With the recent rumors of a new Silent Hill (with some of the old Team Silent heads involved, oh dear god yes!), I coincidentally thought about how Silent Hill 4 came out in 2004 and was mechanically a big departure from the previous three games - for good and bad. While it was also evidently rushed through development with the team cut in half for SH3 and SH4 that resulted in a lot of asset reuse and cut corners, it did a lot of incredibly refreshing things. Most notably, it introduced the apartment segments where the player had to traverse the small apartment space in first-person perspective with some specific scripted events that disturbed the player. From the scary locks on the doors, to the peephole segments, to spying on Eileen next door, to looking out the window to see things across the street, to radio segments, the apartment space in the first half of the game splendlidly builds up a sense of isolation and dread. All the while, you as a player is always 'safe' from monsters in the third-person perspective segments. The game would later upend this seemingly safe space half-way through the story by having random demon infestations in the apartment and making what was once considered an oasis away from the monsters, to also be scary and unnerving.
This particular use of first-person horror in 2004 is to my knowledge incredibly innovative and was perhaps less appreciated at the time. Several years later in 2007, the Swedish Frictional Games would try their hand at first-person horror with the Penumbra series, but not becoming successful with their formula until Amnesia: The Dark Descent in 2010, six whole years after Silent Hill 4. With the advent of youtube live streaming and reactions, as well as Twitch, the first-person horror genre got a massive boost and popularity with several titles like Outlast, Zombi, Alien Isolation, and recently Visage and Devotion. This first-person horror genre of course also culminated in the master-piece that was PT - which also makes me wonder would PT exist the way we know it if not for Silent Hill 4? Did SH4 influence PT in any form, I wonder?
In the early 2000's, no horror game did it like SH4. You might argue that the subsequent Cryostasis (2008), Condemned (2005), and FEAR (2005) were first-person horror games, but they were also much more action-oriented, relying on the first-person shooter genre that they were more in family with. White Day: A Labyrinth Named School came out in 2001 but it never got out of Korea until years later and therefore never had any international influence until much, much later in 2017. You could argue that Fatal Frame/Project Zero (2001) already had first-person horror with its camera, but that was only when using the Ghost camera - you were not forced to do it and it was mostly in combat with tensions being high, so it always felt much more action-y . In comparison, SH4's use of first-person segments in the apartment was more about invoking a sense of dreaded isolation and loneliness and it subverted its own function and sense of place throughout the game.
To me, in retrospect, Silent Hill 4 did some very daring things all the way back in 2004 - it shook up the Silent Hill formula and tried something new, and it was way ahead of its time with its first-person horror segments that would become a dominant horror genre almost a decade later. With first-person horror being as relatively big these days, do you agree that SH4 was ahead of its time?
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