent Hill games is:
3
1
2
4
So nah.
Idk I think the room is probably the scariest in the series
watch the movie. it's scary as hell. I wish the screen writers could have picked a direction to go into how ever the Amreicanization is beautiful in the movie from the "downtown" esthetic to the writing an dialogue to even the music used in said movie honestly I watched that before the games an was let down that it didnt explain the movie. (as I was a child. lmao) see I come from a bad house. the family isnt broken cause I never even had one time begin with I have what most people consider parents but they arent even when I was young I remember us acting normal then when noone wasnthere my father would beat my mother an destroy the house day was like heaven sometimes even good. night.... the walls would be destroyed,,,glass on the floor...most of the time they were both bleeding somewhere you learn how to hide. my mom left him but like a curse my own aunt betrayed us when my mom bout a trailer from her to hide from my dad. it had turned out my aunt had it infested with cockroaches so my mom gave use to my dad. I have dyslexia adhd... school was never easy I remembered just coming home to get beat fir asking for help. my brother was always first so by the time he got to me he was always really drunk. I guess I learned to repress most of it i just realized one day I could lie instead of being beaten. into the grate my worries maybe my innocents tho think I lost that long before......I watched that movie on repeat to build courage. . I had no clue then meaning but I knew seeing but helped realize my situation..
Saltiest retrospective ever! So much nitpicking. Basically, only when you like a game is when you find it's obvious flaws appealing.
Exactly, extremely terrible review barely covers anything and just complains about features that are not that big of a deal. Horrible.
For a retrospective this seems really one sided and slanted, more like a rant/review than anything. I am not saying the game is without criticism, but a lot of what you state as objective facts feel like personal grievances. That's fine but it doesn't really work because a retrospective is in my opinion supposed to talk about development, history, failures and positives.
I guess but I would rather him voice how he really feels about a game than to just put out a regular formulaic retrospective parroting the same opinions
@@nathanyoung4182yet he named this video a “retrospective”
This video is just him crapping on the game with no real research 💀
There is a way to make it fit sense in Silent Hill canon. Walter’s 21 Sacraments was the original plan and Alyssa was the back up, the Cult planed this before Alyssa was born. It also means that even if the cult is dead Walter is still going through with the plan not because he cares for the cult but because he just wants to see his mother.
PS. I didn’t think of this on my own, I watched another series talk about the entire Silent Hill series and they had this revelation.
I know people who are extreme introverts who act and sound exactly like Henry. He’s more realistic than you think and added to the atmosphere.
Omg I can't believe you didn't talk about any of the spooky stuff that happens in Henry's apartment! Over 40 minutes and absolutely no mention. I'm astounded. This video wasted my time. Otherwise it was okay.
I agreed with him my lady...
That stuff wasn't as interesting to me as the gameplay issues, video output and development controversy.
Yes SH4 was originally conceived as a different game. But almost all stuff you'll find about it's production is in referring to it as a Silent Hill game. So clearly the decision to make it an SH game happened extremely early in it's production life and it's not worth talking about it like it's not one
Despite its faults, I consider SH4 to be the most tense and terrifying in the series. A big difference that I noticed between my own experience with the game and yours is that you seem to have fought monsters a lot more often than I did. In my own play-through, I reserved ammo early on specifically for Sniffer Dogs, and ran past the majority of slower enemies. Please don't misunderstand, this is absolutely not me bashing you, but it says a lot about how you approached the game with the fact that you attempted to attack the wheelchairs, and how much time you spent attacking the Wall Men.
It absolutely has some jank here and there (especially in the lighting department), but I hope one day you revisit this title with a different mindset.
The reason for the water prison thing is that everything you encounter is from the perspective and trauma of how Walter sees the world. The further you get the more you learn the significance of the areas you end up in to Walter. That is why the prison seems impossibly tall. To Walter, at the time he was there it probably was huge and scary. Where in reality the actual prison was probably just from the first floor to the roof. I think of the worlds as walking around memories in Walter's head. You are limited to what he remembers and experienced in that area.
Cynically biased review as opposed to a thorough analysis of everything the game doesn’t do well, as well as what it does do well. Missed the mark with this one. The biased negativity got a bit on the annoying side. Love your other reviews and retrospectives.
Yeah, I was very confused about that. This dude seems to have a lot of followers and supporters which is why I found it surprising to find such a poorly written review. Is his usual content better than this?
@@Akechi_The_Phantom_Detective For me, personally, yes. His other works I've seen are great IN MY OPINION.
This game, while frustrating in a lot of ways, is the closest things to feeling like I’m stuck in a David Lynch movie.
Yep nicely summed up
So you complain about the health bar and charge gauge being visible wich break the immersion then you complain about how you use items in real time instead of pausing the action to access your inventory.......... make up your damn mind because you can't say something is bad because it break your immersion then say that something wich is immersive is not good because you don't like it.
DarkOrderSolDjango THIS YO
I adore you Avalanche reviews but this review feels extremely biased although I do agree with some of your key points, I think the story was followable on a first playthrough. I look forward to seeing more of your reviews in the future. 👌
Am i the only one who really liked this game especially the way the game gets you to care about Eileen to the point where it shocks you when something happens to her. The thing that annoyed the fuck out of me is the ghosts that need tobe pinnend to the ground with a knife.
This just in devil may cry is actually a resident evil game because thats what was intended when they started production.
I definitely disagree with his logic on that. SH 4 is still a Silent Hill game in my opinion, but to each their own. I still respect Avalanches opinion, even though I don't agree with it.
DMC was meant to be RE4, but they made it a completely different IP with a different universe. Therefore, it is not Resident Evil. Same goes for SH4, early they were thinking of making a new IP or a spin-off, before settling with the idea of it being a main entry in the series again, whether Konami had something to do with it or not, doesn't matter. It's in the past. This IS a main SH game.
@@VergilHiltsLT thats kind of my point. That just because something was intended early in the development doesnt determine what the end product is.
@@johnjacob3615 Yeah, I get you're being sarcastic about it.
SH 1 = cult and tormented little girls dream world
SH 2 = ppl have symbolic reasons bringing them to the town where they "face their demons"
SH 3 = tries to clarify Cannon from the first game and doing it's best to expand and innovate
SH 4 = a spin off story combining both the second and first games narrative nuances along with the it's competition RE game mechanics
PT = all the nuances of SH 4 that ppl didn't pick up on with a division between game narrative and story narrative
At one point in the video it's said that the rooms game mechanics can be found in future games... Innovation is messy
In my opinion it was the scariest silent hill imo and the story was awesome
amen
I think the problem is that this is a story about introversion and depression. Many people can’t understand the core concept of what Team Silent was going for here- but for me, this was the most resonant and frightening game of the core series.
@@thomasmoore5532 Yeah that really is what made it so pshychologically fucked up. One of the endings in Silent Hill 2 has James drive his car into a river to be with his wife. Thats sorta fucked up if you ask me but it actually could happen.
I love seeing all the people defending this game and giving it the love it deserves. This game is amazing and the only problem I have with the review is the misinformation, this game was always meant to be connected to silent hill and be a silent hill game. Also even though this was team silents B team, it actually had most of the members of team silent that worked on the previous games so it's safe to say this was made by team silent, not just the "coffee guys" who weren't really part of the team. I still love watching your videos bro and I respect your opinion but sometimes it feels like your too narrow in some of your views lol I'm still looking forward to your next video sir, I hope you eventually cover P.T!!!
So just prefacing this by saying, one, I've been in the community since the first game came out in 1999 and I was 14 (what fandom there was at the time), and two, I love Silent Hill 4; 2 and 4 are my favorites. That said.. it was all over the place after the game came out that it wasn't meant to originally be an SH title, _which is okay,_ and that most of the "main" Team Silent weren't working on it as they were busy working on Silent Hill 3, which is also okay..He really wasn't wrong on either of those points. If you were in the community in 2004, you ought to know. If you weren't, that's fine.
I have this game for the PS2 and still haven't finished it and I really should finish, but goddamn it still is terrifying to me to still play it nowadays and I'm in my mid 30's.
I believe in you, dude. You have to help Eileen, and child Walter.
Henry is probably emotionally broken, those people exist in life
"Take the cult out and omit one cameo from James Sunderland's father, and you have absolutely no ties to anything Silent Hill related."
Who ... who cares? Why does it matter so much whether it was originally a Silent Hill game or not? Nobody thinks SMB2 is less of a game just because it wasn't originally a Mario game. Why does it matter whether the game is or should be called Silent Hill? Shouldn't we judge games on their own merits, instead of on their titles? Why is this even part of the discussion? I actually don't understand why you're bringing this up.
It's a cheap way to criticize something when you know full well if someone they liked did it, they would get praise or a convenient hand wave for it.
He will still vilify Tomm Huelett for things that were completely out of his hands because "those things still happened".
I think while not as important as other things, a title is what defines something. To compare it to the other games, sure, that's kinda unfair I guess, but if you call it Silent Hill it's likely intended (partially, in this case) to be Silent Hill, looked at as Silent Hill, sound like it, and so forth which of course leads to being judged as a continuation of the series.
@@naitokyabarii664 But a game in a franchise can be praised for being different from its peers, as much as it can for being similar. Nobody gets mad about Majora's Mask or Link's Awakening for not being set in Hyrule and having nothing to do with Ganon. Again, nobody gets mad at SMB2 for being a reskin of an unrelated game, or any of the spinoff titles (Kart, Tennis, etc) for not having the same gameplay as the others in the series. Clearly this isn't actually important, and just seems important to people who dislike the game for other reasons.
You talked everything about this game except for the one that is this game's biggest strength: eery atmosphere. Seriously this game oozes atmosphere and has creepy eeery scares and you skirt right over them.
You're missing the big selling point.