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Silent Hill is going to be on most horror fan’s brains for the next month, obviously because of the fact the hotly anticipated remake of the second game in the series is due out in a week’s time. I can’t blame anyone, I’ll be thinking about it too, I love Silent Hill 2 – it’s a classic for good reason, and I’m curious to see what the wider consensus will be of its remake. Will people reflect on the original and think “we didn’t know how good we had it”? Maybe people will say Silent Hill 2 “was always bad, actually.” Me, though, I’ll be over here thinking, “OK, can we stop talking about 2 now and start talking about Silent Hill 4: The Room?”
Compared to other fans, I arrived at Silent Hill a bit late, and I did things in the wrong order too. Back in 2020, during the peak of the first lockdown, with not much to do, I decided to play Silent Hill 4: The Room for the first time, a move that in retrospect feels a bit autosadistic given the whole being stuck inside your home thing, but on the other hand maybe it was the perfect choice.
Playing Silent Hill 4 so long after it came out, two whole decades, also meant I had the luxury of not being predisposed to annoying forum posters saying crap like “uh what the hell, this one isn’t even set in Silent Hill, what a load of trash”. It meant I could go in fresh, free from opinions that were shared simply to be correct rather than interrogate what the game actually was. Because of that, I found that I kind of loved it, only finding out from my partner, a fan of the series for many years, that people really didn’t like it.
This isn’t to say I’m easily swayed by public opinion, I’m not, I’m a Final Fantasy 13 defender after all, and I heard plenty about how much people hated that particular game. I just genuinely couldn’t understand why people didn’t like it? Some people hated the story, others didn’t like the gameplay, and there were plenty of people that didn’t like that you had to go back to all the game’s areas a second time. Personally, I was the opposite of all these things.
Silent Hill 4, in my opinion, is still very much a game about Silent Hill the place, but it’s the ways in which it can affect those connected to it. It’s also a game about voyeurism, child neglect, the act of birth, and surviving in the face of complete uncertainty. On that last point, I always think about a comment made by one of the game’s supporting cast, Eileen, who is your main charge during the game’s more escort mission focused second half, where she says “Considering the circumstances, I guess we’re doing pretty good, huh…”
Sure, escort missions are infamously annoying, and Eileen’s AI can be a bit of a pain, but, just, I couldn’t help but be won over to her with this line. I’ve not stopped thinking about it in the four years since I first played it, because it’s a character filled with hope in the most unimaginably horrific setting. A point that made it even harder when I failed to save her from a bloody fate in the ending I received.
So too do I find it interesting having to revisit previous locations, and seeing the ways in which they’ve changed, often for the worse – places that I had become somewhat confident in, only to now have to relearn them entirely. This isn’t to mention the numerous ghosts that are completely unkillable, that haunt you throughout each of the nightmare-scapes you visit.
Most effective of all is how the game’s safest location, the titular room, protagonist Henry Townshend’s apartment, slowly becomes less and less of a place to rest and relax, as various hauntings start to occur. These appear more and more rapidly if you frequent the apartment too often, too, forcing you back out into the game’s various subworlds. It’s then a game about places, and the discomfort that comes when they change, and being unsure of how to deal with that – you can see why maybe this was a great game to play in 2020.
In the headline I ask when will the game get justice, and I want to make it clear that I don’t think that The Room should get a remake too, I’d rather it just get a new port, though you can play it on PC too. I just want it to get another look-in from Silent Hill fans who’ve sworn off it, the very same ones who probably don’t realise how dull the environments are in Silent Hill 3 (a game whose story I love), and how unfairly confusing Silent Hill 2 can be to play (a game whose puzzles I respect but detest on the harder difficulties). When you free yourself from the idea that 2 is the only best one, you’ll find more peace than you can realise.