The Most Controversial Silent Hill

🌎 Get Exclusive NordVPN deal here ➡ nordvpn.com/totallypointless It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee!

Henry Townshend is by far the unluckiest Silent Hill protagonist. He's a regular dude and all he did was rent the wrong apartment.

It took me years to realize the Room itself is actively helping you because Walter NEEDS you alive. The Room manifests as almost a loving mother, healing you, feeling like a safe place that you’re better off in; later on, when the Room becomes haunted, it becomes more like Walter and his sinister intentions. It no longer heals you because Walter wants you dead now, it becomes haunted to get you out into the world Walter can kill you in. He gives you the Doll specifically to kickstart that.

In regards to Henry's lack of response to finding a gun laying around his apartment, you must remember this game takes place in the US. We actually DO find them randomly while dusting sometimes.

I can't lie, as clear as it is that Walter was an insane serial killer, I always felt so sad for what he went through as a child. Convinced he could see his mom and trying to escape the crazy cult brainwashing and abuse, and instead of it being Henry's hell, we see Walter's. It's honestly a really tragic story that holds up on the silent hill themes really well

A theory about why Henry acts so strange during the game is that he has social anxiety or a similar mental disorder. He most likely didn't leave his apartment often and saw it as a safe place, which makes him being stuck there during the game more impactful. He is also forced into situations where he has to interact with people in disturbing and unfamiliar places. Or it could just be bad voice acting, but I like to think it was intentional.

To think: this is what people called “bad” or the “worst thing with silent hill” once upon a time. Then we got origins… and homecoming…and the rest

The room healing Henry is also an in universe explanation how Henry hasn't died from starvation or otherwise while being imprisoned in the room. The room is literally keeping him alive until he's needed for the sacraments.

Regardless of whether people liked Silent Hill 4 or not, it's undeniable that the chained door is one of the most iconic images in horror media history Even with zero context it's a super creepy image and makes your imagination run wild about what could make someone so scared that they'd put so many locks on a door to keep something out (or in the context of the game, keep someone IN)

In Jasper’s defense, if I were wandering an unholy nightmare realm and freaking out about some nosey man, I’d really want some chocolate milk too.

SH4 was my intro to the series. One of the things I’ve always appreciated about this one is how Henry was truly just a normal guy. He wasn’t a father looking for his missing daughter, he wasn’t a man haunted by his dead wife and he wasn’t a teenage girl confronting her past and seeking revenge. Henry was just a guy who got locked in his apartment. Which makes it that much scarier, he picked the wrong apartment to live in. If not him, it would’ve been someone else.

As someone who's never going to play the game cause I'm a chicken, I really loved this kind of walkthrough with the informative, funny and totally not pointless commentary. Thank you!

This game's gameplay makes a lot more sense when you consider Henry an agoraphobic and the game situated as a paranoid agoraphobia. During the time this game was being made, the hikikomori was a type of personality trait that was just starting to become very prominent. This gameplay is essentially a looking view through the lens of a hikikomori/severe agoraphobic. The social isolation, looking in through windows and holes for glimpses of social contact, feeling locked in your own home, invading privacy in an almost intimate setting, and on and on. The fact that the game has ghosts that "stalk" you also portrays the game's focus on avoiding social contact, anyone with anxiety will tell you what it's like to be too close to someone; simply being "damaged" by a humanoid ghost being nearby is a good 1 for 1 example of this. The fact that the escort portion of this game is also so taxing is another principle of the agoraphobic or socially anxious sort. You are now no longer beholden only to you and your wellbeing, but someone else's as well. The escort portion simply reminds me of the time I had my first date and girlfriend, in which I immediately chose the self-destructive nuclear option because my own form of social self-loathing made me not only feel like things were "too good for me" but that I felt like no matter what I did there was NOTHING I could do to help/better my girlfriend. The game captures this pretty well, you WANT to tell Eileen to wait someplace safe, safe away from you. You WANT her to be safe, you WANT her to feel content, you KNOW that you will NEVER make them safe nor happy and want them to find a place of rest or a place to be gone but that simply isn't an option. For all rights and purposes, you are tied to this individual, your personal safety in social isolation has now been forcefully breached and you're forced to deal with enemies and monsters (stressors and vulnerabilities) head-on rather than retreat. Because if you retreat, your in-game partner cannot. She cannot physically follow you in the same pace that you hold. This is also true with real life when you feel the urge to retreat inside and back to social isolation where the vulnerabilities you suffered during your trauma that made you this way just . shut. up. for a while and allow you to think and experience peace for the precious few moments you feel like you can grasp. That's why I still consider Silent Hill 4 to be "Of the original stock" because Team Silent knows their strengths in psychological horror, atmosphere, world building, and enemy design and Silent Hill 4 tells it's story exactly how it needs to be told.

The reveal that the “1” in the carved numbers on the victim wasn’t a 1 at all, but actually a “/“ was a game changing plot twist honestly.

Despite it flaws this was the scariest silent hill for me. The special ghosts in each stage with their found footage introductions are nightmare fuel.

I always felt the prison levels was meant to be some kind of homage/reference to the Panopticon. A conceptual prison that was a massive circle with no cell doors and a single guard post in the center that could look down but none of the inmates could tell where he was looking.

My theory about the giant umbilical cord you find through out the world was that it's actually the tunnel you take between worlds but poking out in Walter's world.

I feel that Henry's Blazé reaction to most things has to be implying depression on his part as apathy is one of the big symptoms. Feeling like you are trapped in your own body, your own room, a silent witness to the world with no way to interract with it or help people is a major part of the illness, which is what the game is all about.

Despite this series being about the "Most Hated" Silent Hill Games, I'd love to hear you go through all the main titles like Origins, the first game, SH2, 3 and Shattered Memories.

I personally found The Room to be one of the eeriest in the series. Taking a place that is generally considered a "safe space", your home, and making it gradually dangerous is completely unsettling. My cousin and I rented it on a whim from the video store back when it first came out, staying up all night trying to figure it out, and it gave me nightmares off and on for years. It still to this day unsettles me in ways the other 3 never did - I specifically hate the idea of climbing through little spaces because of that damn tunnel in the bathroom 😅