Silent Hill 4: The Room

I first played Silent Hill 4 at the very tail end of my senior year of high school back in 2005. I did not like it. Having played the previous three games, I considered the fourth entry the weakest by a mile (obviously, this was before the series would fall into the hands of those who wished to do evil with the Silent Hill name). I thought it looked good and sounded good (taking this time to post the exemplary "Room of Angel"), but I found the story to be weak, and actually having to play it was complete frustration. I didn't like how the protagonist was an emotionless weirdo. I didn't like the extremely tenuous plot connections to Silent Hill 2. I didn't like how the second half of the game is an escort mission. I didn't like how the game wasn't even in the town of Silent Hill itself. Most of all, I hated the ghosts. For the past twenty years, if anyone asked me my opinions of Silent Hill 4, I would immediately respond with "FUCK THOSE GHOSTS!" Combat is not something Silent Hill is known for anyway, so why add a new enemy type to make it even worse?

Recently, I had a desire to load the game up for the first time in nearly two decades. Luckily, this desire coincided with the recent update of SH4's PC post, which I quickly grabbed. Now that I'm not an impatient, dumbfuck 18 year old, maybe things will be different this time?

Silent Hill 4 is a game about a man named Henry Townshend. Henry is some guy, just a regular dude. A regular dude unwillingly dragged into a potential end-of-the-world situation. For committing the heinous crime of "moving into an apartment," he is now the target of a serial killer with supernatural abilities. Among these is the ability to lock Henry in his own apartment. The door is chained shut. No electricity. No phone service. Nobody can hear Henry yell or bang on the walls. Completely isolated from the rest of the world. Henry's only escape is through a hole that has emerged in his bathroom, which will take him to various altered realities, where he gets to fight for his life against the most horrific looking monster designs in the entire Silent Hill series, and his reward is being forced to watch innocent people get brutally murdered. There's a lot that goes on in Silent Hill 4; lots of evocative imagery, excellent use of symbolism, shitty fights against annoying ghosts, all types of other things people have created entire empires on YouTube discussing. I want to talk about something else with this piece.

Now, I am not the first person to ever make a connection between Silent Hill 4 and mental illness. I'm sure that I'm not even the 100th person to do so. Plenty of very well-written/well-spoken thoughts of Henry Townshend as an analog to things like anxiety, agoraphobia, and depression. But I want to go on a different path here. I want to talk about Henry being on the Spectrum, and I ain't talking about computers, here.

Henry lives in small apartment. There's nothing fancy or extravagant about it. Gray walls, plain floors, a basic bed with some basic chairs and a basic couch. The most luxury Henry has is a TV and a decent stereo. Yet, outside of the front door being chained shut by a guy trying to kill you, the apartment has a pretty cozy vibe to it. It's the kind of place where you can read a book by the window on a rainy Spring afternoon, listening to the raindrops hitting the ground. Henry is not a man wanting for more; he's lived here for two years, not bothering to decorate the place beyond hanging up some of his urban photography. He's barely talked to his neighbors, tending to keep to himself. He fits perfectly within this small world, where he is safe. Room 302 is a comforting, healing presence in Henry's life. A place for him to retreat to when the outside world becomes overwhelming.

A mechanic of Silent Hill 4 is Henry's apartment. It's a place to manage your inventory, to read any notes sent to you, among other things. But the main thing the apartment does is literally heal you. If Henry takes physical damage, or you the player take mental damage, you find the nearest hole back to the apartment, and go back to this tiny little home while Henry's health meter fills back up.

But then you have to go back out. You have to be responsible and do things that are difficult and scary. Everything is out to get you. There are too many loud noises. The lights are too bright. I want to go back home, but I cannot go home, and even if I do go back home, I cannot stay there. Home is cozy, but it is isolating. You yell, but nobody hears you. You're trapped, you're scared, you become emotionally disconnected, or pretend to be tough, when all you really want is someone who knows what they're doing to come and help you, to make everything so much easier.

Outside, the monsters are loud and dangerous. They point at you. They stare at you until they make their move. Then there are the ghosts. Good Lord, there are the ghosts. They hit hard. They take tremendous amounts of punishment. They cannot be killed through normal means, only through the use of a special item, of which there are only five in the entire game, and there definitely more than five ghosts floating around. You are otherwise never truly rid of them. They're fast, terrifyingly so. They can hurt you simply by being around you for a few seconds. They are constantly in your face, yelling and moaning and blocking the path you need to take to get away from them. You become overwhelmed. I want to go back home.

Mid-way through the game, things change. The malevolent spirits outside your apartment finally get inside. Poltergeist activity becomes a common occurrence, and much like the ghosts, will hurt you if you are too close to it for too long. On top of that, the apartment will no longer heal you. The mental reprieve you have come to expect is gone, leaving only more anxiety. A true nightmare: your house is no longer your home. Noticing the hauntings in the apartment doesn't feel too different from discovering problems in your own real-life home. The water heater is busted. The shower won't drain. You really hope those aren't mouse droppings under the kitchen sink. It's added stress.

I bring all of this up because I have recently experienced a pretty bad case of autistic burnout (which is why it's taken me three weeks to write a new article), and playing Silent Hill 4 is a game that is hitting close to home in a way I can all but guarantee nobody at Team Silent intended. Henry's emotional detachment and way of living is very Spectrum-coded. The way the he does social masking to get through all of this is much like the kind of masking that causes someone to suddenly become the most capable, mature person in the room, but are screaming and wailing internally the entire time. The game's constant overwhelming audio-visual nature. The way that the scares and the combat feel so different from other Silent Hill games to this point feel like an extreme analog to things I go through in my life. The way monsters point at you, perceiving you, the one thing you never really want as an autistic person. Two of the biggest scares in the game involve you just being stared at.

Silent Hill 4 is scaring me as a nearly 40-year-old finally coming to terms with my disability in a way that it could not when I was an 18-year-old who only thought I was just kind of weird. Turns out, I can relate to someone trying to live a basic life on their own terms, but are forced to deal with endless horrors that leave them unable to find peace, and it is entirely due to things that are not their fault. There are multiple endings to the game, one of which promises a future where Henry can leave his home without fear. In this moment, I cannot think of a happier, more hopeful ending than that.