Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004) — they made the safest room your home base, and critics missed the puzzles

Released September 7, 2004 in North America — a series named after a town moves into Room 302

Hello, this is Toki. Episode 50 of “Today Is Release Day.” Today’s game almost entirely leaves the town the series is named after.From the thumbnail of “Silent Hill 4: The Room PlayStation 2 Trailer - E3 2004” (IGN, YouTube)

Silent Hill 4: The Room. Developed by Konami’s in-house team (known as Team Silent) and published by Konami. Suguru Murakoshi directed and wrote it; Akira Yamaoka wrote the music.

The North American release date was September 7, 2004. PlayStation 2, Xbox and Windows all arrived the same day. In Japan it had already come out on June 17 of that year.

So this game has two release dates worth remembering. For someone who likes writing dates down, that is a small pleasure.

You play Henry Townshend. The setting is Room 302 of an apartment building called South Ashfield Heights.

The only save point starts draining your health halfway through

Henry cannot leave his flat. The front door is chained from the inside, and banging on the window gets nobody’s attention.

Instead, a hole opens in the bathroom wall. Crawl through it and you come out somewhere else: a subway, a forest, a hospital.

The room had three jobs. It was the only save point in the game. It was where your health came back. And it was where you left your things.

You can carry ten weapons and items at most. Anything beyond that has to sit in the chest in your room, because there is no option to throw things away.

The interesting part is the second half. The room itself becomes “haunted,” and simply being there drains your health.

The place that heals you turns into the place that hurts you. Refusing to keep the player’s home base safe was a bold move for 2004.

In the second half your neighbour Eileen travels with you. How badly she is hurt, and how far the room has been corrupted, decide which of the four endings you get.

An average of 76 — and what reviewers missed was the puzzles, not the room

At the time the aggregate was 76 on Metacritic for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox versions, and Metacritic counted 54 reviews there. The Windows version sat at 67.From the thumbnail of “Silent Hill 4: The Room - E3 2004 Trailer” (/noclip Game History Archive, YouTube)

Individual scores: 8 from IGN, 7.9 from GameSpot, 7 from Eurogamer. Not bad, but not unreserved either.

Praise went to the atmosphere and the craft. Game Informer singled out its “disarming voyeurism, bizarre camera angles, and exceptionally well-placed tension.”

The first complaint was the save system. Being able to save only in your own flat meant walking back there again and again, and plenty of reviews said so.

The second one matters more here. Eurogamer wrote that the game had been geared towards combat, and was disappointed by the absence of the usual Silent Hill puzzles.

IGN made the same point: logic-based puzzles had been replaced by finding items and using them.

Edge saw it both ways at once. From one angle, a choking journey with unprecedented attention to unease; from another, a clunky throwback to the previous generation.

In Japan it sold about 41,000 copies in its release week and topped the chart — then fell to tenth the week after.

Twenty-two years later, Room 302 opens on a PC

For a long time afterwards the game was hard to get hold of. In Japan it appeared on the PlayStation Network in 2012.

The PC version came back officially on October 2, 2020, released on GOG.com with work done to make it run on current versions of Windows.

In March 2025 it joined the same shop’s GOG Preservation Program, a scheme for keeping older games in a running state.

Below is a trailer from the time (IGN’s official channel, E3 2004). It shows the room, and what lies on the other side of the hole, in a short stretch.

Where was the place you thought was safe?

The game’s working title was simply “Room 302.” It was later explained that it had always been planned as a Silent Hill game.

Work began soon after the previous game shipped, with full production from spring 2002: around two and a half years and some seventy people. Leaving the town was not a passing idea.

2004. Let me write the year down. The North American release was September 7, 2004, which makes today, September 7, 2026, exactly twenty-two years. In Japan it was June 17 of that year.

The place you save, the place you rest, the place you leave your things. Has a game ever taken a spot you thought was safe and made it frightening halfway through?