Silent Hill 4 Images

[BlueFire]

This game looks promising

[DarkMaster]

Ok, here's some more new information.

If Silent Hill 3 scared you (and we can't imagine why it wouldn't have), prepare yourself: Akira Yamaoka's team was just getting warmed up. Silent Hill 4: The Room sees the series director and sound designer off and running in a new direction for the series, one he considers the biggest and scariest Silent Hill yet.

You play as Henry Townshend, who discovers one day that he's trapped inside his own apartment: the doors and exits have all been chained and sealed shut, and there's no way out. On the fifth day a mysterious, dark hole opens in his bathroom; desperate for an escape route, he crawls into it to see what lies in store for him. On the other side is a dark world unknown to him, but all too familiar to Silent Hill fans …

The gameplay of Silent Hill 4 will be divided up about evenly between the world outside, and Henry's own room, according to Yamaoka. The goal behind focusing on the room as much as the netherworld was to show "your own room, your safe spot, threatened … when that comfort zone starts to change, that's one of the themes of this game." Confinement and claustrophobia is but one of the new aspects of SH4, "the other that of being stalked or chased."

To play up the split between the room and the outside, Yamaoka's team is introducing first-person exploration to the series. Everything that happens in the netherworld will be in the traditional third-person perspective, while scenes that take place inside the room will be through Henry's own eyes, "in order to project a greater sense of fear and dread." Also contributing to the terrifying feel will be the elimination of the "safe," separate, item screen: in Silent Hill 4, weapons and items will be selected via a realtime window that pops ups, to simulate the feel of scrambling for a necessary item while the demons close in.

One thing Yamaoka mentioned during the presentation is that this Silent Hill will feature the largest cast and most weapons of any game in the series so far: characters already revealed are Henry himself, as well as a young boy, a long-haired man in a jacket, and a young woman, none of whom have names as yet. Many of them featured in the trailer shown, which did little to impart a sense of the plot, but did a lot towards scaring the pants off the audience.

Much of the trailer is obscured in some way; the footage is either rendered as a series of stop-motion stills, or is slightly out-of-focus, or only contains motion in the corner of the frame, all as tricks to unsettle the player. What we could see, we sort of wished we could un-see: spooky, floating figures menacing Henry, the unknown man and woman in tight-close ups with unexplained blood spattering their faces, two-headed demons cawing for something unwholesome.

After the video, Yamaoka answered some audience questions: there will be no significant differences or omissions in either the PS2 or Xbox versions, the game is unconnected to the events and characters of 1, 2, and 3, and they're working hard to maintain the psychological tone of horror the series is famous for. When asked if Silent Hill 4 would contain a bonus CD, as 3 did, Yamaoka laughed and said "Even if [Konami Digital Entertainment] says 'We don't need a soundtrack,' I'm making it!"

Silent Hill 4: The Room is set for a simultaneous release on PlayStation 2 and Xbox this fall.

[Jonbo298]

Is the trailer for SH4 on the 'net? I want to see

[DarkMaster]

If it was, it would be in this forum.