Continued my journey through some sixth generation horror games over the past week with Silent Hill 4: The Room. I've defended the game a lot in the past, but 2018 Eleanor has been thinking much more critically over its shortcomings. 
Team Silent desired change after 3 games that adhered to a very specific formula - one that worked, but perhaps felt stale to them. SH4 had a lot of forward thinking ideas, like Henry's apartment being in first person. Considering the context of its time, it came together nicely.
But there were also some attempts to borrow from more 'modern' games, which included weapon durability and storage limitations as a form of depth in games otherwise technically constrained. Those... did not age so gracefully. Like a cheap wine that fermented to vinegar.
But stepping outside of the mechanics, which Silent Hill is very dated by, perhaps the most disappointing for me has been the lack of strength in its writing and characters.
At its core, SH4's entire focus is on Walter Sullivan, who rightfully remains an enigmatic presence as the game world presents his distrust in others to the player by way of visual metaphor and potentially distorted view of characters you meet.
Quite a chilling look into the mind of someone so corrupted and vile yet disconnected from his own horrific actions. His calm demeanor whenever he appears on screen is immensely unsettling. It's just a shame that his victims were sacrificed by the script as mostly one-notes.
Walter's methods for selecting his victims has little rhyme or reason, which... should be utterly terrifying? But it makes the rest of the cast struggle with a lack of depth compared to even the poster boy for 'normal, mundane person', Harry "#thatsourboy" Mason.
Almost every single character is either already dead or going to die shortly after you meet them. There's very little to explore, and in some cases we can't even be sure we're seeing the true people or Walter's paranoid delusion of what he fears they might have been.
And I think that is really the crux of where SH4 is finally falling flat for me. The series is typically more of an ensemble work, where each of the characters fits as a piece of a greater puzzle and offers a lot of potential for discussion on the town, the cult, and its power.
SH4 comes across as having a lot less to say, and, imo, it sadly weakens the effectiveness of even its strongest moments. Of which there are still quite a few!
The tangled intra-world travel system introduced in the second half is quite the expansive, breathtaking voidscape. Henry's apartment is littered with detail and becomes immensely suffocating as the hauntings settle in and over-run your only safe and peaceful space.
I still appreciate it for trying to move away from so many of the series' sacred elements all at once. It was an immeasurably bold move that could have paid off better if the scenario hadn't shifted so harshly from being ensemble pieces to a singular character study.
If nothing else, I'll always love the two trailers for the game, which said so very little about the game but are deeply affecting, disorienting short films in their own right.
Anyways, this twitter thread is another entry in the "I played a videogame again" content folder on twitter dot com and even though I am being very down about it, there's still a lot of Good in SH4. I just wish it had been able to land so many of the swings it tried to take.
