Silent Hill 4 The Room

by Konami

Product Features

• A new Silent Hill adventure, where terror comes to your room
• Horrific new monsters, including spirits that can attack through walls
• Expansive areas to explore, including a forest, prison, and hotel
• A cast of mysterious new characters

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B0001Y73YQ
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 5.2 x 0.5 inches ; 4 ounces
• Media: Video Game
• Release Date: September 7, 2004
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (33 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,187 in Video Games (See Top 100 in Video Games)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: Xbox

Silent Hill 4: The Room offers a new cast and story, full of dark mysteries and horrendous new creatures. Henry Townshend is trapped in a cursed apartment. Mysterious portals have appeared in them, leading him to disturbing alternate worlds. This game is a terrifying experience that fans and newcomers will never forget.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Silent Hill moves into the surreal, September 14, 2004

By 

Martin Wagner (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Silent Hill 4 The Room (Video Game)

Silent Hill 4: The Room is the most unusual entry in a most unusual video game franchise. While earlier installments in the series have focused on stories designed to evoke spine-chilling horror, this fourth chapter in the saga causes much deeper feelings of anxiety and unease. I remember being more traditionally scared playing Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams, but the underlying, more psychological sensation of existential dread I felt playing this game was something altogether new.

The Silent Hill games have shown a narrative progression by which the nature of the town is expanded upon in each game. In the first two games, your character went to Silent Hill and had his horrific adventure. In the third, Silent Hill itself "came to" the main character of Heather, who merely wanted to have a nice day at the mall. In Silent Hill 4, the town has now invaded your last refuge of security, your home.

You play Henry Townshend, who lives alone in a small apartment in the bustling town of South Ashfield, half a day's drive from Silent Hill. After suffering from inexplicable nightmares, Harry awakens to find that his apartment door has been chained and padlocked shut from the INSIDE. He can't open his windows, and no one, even people standing directly outside his front door, can hear him when he pounds on the door and cries for help.

The game expertly evokes the desperate confusion and lurking fear you would feel if you simply couldn't get out of your house. The strangeness of Henry's situation is underscored by the fact that, tantalizingly, he can see the real world right outside his window, with cars and pedestrians zipping by on a street only fifty yards away. Neighbors in the apartment building opposite his can be seen going about their business (one guy, amusingly, is playing air guitar). The banality of day to day life takes on a whole new meaning when one person is suddenly set apart from it by horrific circumstances he can't understand or control. The next time you're taking a walk down the block, imagine if something terrifyingly Silent Hill-ish was happening to someone in the very house you're walking past, and you're safe outside with no way of knowing. The whole character of the neighborhood will change. That's the kind of thing the Silent Hill series does so well: conveying the deep terror that can result when what is normal and commonplace suddenly and without warning goes all WRONG.

The action begins when Henry discovers that a large hole has emerged in his bathroom wall. As it's the only way out, he must crawl through it, and doing so, finds himself in the decaying, blood-spattered environments of Silent Hill with which the series' fans have become so familiar. But this game offers alarming differences. Some of the creatures that menace you -- like the ghosts that look more like floating paralyzed corpses -- can't be killed, and others -- like the two-headed babies that walk on adult arms -- are so bizarre they beggar imagination. You're also limited in what you can carry, and the only place you can save your game is in your apartment, a safe haven you can return to through holes in walls spread throughout the levels. But even that safe haven isn't safe for long.

In earlier games, the horror, while nightmarish, was still rooted in a sense of realism that, in turn, created realistic horror. You'd walk down dark corridors or misty deserted streets armed with a flashlight and your weapon. But here, the environments are more outrageously surreal, as if you're literally wandering through a bad dream. Spiral staircases seem to float in thin air. A enormous woman's face peers at you from a hospital wall. Living tendrils of no discernible biology dangle upwards from the floor to bar your way. Wheelchairs zoom down corridors by themselves, as if it were a freeway for paraplegic ghosts. It's as if the game designers just decided to let Salvador Dali loose with 3D rendering software and instructions that he was to exercise no restraint at all in coming up with ways to freak people out.

Sometimes it gets a little TOO weird. At times I found myself less frightened by this game than morbidly intrigued; I was actually interested in getting to certain rooms just to see what kind of crazy thing I'd encounter next. In that sense, I'd have to say the earlier games work a little better as pure, edge of your seat, bloodcurdling horror. But Silent Hill 4 still does a bang-up job of generating an entirely different kind of fear, one that doesn't so much leap out at you from the dark as crawl deep into the back of your mind and lurk there.

I leave you with two pieces of advice. One: if you're new to the series, don't start here, start with 2 and 3. Two: don't take the doll.

18 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Stepping Backwards, September 15, 2004

By 

Aramis Gutierrez (NJ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

= Fun:2.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Silent Hill 4 The Room (Video Game)

Ok, so I could not believe in the bad press until I played through this game myself. This is the first SH game I didn't really enjoy. There is so much that is just wrong with it that it starts to overtake that which is new or innovative. Basically you play through 5 generic levels.......then you get to struggle through the same identical 5 levels with a limping companion who gets injured easily and who gravitates into conflicts with invincible enemies (I am not kidding). Some of the monsters/ghosts are creepy the first time you see them (which is saying something seeing how you don't encounter them in the dark with a flashlight) but lack the originality of SH2 or SH3 and have seemingly nothing to do with the storyline. The story is a re-hash of "Seven" morphed with "Nightmare on Elm Street" with a main villain who is about as scary as some trendy 20-something actor playing a serial killer in any boring 20-something neo-horror flick (not to mention Henry). Your room is an interesting and engaging concept but doesn't equate to what the spralling town of Silent Hill did for SH1 & SH2. Lastly, there is the soundtrack. Whoever thought to put a weak neo-metal ballad vocalist and a Peter Murphy wanna-be singing the lamest lyrics ever over the soundtrack needs to seriously explore another direction. On the SH3 soundtrack it was annoying and embarrassing, now it just sucks. Konami needs to put "quality" back into this series (no repeating levels, no RE item system) and seriously reconsider the nuances between scary and annoying game play.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Room: most innovated SH game yet., September 12, 2004

By 

Ryan H. (IA United States) - See all my reviews

= Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

This review is from: Silent Hill 4 The Room (Video Game)

For some fans of the series, this game will come to be a shock when you find out that there are two view points in this game, 1st and 3rd person. You see when your in The Room you have to be in 1st person for some odd reason but the only thing that bothered me about this setup was trying to get used to the somewhat clunky control scheme used there. Sometimes you might need to look at a certain thing, let's say looking out the window, well sometimes you'll get this message that says "I haven't been able to open the windows in 5 days..." when I was trying to look at the main glass part of the window.

Sometimes this 1st person can be a problem, but I started getting used to it and most of the problems stopped.

As for gameplay, it's your normal SH game but they've added some new features. Like you can only change weapons by using the D-pad in real time, meaning if you run out of ammo in the middle of the battle you can't pause it to save you so you have to plan ahead and bring melee weapons.

Also you iventory is no longer limitless, you have to return to your room and deposit your unneccessary objects in a chest, kind of like the boxes in RE.

They've added a special ability mode too where you hold down the A button while in combat position and wait for a bar to fill up, once it's full you unleash an attack that can either be more devastating or can hit more enemies.

The storyline of the game is great and has little tidbits from the other 3 games (which can easily missed so look carefully) but other than that this game is like the 2nd where it has no connection to the main storyline of the characters from the 1st and 3rd (want to know their names and plots? Well go buy the games and play them to learn the secrets of the cult based in the town).

The graphics in this game aren't bad some of the creatures in this game are creepy, and they've added ghosts, which cannot be harmed by normal weapons and are kinda like the Nemesis from RE3.

Buy this game if you like the series or if you like the whole survival horror genre.

2115|R2RJ0NACWEEZTP;2115|R7DF07RLTCLEC;2115|R32JU7ZPLX8BN7;