Let’s continue our celebration of spookiness by taking a look at one of my favorite survival horror games. Silent Hill 4: The Room is not widely considered to be one of the best Silent Hill games, but it’s actually the one I like the most.

As you might know, I got into the survival horror genre because of Let’s Plays. I was convinced I wouldn’t like horror games, but my friend talked me into watching her Let’s Play of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories. You know what? I really liked it. I went crazy trying to figure out what was going on in the story, and when it was all over, I missed it.

So I found other Let’s Plays of the rest of the Silent Hill series, and of all of them, I liked the fourth game the most–so much so that I needed to play it myself, and thus I bought and played my first survival horror game.

(I played the Xbox version because it was less expensive. Silent Hill 4 is one of those Xbox games that works on the Xbox 360 with just a few issues, in this case weird graphical problems like lines on characters’ faces. The gameplay was perfectly intact. The PC version, on the other hand, has notoriously terrible AI.)

Unlike most games in the series, Silent Hill 4 doesn’t begin with the player entering the town. Instead, you wake up in an apartment in South Ashfield, a city near Silent Hill. The apartment is sealed. The doors and windows won’t open, the phone doesn’t work, and no one can hear you when you shout. When a strange hole opens up in the bathroom, it looks like your chance to escape, but it leads you to a strange version of the nearby subway station…

The apartment, Room 302, acts as a hub area, where you can save, store items, and heal before returning to the various Otherworlds. It’s also viewed in first-person, although the rest of the game has a third-person view. Rumor has it the game wasn’t originally meant to be a part of the Silent Hill series, but the decision was made very early in development (so don’t use that as a reason for disliking it).

Objectively, I’ll admit Silent Hill 4 is not the best Silent Hill game. That title probably goes to Silent Hill 2. But something about it just appeals to me, even if its protagonist is, well…

Poor Henry Townshend gets a lot of criticism for having next to no emotional range, responding to nearly every situation with, “What… the hell…?” and asking a blood-soaked dying woman if she’s all right. But the thing is, Silent Hill 4 isn’t about Henry, not really. Sure, from the player’s perspective, the entire game is about helping Henry escape from his apartment. But what does the gameplay really do?

It sends you to twisted locations in both Ashfield and Silent Hill to discover the events of their pasts, gives you clues as to what happened in Room 302 and to its former occupant, Joseph Schreiber, and forces you to piece together a story about a little boy, a cult, and a serial killer.

From its plot to its symbolism, Silent Hill 4: The Room is about Walter Sullivan.