The fun is in there... somewhere

CAUTION: A FEW SPOILERS.

When I heard the hushed, despondent singing of "Room of Angel", Silent Hill 4's teaser song, my ears pricked up immediately. Would Silent Hill 4 offer a quantum advance over Silent Hill 3's childish, butchered storyline, crummy, laughable monsters, and jaw-slackening cinemas? Would 4's sound effects rise above 3's remixes of animal sounds?

The answer to this is the same as the definition of the Dadaist movement, which has been described as "a big no and a little yes".

I do like Silent Hill 4. Really I do. It stands head and shoulders over Silent Hill 3. No ridiculous teenybopper-centered non-story. No dispersion of potential scares with irritating protagonist attitude. No horrible, blotchy pumpkin-interior scenes. No seriously cheesy attempts to justify the story with SH throwbacks.

The third-person view is excellent and true to SH2's good camera angles, with the badly needed addition of a refocus button to center you immediately on your character. For the first time, Silent Hill is able to establish wide-open spaces with an unfaked feel to them. Stairways stretch up and down several stories at a time, and the outdoor level, while somewhat roped in with chain-link fences, is wide enough to give you some breathing room. Unfortunately, I think the openness of the levels detracts from the tension and fear brought about by limited fighting areas. I do think Konami did a good job ranging their monsters, though, so they bring the fight to the character.

The first-person interface is about as deep as a 1980s text adventure game, however. Most of the adornments of The Room slowly give different wordings when examined, often to no great effect. A few half-hearted puzzles use The Room, but for the most part, The Room is used for a lot of woe-is-me effects that evoke more annoyance than fear. It's like having an invisible roommate push you around ("Hey! You're standing on my save point."). Often you just want to bypass it all to get on with the game, but to get to certain important parts of the Room you need to risk losing health passing through invisible hot zones. There are ways to get rid of these possession areas, but sometimes you end up wasting a resource because what you thought was the right spot to set it in, wasn't. As The Room changes, overblown effects transform your apartment into concentrations of blood and/or rust. It's an unintentional motivation to get out and explore the third-person views.

The first time around is a major pain. Get stuck and you're wandering vast empty stretches with no hints. However, the pacing of the game does pick up in one specific area, a literal hallway of horrors, where about a dozen rooms each hold a mind-warping scene, and later in the game, when you play through all the levels again. One caution: be prepared for some absolutely BRUTAL beatdown in later stages. Usually in all the Silent Hills I've been able to get by by using an occasional health drink and squirreling the rest away, but between ghosts, powerful monsters, and an insanely strong villain, you'll be bleeding throughout the game.

Ghosts are a puzzlement too. Is this how Japanese ghosts look, or something? They look like a cross between Fruit Roll-Ups, liver spots, and Siren zombies. They also give off a staticy TV/appliance sound more appropriate for a Mr. Bean episode than elsewhere.

The story builds slowly and sparingly, about as close as you'll get to SH1 or SH2's level of quality for now. Except for Cynthia, who merely comes across as a distracting representation of a token American harlot, each other character has something to contribute, though not as much as I would have liked. Jasper Gein, for example, comes across not as a respectable authority on cults, but a chocolate milk-craving dork. He winds up about as laughable in death as he does in life.

If you're expecting any light to be thrown on the Silent Hill back story, you may as well forget this game. There are no references to Pyramid Head, even when the story, which purportedly links back to a Silent Hill 2 character, should have mentioned him in a big way. This is the biggest letdown of Silent Hill 4: the lack of a sense of connection to the Silent Hill mythos. Everyone as usual is a flawed basket case just waiting for a chance to expose his or her lunacy, but this time around, up until the very end, the dialogue writing leaves little room for sympathy. In Silent Hill 2, one of the finales was written and acted so well that it put my ex into tears. Since 3, the actors largely just seem to be reading on their lunch breaks. I can't recall a single thing from Henry that shows character growth or even a sign of life under that bushy hairdo. I actually wouldn't blame him though, because no one he runs into gets a chance to connect with him.

Sound effects by and large sound fine, but the music seems subdued, almost afraid to shine as it did in SH2. I am almost all the way through the game, but only two tracks have stood out: Wounded Warsong, and another, a monstrous variation on an air-raid siren. Strong praise does go, however, to an accompaniment to the reading of a ghastly newspaper clipping.

Except for Eileen's and Richard's voice actors, the entire cast needs to be slapped awake and given caffeine pills. That's right, you too, Little Plot Twist in a Kid's Striped Shirt. Henry sounds like a total stoner on his way down, and the main villain comes across as half Kurt Cobain interview, half snotty barista. And Cynthia... ugh. All the in-your-face of J-Lo meets the brazen tartin' of Madonna for an irritating, unsympathetic caricature of a woman. Just what does Konami think of us degenerate Americans, anyway? By the way, nice Nation of Sin reference.

The sound effects I do not like are the ones that Akira Yamaoka ripped off and would have us believe were other sounds. For example, he gives these bizarre gorilla-like creatures a wildcat's death snarl when they are killed, and plays a snippet of microphone feedback in what is supposed to be a creaky steel building setting. It's a bad habit that started with Claudia's final transformation in SH3, and one that I hope he kicks for SH5.

Monsters in SH3 were way too human-like, and bound by the laws of physics. Here there is at least a sincere effort to mix up creature types, though I still think they are far too humanocentric and humdrum in their movements. Nothing freaked me out more than seeing a fuse-limbed monstrosity scuttle in a crazy figure 8 at an impossible speed while click-screaming after I floored it in SH2. Nothing probably will until SH5, though I enjoy fights against the great cats and the two-headed baby creatures.

Most of the monsters lose their oomph by not having introductory scenes. When they arrive, they have no chance to build fear beforehand, and so they show up unannounced like 1980s NES sprites. It's a shame, because the baby-headed monsters could have easily been shown doing something as warped as Pyramid Head and the mannequins in SH2.

Most character cinemas just don't have the same appeal they did in SH2, or even parts of SH3. Henry, the little boy, and Jasper Gein look outright fake in their cinemas, with nothing of the refinement of a James Sunderland. Even James' dad Frank talks like a disturbing, out-of-steam old coot, much to the detriment of what could have been an appealing, noble character.

And last of all, the main villain is downright pitiful, even to the point of contempt. While it's true that having a villian run his mouth through a video game like he runs the place, only to be killed to reveal the true archvillian, is a plot twist old as Bionic Commando, it would still be a welcome improvement over SH4's excuse for a main meanie. If SH3 got it wrong by having a massively deformed Leonard Wolf talk perfectly clear English, SH4 got it wrong by not even making its uberboss anything more than an ordinary human with some minor parlor tricks up his sleeve. Nothing got me more disenchanted by being chased by a Nirvana concert escapee with the power to escape lethal harm but nothing more for firepower than, well, a handgun. In fact fighting this goof most of the time is just a major waste of ammunition and about as original as a NES gunfight. In SH2 Pyramid Head scared the holy hell out of me as he cast shadows on the walls chasing me and Maria, and SH3 had a reasonably frantic chase in Borley's, but again, SH4 was nothing more than a major nuisance in this department, with a slow, drawn-out multi-screen encounter with Mr. Evil Vanilla. Another flaw in this chase sequence is that things get interrupted by the opening of a door and repeated by having to regain ground, then oop... there's the exit again... hello load screen.

If this game were to come out two years ago, it would be lavished with awards. In the glare of comparison to true smash hits like GTA:SA, this episode seems to burn away like so much fog. Buy six months from now, or at your own risk.

UPDATE: Replay value

I checked out some of the requirements needed to get some of the extras out of the game... ugh. Nine or ten stars. Maybe I'm just getting old, but I'm tired of having to run like an absolute neurotic through some games, offsetting fun in exchange for conserving movement and cinema time, on the off chance that I'll get a lame nugget of replay.

MAJOR SPOILER (Click X now if need be):

The bonus weapon you get for finishing the game is HORRIBLE. You can't even defeat more than one cat creature at a time with it. I'm guessing that it comes in handy against some of the final creatures, and helps out especially in the final battle, but it's got no oomph in a mass battle, even compared to (gasp) Silent Hill 3's machine gun, light saber, and eye beam weapons. I was surprised Henry didn't cut his own feet off with it.