Silent Hill will be on most horror fans’ minds over the next month, apparently because the highly anticipated remake of the second game in the series is set to launch in just a week. I can’t blame anyone, and I think about it too, I love Silent Hill 2 – it’s a classic for good reasons, and I’d be interested to see what the wider consensus would be for a remake of it. Will people reflect on the original and think “we had no idea how good our work was”? Maybe people will say that Silent Hill 2 “actually always sucks”. But I’ll be here thinking, “Okay, can we stop talking about Silent Hill 2 now and start talking about Silent Hill 4: The Room?”
I arrived at Silent Hill a bit late compared to other fans, and I did things in the wrong order. Back in 2020, at the height of the first lockdown, with not much to do, I decided to play Silent Hill 4: The Room for the first time, which in retrospect, considering the whole time we were stuck at home, was The behavior is a bit masochistic. thing, but on the other hand maybe it’s a perfect choice.
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I’ve been playing Silent Hill 4 for twenty years after it came out, which means I don’t have to worry about those annoying posters on forums saying, “Ugh, what the heck, this game isn’t even based on that.” “Silent Hill” as the background, what” nonsense. A load of garbage”. This meant I could dive into it in a completely new way, uninfluenced by opinions shared just to be right, rather than questioning what the game actually was. Because of that, I found that I kind of enjoyed it, just Found out from my partner (a fan of the series for many years) that people really don’t like it.
That’s not to say that I’m easily swayed by public opinion, I’m not, after all I am a defender of Final Fantasy XIII, and I’ve heard a lot about how much people hate the game. I really don’t understand why people don’t like it? Some people hate the story, others don’t like the gameplay, and many don’t like that you have to go back to all areas of the game again. Personally, I am the opposite of all of these things.
In my opinion, Silent Hill 4 is still very much a game about Silent Hill, but it affects the people involved with it. It’s also a game about voyeurism, child neglect, the act of birth, and survival in the face of complete uncertainty. Regarding the last point, I always think of the comments made by one of the game’s supporting characters, Erin, who is the main person in charge of the escort mission in the second half of the game. She said: “Considering the current situation, I think we did a good job, um… …”
Sure, escort missions are notoriously annoying, and Erin’s AI can be a bit of a pain, but, just, I couldn’t help but be won over by this statement. I’ve been thinking about this in the four years since I first played this game, because here’s a character with hope in the most unimaginably dire circumstances. This was made even more difficult when I failed to save her from a bloody fate in the finale.
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So I also find it interesting to have to revisit previous locations and see how they’ve changed, often for the worse – places I’ve become somewhat confident in but now have to completely relearn them. Not to mention there are countless completely unkillable ghosts that haunt you in every nightmare scenario you visit.
What works best is that the safest location in the game, the titular room, protagonist Henry Townsend’s apartment, gradually becomes less and less of a place to rest and relax as various ghosts appear. If you frequent the apartment, these will appear faster and faster, forcing you to return to the various sub-worlds of the game. This is a game about place, and the discomfort that comes when that place changes, and not being sure how to respond – and you can see why this might be a great game to play in 2020.
In the title, I asked when the game would get justice, and I wanted to make it clear that I don’t think The Room should be remade as well, I’d rather it just get a new port, although you can play it on PC as well. I’m just trying to get Silent Hill fans who have sworn off liking it to look at it again, who may not have realized how dreary the environments were in Silent Hill 3 (the game I loved the story in), and that Silent Hill 2″ is so confusing to play (I respect the puzzles of this game, but hate the harder difficulty). When you let go of the idea that 2 is the only best, you’ll find more peace than you ever imagined.
