Caltrops - Silent Hill 4: The Room - Starts going downhill later on

Forum Overview :: Silent Hill 4: The Room

by FABIO 11/05/2004, 2:31pm PST

The one had a refreshing premise: take an interesting Twilight Zone scenario, watch it develope from your apartment, go through nice bite sized levels that end before you get bored with them, jettison the gay item puzzles that plagued the previous games, and allow the player to heal back at the room so you don't have get all anal with healing item management.

All of these are chucked right out the window a little after the halfway point, which I believe is the point Fussbett stopped playing. The evolving story with Henry as a helpless observer in the apartment and meeting strange people in the portal grinds to a halt. Story events in the apartment almost completely disappear. No new developments happen in the portal, you just try to get from point A to point B in each level. You have to go through all the levels a second time, only now they last twice as long thanks to gay item puzzles (finding candles to put in a birthday cake, restocking volleyballs as a sporting goods store, and somehow figuring out I was supposed to bring a stuffed animal to a pet store and put it inside a cage have been the worst so far. These puzzles also mean you'll have to make room runs a lot more often to manage a full inventory) and the fact that you have to escort an NPC that frequently gets left behind between loading zones forcing you to go back to get them coupled with the fact that they cannot climb ladders forcing you to find some long alterntae handicapped accessible route. Difficulty ramps up suddenly and tremendously as invincible ghosts (even more invincible than the old ones) begin gang raping you hard and often and if you wasted the healing items you had found in all previous levels before instead of hording each and every one back at the room then you are FUCKED.

The last level is pretty creepy, but god DAMN going through the old levels a second time was a fucking chore.