Silent Hill will be on the minds of most horror fans for the next month, of course due to the fact that the hotly anticipated remake of the second game in the series will be released next week. I can’t blame anyone, I’ll think about it too, I love Silent Hill 2 – it’s a classic for a reason, and I’m curious to see what the wider consensus for its remake will be. Will people think of the original and “we didn’t know how good we had it”? Perhaps people will say that Silent Hill 2 “was actually always bad.” But I’m going to be thinking here: “OK, can we stop talking about Silent Hill 2 now and start talking about Silent Hill 4: The Room?”
Compared to other fans, I came to Silent Hill a little slow and also did everything in the wrong order. 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 seems a bit self-sadistic considering we were stuck at home for a while , but then again maybe it was the perfect choice.
Manage cookie settings
Playing Silent Hill 4 so long after release, a full two decades, also meant that I had the luxury of not being prone to annoying forum posters saying crap like “oh what the hell, this doesn’t even take place in Silent Hill, what a lot of garbage.” This meant I could go into the game fresh, free from opinions that were given simply to be right rather than to find out what the game actually was. Thanks to this, I kind of liked it, but only from my partner, a fan of the series for many years, I found out that people really didn’t like it.
That’s not to say that I’m easily swayed by public opinion, because I’m not, after all, I’m a defender of Final Fantasy 13 and I’ve heard a lot about how much people hated this particular game. I really couldn’t understand why people didn’t like it? Some people didn’t like the story, some didn’t like the gameplay, and many people didn’t like the fact that they had to go back to all areas of the game a second time. Personally, I was the opposite of all this.
In my opinion, Silent Hill 4 is still a game about Silent Hill, but it’s about the way it can affect those associated with it. It is also a game about voyeurism, child neglect, the act of birth and survival in the face of total uncertainty. On this last point, I always think of a comment from one of the game’s supporting characters, Eileen, who is your main protege during the game’s more focused second half on social missions, when she says, “Given the circumstances, I think We’re doing pretty well, huh…”
Sure, escort missions are notoriously annoying and Eileen’s AI can be a bit of a nuisance, but I just couldn’t lend a hand but win her over with this line. I haven’t stopped thinking about it in the four years since I first played the game, because it’s a hopeful character in the most unimaginably terrifying setting. A point that made it even harder when I failed to save her from her bloody fate in the ending I got.
That’s why I find it captivating to revisit previous locations and see how they’ve changed, often for the worse – places I’ve grown to trust and now have to completely learn. Not to mention the numerous completely unkillable ghosts that haunt you in every nightmare you visit.
Most effectively of all, the safest place in the game, the titular room, hero Henry Townshend’s apartment, slowly becomes less and less a place for rest and relaxation as various hauntings begin to appear. These spawn more and more quickly if you’re in the apartment too often, forcing you back into the game’s various sub-worlds. So it’s a game about places and the discomfort that comes when they change and the uncertainty of how to deal with it – you can see why it was perhaps a great game to play in 2020.
In the headline I ask when the game will get justice and I want to make it clear that I don’t think The Room should get a remake either, I’d rather it just get a fresh port, although it can also be played on a PC. I just want the Silent Hill fans who have disowned it to take a second look at it, the same ones who probably don’t realize how monotonous the environments in Silent Hill 3 (a game whose story I love) are and how unfairly confusing the gameplay can be Silent Hill 2 (a game whose puzzles I respect but hate on harder difficulty levels). When you free yourself from the idea that 2 is the only best, you will find more peace than you can imagine.
