Caltrops - Silent Hill 4: The Room - Re: Spoiler-free tips for the ghosts

Forum Overview :: Silent Hill 4: The Room

by FABIO 11/05/2004, 4:29pm PST

BIG BIG SPOILERS!

curst wrote:

I gotta agree, the backtracking you have to do in the later parts gets pretty annoying. If the FPS mode didn't suck, and if the load times were better, it wouldn't be an issue at all. You know like, Diablo 2 town runs - they're something I don't care for, but they didn't have me wishing for an unlimited inventory. SH4 does make me wish I could carry a trillion things at once.

I think the apartment not healing (and in fact, harming you) after the halfway point is more annoying, since it's coupled with the fact that you CANNOT avoid taking damage from ghosts. This is made a definate when they start peppering ghosts in rooms that contain key items that you have to search for. The brithday cake room was the worst. Everyone's first run through that was "OH SHIT TWO GHOSTS GET OUT GET OUT GET THE FUCK OUT!". Oops there was an easily missed key item lying in the corner that you should have been methodically searching for while ghosts rape you WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU WHY WEREN'T YOU DOING THAT?!?

Fuck though, if you had used (i.e. wasted) any healing items before the apartment stopped healing, you are FUCKED. At that point the normal difficulty goes well beyond SH3's ridiculous hard mode, and you receive abosolutely no warning that it's going to happen.

That part where the bloody apartment notes took up one space each was ridiculous though. Carrying an entire notebook around must take a whole team of oxen.

Anyone who has yet to play it but is about to: you will find certain items that specifically help you deal with the ghosts. These are the items FABIO's talking about here, the ones you have to hoard until absolutely necessary.

I was talking about healing items actually, but oh well.

- One kind will prevents ghosts from harming you as much as normal. Only use them as a last resort because IIRC you won't find many of them at all. And at the point where you have to accompany the NPC, I believe you can give them this item in order to help "heal" them somewhat. That's important, because as they take damage they will become more "possessed" by evil, and the further they are possessed when you fight the final battle, the harder it will be to accomplish a certain something in that battle, and that affects what ending you'll get.

I'd say Eileen getting possessed and coming into play the last boss battle qualifies as quite the spoiler.

How do you give items to her? All I can do is have her equip the hillariouisly feminine weapons (purse, riding crop) available to her (which somehow still take up space in MY inventory).

I think she's already beyond fucked in my game anyways (working my way through the last level). That time we left her behind in a ghost area for half an hour (does she take damage while in a different loading zone?) and came back to find her on the ground panting with noticeably worse wounds seemed bad. Now her wounds are pulsating and every once in awhile she stops to speak in tounges or beat her chest at which point Henry takes proximity damage fro her similar to ghosts.

- Another special item can pin a ghost in place permanently. There are a few "permanent" ghosts that will follow you throughout the whole game, so obviously your only chance of stopping them is to use one of these items. So hoard *all* of them until you run into the permanent ghosts. If you're up against a non-permanent ghost, but absolutely need to pin it in place, that's fine, but you have to be sure to pick the item back up before proceeding.

The problem is though you have to do enough regular damage (a ton of it) to the ghosts until you can stomp on them before you can pin them with the swords. Against regular ghosts this is far more trouble than it's worth. Against the "former victim" ghosts (long-haired woman, flaming ghost, fat shirtless ghost, phasing crowbar ghost), the ones you really want to pin because they follow you around the entire level, though it seems utterly impossible. A dozen hits with the pickaxe of despair and they still immediately get back up after falling. The only time I was able to do it was when I used my one and only silver bullet on that prison ghost you had to pin to get the key. Are pinning those ghosts impossible without silver bullets?

- Then there's another that exorcises certain ghosts that start infecting a certain area of the game. IIRC, you can use it while its in your inventory and carry it around with you, and it acts as a sort of ward... I don't remember if that's really true or not. However, if it is, you still don't want to waste them in that fashion. Hoard these until you need to do an exorcism in the special area. Also, when you do exorcise a ghost, it takes a while for the item to be completely consumed - if you don't wait that long, I believe that ruins the exorcism and the same ghost will return at a later point.

Candles? You can't use them in your inventory. You have to find some surface to place them on in the apartment. As long as the candle is burning down super fast there's still an infestation. When you can longer notice it getting shorter it's gone.

I also really like how there is absolutely no way of guessing their purpose without a guide. The game makes you believe they will repel ghosts in the portal world, and even lets you use (i.e. waste) them there, where they do nothing to stop ghosts.

And then there's a certain item that you have an option of picking up or leaving behind. It serves no obvious purpose at all - you never "use" it. However, if you decide to never take this item, you'll make future parts of the game easier. Taking it causes the number of ghost infestations to increase, I believe to the point where you can't possibly exorcise them all.

I'm guessing you're talking about that shabby doll you get from the trenchcoat dude. I read in some FAQ that all it does is cause the baby heads to appear in the wall over the chest if you leave it there (though keeping it in your inventory will cause no harm), but it does seem like there are far more apartment infestations than candles to go around.

I also read that the level of untreated infestations in your apartment affects the ending. Looks Like I get to look foward to the shittiest ending possible.

P.S.- Dig the build up of mystery in the plot, only to have the entire thing suddenly and clumsily spelled out to you by the Tasha Yar killing tar monster.

P.P.S.- I lied. The most retarded item puzzle was getting the key to finally open the lock on your apartment door, but not working if you used it on the lock itself. You have to use in on one of the chains in the corner and not the lock itself in order to unlock the lock. Wtf? That drove me crazy.