Silent Hill 4: The Room [PS2]

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Each successive release in the Silent Hill horror series features a "pack-in bonus" of unease, but it's one that the designers don't intend: it's the fear that, this time around, they won't be able to pull it off. How many times can they make games of visionary, intelligent horror, with intriguing stories, new twists, and truly nightmarish visuals? So far, the answer always seems to be, "At least one more time. Now shut up and turn off the lights -- we have something awful to show you." Enter Silent Hill 4: The Room.

Visionary, intelligent story? Check. Once again, we have a protagonist we can relate to, not some cartoonish "elite cop." Henry Townsend is a normal guy, a late twenty-something with a low-key demeanor, a dingy apartment... and a problem that defies logic. Awakening from a nightmare, he finds his front door draped with an asymmetrical net of black chains, from the inside, and marked with one blood-scrawled note: Don't leave.

And he can't. Nobody outside his door seems to hear him; his windows won't break (despite the normal, populated city streets visible outside); the radio, phone, and TV are malfunctioning in creepy ways; and his only exit seems to be an ever-widening hole in his bathroom wall that leads... well, straight back into the surreal nightmares he's been having for five days, going on eternity.

New twists? Check. The most obvious and pervasive is the apartment itself, which is experienced in a first-person mode. The apartment acts as a hub, to which the player continually returns to heal, advance the story, manage inventory, and -- above all -- feel very confined and helpless. Henry's return trips to the apartment, and his actions in it, can affect the nightmarish other-worlds beyond the surreal hole in his bathroom. Unfortunately for Henry, the reverse also applies.

Also new are the game's puzzle-solving and inventory systems. While Silent Hill is known for its challenging puzzles, The Room has chucked most of that in favor of a much more action/combat-oriented scheme, where inventory items must be juggled in perilous real time. Bring up the item interface, select the gun quickly... oh crap, the clip is empty! Reload quickly, something is coming. Something is COMING.

While this definitely adds a new tension to combat, the inventory system also causes new problems. When you've got a full load of items and suddenly come across a new one on the ground, you aren't even allowed to know what it is unless you've a free slot for it. This means a lot of backtracking to the apartment is required. And why can't all new collected ammo of the same type just neatly compile into a single inventory slot? Come on, Konami, you know better than that.