Silent Hill 4: The Room

About Silent Hill 4: The Room

Silent Hill 4: The Room was made by Team Silent and published by Konami in 2004. GOG brought it to modern Windows PCs in 2020 and keeps it running in its Preservation Program, with fixes for Windows 10 and 11, support for current controllers, cloud saves, and brightness set to match the PlayStation 2 version. GOG's notes also say it restored the apartment's missing hauntings, so the game is complete.

You play Henry Townshend, who finds himself trapped in his apartment, its door wrapped in chains. Then a hole appears in the bathroom wall, and crawling through it takes him into a horrifying alternate reality. The store describes gruesome sights around every corner and a hero whose sanity is being tested as he looks for a way out.

It is the first Silent Hill to move between first and third person views. The worlds beyond the wall include an otherworldly forest and a grisly prison, and you fend off new kinds of monsters there, among them ghosts that defy physical reality. You pick up pistol bullets and other items as you find them, and piece together clues to why you are trapped.

That structure is what sets it apart from the other Silent Hill games on this site. In Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill f you walk a fog-bound town; here the horror is closer to home, an apartment that should be safe and is not. The look is that of a PlayStation 2 game, dim and grimy, with long quiet stretches between scares.

It suits players who want the older Silent Hill games as they were, and anyone drawn to slow dread and a strange, claustrophobic premise more than to action.

How to play Silent Hill 4: The Room

1. Buy Silent Hill 4: The Room on GOG and install it on a Windows PC, with GOG Galaxy or the offline installer; it needs no online connection.
2. Connect a controller if you have one; the GOG version supports modern pads, or play with keyboard and mouse.
3. Choose New Game from the title menu and look around Henry's apartment for clues about why he is shut in.
4. Crawl through the hole in the bathroom wall to enter the otherworld.
5. Explore each place, pick up ammunition and other items when the game offers them, and fend off or avoid the monsters.
6. Piece together the clues you find to learn why Henry is trapped and how to get out.

Tips

• The game asks before you take each item; say yes to ammunition, because you will not find much.
• If the picture looks too dark or too bright, adjust the brightness and gamma in the options before you start.
• Read the notes you find in the room and beyond it; they hold the clues to what happened.
• Ghosts do not behave like the other monsters, so do not assume what worked on one enemy works on all of them.
• If you prefer an inverted camera, the GOG version applies the first-person y-axis option to the mouse too.

Questions