Survival Horror, I'm convinced, has become less of a past time and more of an addiction. An addiction that's becoming more and more impossible to quench when faced with the cold, hard facts of life. Yes. It's true. Resident Evil 4 is coming out next year, MAYBE. Lifeline is the closest thing we've had to anything with zombies and limited healing items since Silent Hill 3 came out, which was a year ago.

I guess there was Resident Evil: Outbreak. But the jury's still out on that.

And there was Resident Evil: Dead Aim. The jury is certainly NOT out on that.

Imagine my surprise (please, do!) when I heard that the next Silent Hill was coming out in a mere year since the arrival of the third installment, which was okay but of noticably spotty quality compared to the greatness that was dropped into our laps with Silent Hill 1 and 2. Now, herein lies the rub. The localization time on Survival Horror games is patently insane when you consider that 90% of them are comprised of fully English dialogue and another 60% also have English MENUS. Basically, even though Silent Hill came out two months prior in Japan, it won't arrive here on American shores for another five days . Why? Because Konami of America can't be troubled to change a region code and put the "You have insufficient space on this memory card" message into our native language. I have no experience with programming aside from a Computer Science course I took seven years ago in high school, narrowly skirting Calculus in the process, and I'm pretty certain I could bang out an American copy of Silent Hill 4 in a weekend, given the proper tools.

So that's the backstory, I guess, we get Silent Hill 4 later than everyone else. This causes a bit of a problem with me. See, I have this friend of mine, Andrew, and he's kind of like my Survival Horror buddy. He doesn't play console games, he doesn't even like them. But nine years ago we rented Resident Evil and even since there he's been in attendance for every game of the genre I've ever played. I've even waited on certain blockbuster releases just to make sure he gets a chance to experience the same visceral thrills that I do the first time through. I mean, this is the guy that soiled his linens with me the first time we saw the "hunter cutscene" in Resident Evil 1, the guy that screamed like a girl when the "bathtub scene" in Eternal Darkness came around. You've got to give him props.

And I had to give him the chance to do what we do so well. But, the horror, Silent Hill 4 was coming out a full two weeks after he went back to his college in the middle of nowhere. I did what any sane man would do in this situation. Something that I'm not proud of, something I've never done before, but something I felt I had to do.

I imported Silent Hill 4.

Yeah. Generally even the mention of something like that gets me all squicky. It took me years before I bought my first CD from other shores and, similarly, it took me pretty much forever until I could acclimate myself to the idea that it's okay to buy things from other countries before they come out here and that the whole region coding thing is basically BS. After about two weeks of waiting for various parts to arrive and five minutes of breaking and reassembling my PS2 I was ready to roll and the world of Survival Horror was about to be unlocked for me and my buddy Andrew once more.

The story of Silent Hill 4 goes something like this: for five days your character, Henry Townshend, has been locked in his apartment by a ramshackle combination of master locks on the door. It seems that nobody can hear his cries for help, even when they're standing on just the other side of the door. What's more, nobody seems to realize that looking into a peephole from the outside doesn't actually work.

Cooped up in his apartment with only a can of Yoohoo and a bottle of white wine to keep him company, Henry soon starts to have the same strange nightmare over and over, his apartment getting all creepy and ghostly a la the alternate Silent Hills of games past. You're not made to experience the feeling of isolation that playing all five of these days would provide. This is probably a good thing, because as cool as it might be to play it the first time it would soon become the most boring intro ever. Even more boring than the ten minute tram ride at the beginning of Half-Life that computer game players have despised for nigh on six years.

When he wakes the fifth day, Henry does his usual rounds. Looks through the apartment, glances out the window and watches the traffic on the street below. Yes, everything seems normal in the outside world, it's just his apartment that's been taken over by this strange supernatural force. Suddenly there's a crash from the bathroom! When Henry investigates, he finds a rather giant hole has been bored into his wall. Knowing the Silent Hill team's affection with characters sticking their hands into toilets and such, I consider this to be the ultimate in-joke. Henry jumps full tilt into the hole and crawls his way along.

And he wakes up on an escalator in the town's subway. Well. It's a start!

Throughout his time in and out of the holes Henry meets with a variety of people who start cluing him in on what's going on, and events hinted at in prior Silent Hill games as bits of backstory used to weird you out. Basically a bootleg version of the bad guy from Michael J. Fox vehicle "The Frightners" is going around doing some unfinished business. How this connects to Henry and his strange apartment is anyone's guess for the first six or seven hours. Suffice it to say, the motives of the killer are weirder and more excessive than any of the past Silent Hill's plot threads.

Unfortunately, they're also among the least developed. Silent Hill 1 and 2 relished in keeping you in the dark, but as the series progressed things became a little more rote. The first game was basically unsolvable, with a dozen different theories that could all be right without necessarily excluding any of the others. Silent Hill 2, like any M. Night Shamalyan movie, only required that you had a good head on your shoulders and a semi-keen sense of deduction to figure out the game's main twist. Silent Hill 3's plot required... the ability to read. It's tough, I know, but those of us who were able to do it discovered the game's "mysteries" without a hitch. Silent Hill 4, however, doesnt even suggest that it HAS mysteries. One expects a bit more from a series with such a deep history.

Here's the thing, though, well founded rumors (I know) suggest that Silent Hill 4 title was slapped on sometime in post production and previously the game was to be called only "The Room", intended as some sort of spin off to the moderately successful franchise. Silent Hill 4 bears enough of a connection to the previous games that the addition of the title doesn't feel entirely like a last ditch effort to sell more copies, but it doesn't carry with it the same emotions and spine shivering implications as its predecessors. I'm inclined to believe that the rumors were true. A spin-off seems appropriate, as the game doesn't even take place in Silent Hill but in the neighboring town of Ashfield, with only a brief spate of gameplay being near the town of Silent Hill at all.

The gameplay has also changed somewhat drastically. The apartment, which becomes the hub for your area hopping activities through your bathroom-timeportal-warpzone, is explored in the first person. This is an irritating and fearful experience at first -- I quickly became worried that the entire game was in a first person perspective -- but soon becomes pretty intuitive. First person is only logical, considering your main methods of exploration must be accomplished in this way. Henry's only glimpses of the outside world come from his windows, watching the conversations of his neighbors through his peephole and oggling his "sexy" neighbor through a hole in the wall in a shameless attempt to see what color underwear she's sporting at the time.

Through the hole, things return to their more comfortable 3rd person style. Still there are differences. Silent Hill 4 is the first game in the series to provide a health bar right off the bat and with it comes the ability to charge your melee weapons. This makes combat almost painfully easy even when you discount the fact that Henry is immune to anything and everything while executing a fully charged swing. Killing monsters was never particularly HARD in Silent Hill, to be honest, but this lowers it to a new plane of pathetic.

On the other hand, guns are almost non-existant. They're also rendered basically useless by the same inventory contrivances that Silent Hill never fell victim to before. Now our plucky young hero is restricted to a mere ten inventory spaces, having to story excess materials in a chest in his apartment. What's more, items of the same type don't stack (though they do in the box). That means every ten bullets you want to carry for your handgun take up a whole spot in your inventory. The same is true of healing items. This is less of an annoyance than it first seems, as firearms are given so little of an emphasis in this iteration of the series that you can and may go through the game firing only a handful of shots with special bullets at special badguys. Henry's options are limited to the dinky pistol, which you find scads of ammo for, and slightly-less-dinky revolver, for which you get basically no ammo at all. If you're anything like me, you'll spend your first playthrough picking up every bullet you find and wasting hours of your time shuttling them back to your apartment, only to have hundreds of rounds in reserve when you finish the game. If you play Silent Hill when it arrrives this fall, don't be as fool hardly as I. The pack rat mentality only gets you so far. Also there's a notable lack of thought in distributing weapons. You're thrust your first two weapons before the first "stage" and you don't find a single new one until well into the fourth area... then you find four in close succession. You've been wailing on monsters with that steel pipe for four hours before have the chance to swing your baseball bat. You kill maybe two enemies with it you stumble upon a rusty axe. A shovel is not far around the corner. After this deluge of items it will be well over another three hours and three areas before you find another melee weapon.

What's more, the most significant pieces of the Silent Hill puzzle outright don't exist. For one, there's no mention of the mythology of the town besides brief lip service in the form of some throw away "ambiance" memos and diaries. Another, more egregious omission, is the total lack of puzzles. Silent Hill 3's most prominent strength, for all its flaws, was the absolutely brain crushing riddles it could provide you with. Silent Hill 4 has an astounding ONE puzzle that is entirely spelled out for you in notes that you find right next to it. They might as well have said "Turn this wheel to the right five times and turn the other one three and never ask for another puzzle again." Everything else is your standard Fedex quests. More suited to Resident Evil, Henry's trials and tribulations take the form of "Get key. Put key in lock. Repeat." This was the primary mood shaker for me regarding Silent Hill 4. How can you have a Silent Hill without weird, nonsense puzzles involving multiplication, subtraction and that Master MC Billy Shakespeare?

Silent Hill 4 reinforces that old proverb. The more things change, the more they stay the same. For all its glitzy new additions and lifebars and first person modes, it feels like largely the same knockoff Survival Horror games we've been playing since the late 90s. Though it's decidedly more refined and playable than crap like Carrier or Martian Gothic (or even Blue Stinger) it doesn't carry any of the weight and promise that any Silent Hill or Resident Evil (Gun Survivor excluded) has provided in the past.

Fans of the game will probably be simultaneously disappointed and intrigued by this game, but it's mostly just searching for scraps of the greater story of Silent Hill awash in the mostly boring plot of the current game. While intrepid companion Andrew and I soldiered through Silent Hill 3 in about ten hours over the course of one night, Silent Hill 4 didn't fare so well. Sometime in the early morning Andrew had resorted to looking at internet forums on his laptop, an hour or so later and he was passed out on my uncomfortable couch. Around six in the morning I discovered that the game was indeed going to make me play through its four principal areas again and I just didn't WANT to. This is kind of a damning sign, when the facts are considered. Silent Hill 3 wasn't that good to begin with, but at least it instilled in you a sense of purpose. Prior Silent Hills have all contained a forward momentum. Characters are looking for something, trying to do something, trying to save someone. What is Henry Townshend doing? He keeps going to these weird areas and coming back to his apartment. There's a strong sense of regression in this game that only plays out like the backtracking to end all backtracking. You never went back to the same place in other Silent Hills. Andrew and I probably think there's a reason for that. I'm guessing you will too.

Silent Hill 4 is probably worth a rental from your local provider, but the full $40 price tag will leave more than just the holes in your wallet and Henry Townshend's bathroom wall. The games have certainly changed without the directoral talent that Masashi Tsuboyama infused into the first two. Let's just hope the trend isn't as worrying as it seems to be.