Video games - Silent Hill 4: The Room

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	Video games - Silent Hill 4: The Room

Silent Hill 4: The Room is the fourth installment in the survival horror series. The game was released in Japan on June 17, 2004, North America on September 7, 2004, and Europe on September 17, 2004. The Room was released onto multiple platforms consisting of the Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox and PC.

Plot

Henry Townshend is living in South Ashfield, a town a day's drive away from Silent Hill, one day finds himself mysteriously locked in his own apartment. He cannot escape through either the windows or his front door, which has been chained shut from the inside. No one, not even people standing directly outside his front door, can hear him when he pounds on the door and cries for help. After five days of entrapment Henry finds a hole that has opened up in his bathroom wall. Armed only with a steel pipe that broke loose when the wall opened, he is about to venture into the hellish madness of Silent Hill.

About The Game

This installment of the series features revised controls, modifications to the item menu and map, and segments that are played from a first-person perspective. The plot of the game expands upon the history of a serial killer mentioned in Silent Hill 2 and of the cult that seems to control the town.

However, Silent Hill 4 was not originally slated to be a Silent Hill game . The Silent Hill team of designers planned for it to be an original concept for an original game not affiliated with any other franchise. After the general pre-production of the game, Konami decided that launching a new franchise was too much of a marketing risk, and instead opted to convert the game to a Silent Hill title. The connections to the second Silent Hill game, including the story of the serial killer, were added when the game went into full production.

Sequels

A sequel title is planned for the quote: "most powerful next generation console" (PS3).

Silent Hill 5 (TBA)

Influences and Trivia

All four Silent Hill titles contain references to the movie Jacob's Ladder. Silent Hill's gradual decline from perceived normalcy to stylized decay bears a close resemblance to the film's visual aesthetic, and Silent Hill's monsters are often seen shaking their heads rapidly from side to side in unnatural and jerky motions, a direct lift of Jacob's Ladder's visual style. Silent Hill 2 implies the notion of the town being akin to a personal purgatory, another similar theme from the film. Another strong reference is the use of the name Bergen Street for the subway platform to which Heather (protagonist of Silent Hill 3's plot) encounters in Silent Hill 3. Bergen Street station played a significant part in Jacob's Ladder and the setting looks very much alike. Similarly, the "Subway World" in Silent Hill 4, with its surreal decay and blocked exits, echoes scenes from the film as well.
The novel House of Leaves and its use of impossible physical spaces may have been an influence on the series (especially in Silent Hill 2), with its almost interminable corridors.
In the liner notes of the Silent Hill 4 soundtrack, an address is listed for the strip club "Heaven's Night." That address is: 2121 Carroll St., South Vale, ME.
The cult series Twin Peaks is said to have had an influence on many aspects of the games. Both the game and the TV series takes place in a resort town. David Lynch's often dream-like sequences in the series are also very much alike to the surrealist occurrences throughout the games.
Wheelchairs are recurring features in the series. In Silent Hill
a boss, Cybil, is encountered sprawled in a wheelchair. At one point in Silent Hill 3
, Heather passes a glass wall. On the other side is an empty wheelchair outside of a room in what appears to be a mental institute. This strongly resembles a key image in the movie Session 9. Heather finds another wheelchair lying on the floor in the hospital basement, its wheel still spinning, resembling a shot in Jacob's Ladder. In Silent Hill 4, the player is attacked by packs of wheelchairs that cannot be defeated. When they pass in front of light sources, these wheelchairs cast shadows showing lurching, grasping figures sitting in them. An empty wheelchair is a recurring image in the horror film The Changeling. There is also a memorable scene in Hellraiser 5: Inferno, in which the protagonist is pursued by a tortured old man in a wheel chair who giggles like a baby. The scene takes place in a long hospital hall, which strongly resembles the hospital corridor in Silent Hill 4.
Throughout the series, it becomes clearer that there may be three levels of reality in Silent Hill. The 'top level' is where people live out their lives as normal, bearing hardly any difference to any other town of its kind. The next level could be called 'Foggy' Silent Hill (or the 'Alternate' Silent Hill), where an all-pervading fog obscures visibility to a matter of feet, similar to Stephen King's The Mist (a favorite story of one of the series' developers). Some monsters are apparent at this point, but the town environs are practically unchanged. The third layer down, where the real corruption of the reality lies, can be called Otherworld. This darkness is not just a physical darkness, which is used to put the player on edge, but also corresponds to the kinds of monsters found here. This Otherworld is the rotten core of the town, covered in rust, blood, and various viscera. However, the recent comic book adaptations only have two layers, with Silent Hill being in fact an abandoned and monster-infested ghost town. Paint It Black points out that cable, power, and phones all work within the city limits, and the stores are refreshed with food.
Though the town of Silent Hill is officially located somewhere in New England, there is a body of water in the town named Toluca Lake, named after the real Toluca Lake in Southern California, near Burbank, North Hollywood, and Studio City. Director David Lynch is legendary for having eaten lunch at Bob's Big Boy restaurant every day for approximately seven years straight. That particular Bob's Big Boy is located in Toluca Lake, CA on Riverside Drive, just down the road from Warner Bros. Studios and Universal Studios.

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