Spoilers for Silent Hill 4: The Room are here…

Silent Hill 4 will become suddenly a much more daunting game, and a much larger focus of my (digital) life, starting what I hope will be very soon – i.e., later this month. This is because I am going to be attempting, somehow, to obtain a perfect ranking in what is a very difficult game at the best of times.

Ten Star Runs. To me they’re a kind of fabled achievement, something that I almost don’t consider surmountable. In my spare time I’m trying to prep myself to do Ten Star Runs for Silent Hill 2, specifically the much-reviled HD Collection, just for the sake of the platinum trophy. (Yes, I’m that kind of completionist).

Silent Hill 4: The Room might be a little different from those behind-the-scenes attempts, given that I’ll be streaming my attempts. Presumably the first few attempts will be absolutely dismal. Let’s just step through the requirements for a moment:

Difficulty: Hard | I must play on the hardest difficulty. Seems like a no brainer for the requirement, but as for what it entails – every enemy has double or perhaps triple the health. This means that every fight will be a grudge match, and will waste a lot of resources if I dally in fights I really shouldn’t be picking (if I am fighting more than one Twin Victim at a time, the audience should probably bonk me over the head – lightly, though).

Play Time: Under Two Hours | One of the more terrifying requirements. If you recall, the game took me five hours when I first streamed it. Granted, it was the first game I ever streamed, and as such there was a greater sense of nervousness about the whole thing, and I did stop to talk about things here and there or pontificate – but still. I have to cut down a whopping three hours (and one minute & 57 seconds) from my time to succeed in this category. Watching cutscenes, unlike in Silent Hill 2 & 3, does count towards the timer. So I’ll have to skip all of those too. Remember that there are eleven total locations in the game (Subway World, Forest World, Water Prison World, Building World, and Apartment World all have to be visited twice, so that’s ten, plus Hospital World, plus all the times you have to return to Room 302). So if we divide 120 minutes by 11 locations, we get 10.909. So that means I have to complete every location in about ten minutes. Some places I’ll probably gain more time, and others I’ll almost certainly lose time on – I’m most worried about Building and Apartment Worlds at the moment, though I also fear I’ll mess up the Water Prison World puzzle with the cranks and take too long there. I’m thinking I might need to get a visible splitter on screen and actually look like I’m speedrunning or something similar to get this category under control, and to see what areas I might have to improve in.

Saves: 0 | Yep, you read that right. I can’t save the game a single time. While this ought to save me time, helping me with the previous category, if I die, the whole run ends. No pressure – especially when you consider some of the nastier segments of the game, like the Wall Men escalator, the fight with Andrew de Salvo (do a barrel roll!), the One Truth boss fight, and both Apartment World (2nd Time) and Outside Room 302. These segments are what I am really dreading – oh, not to forget fighting the ghost of Cynthia, who can wrap her long hair around Henry and drag him in to kill him pretty easily, especially considering how narrow the Subway cars are to move through.

Continues: 0 | Yes, if you thought I could get around the whole “no saves” thing by just hitting “continue” on the game over screen, you’d be dead wrong. The game is going to be more lethal, have to be played less conservatively, and with the knowledge that if I die, it’s all over… that’s horror.

Enemies Defeated: 120 or more | This is probably the category I’m least worried about. While it might sound daunting, there are a number of really pathetic enemies in this particular Silent Hill that mean I can wail on those tentacle things, or the leeches, and every individual one of those killed adds to my tally. Not to mention the enemies I will probably have to fight unavoidably (such as Patients in the hospital), and I will hopefully add this one pretty easily to the list. Though if I can attract a steady number of viewers to these streams, you guys can help me count!

Memo Items Found: All 52 | This is another one I’m pretty worried about. How on earth am I supposed to remember where all the memos can be found? Some of them are pretty cruelly hidden. In a five hour playthrough where I tried to touch on everything in the game, I found 44 / 52. I’ll probably write a list for myself and keep it open on a screen beside me so I can keep track, at least during the first few trial playthroughs where I get myself back into the game and back into the swing of things.

Ending: Whatever one you want | Unlike some other Silent Hill games, where getting a specific ending is basically a requirement (Silent Hill 3‘s Ten Star rank requirements can’t be achieved on any other ending besides the “Normal” ending), Silent Hill 4 lets you away with any ending you so please – or whichever one you happen to obtain. Remember, the endings rotate around two factors – whether you save Eileen from Walter’s giant death machine at the end, and whether you cleanse the apartment of the Hauntings. I think I will try to save Eileen – or at least to keep her as safe as possible to prevent her being possessed randomly – but whether or not I can cleanse Room 302 depends entirely on how my time is going. As such I’d like to obtain one of the two “better” endings – but that might just be a rosy ideal, and the way it really turns out might be much more miserable.

Now this list is certainly fairly daunting. It’s basically playing a perfect game of Silent Hill 4: The Room. Note that there are two small “Freebie” stars that I could technically use to up my ranking, if I happened to stuff up one of the other categories. Say that I really needed to save twice in the game at some stage. That would use up my two freebies. For every half-hour threshold of extra time I use up, that’s a freebie used up.

But the ultimate goal is to obtain a 10.2 Star Ranking, which means I fulfill all those criteria without needing to rely on the two free little stars that the game gives me. This means that yes, I really will be trying to play a perfect game of Silent Hill 4, a survival horror game from almost twenty years ago (it turns nineteen this year, and Silent Hill 3 turns twenty).

I think the worry I have most is not that I won’t be able to obtain the 10.2 Star Ranking. I think with enough practice and enough willpower, I will be able to one day obtain it – and have video evidence I obtained it! I could even do tutorials or guides or something similar afterwards, dissecting my own play and the nature of perfecting a game. No, the worry is whether or not I’ll be able to stream it.

See, video gaming is something I want to remain wholly a passion of mine. Streaming is something I’ve heard a lot of things about – a lot of great things, that’s why I started streaming, even without having watched many prior to my own diving in – but also some things about creator burnout. I think streaming, in some sense, emphasizes creator burnout. Being on the internet alone emphasizes burnout, just by virtue of how much stuff is being shoved at you, day in, day out. But I think the reason why I have been so cautious with choosing what games to play is because I worry that if I don’t play games I already know I’ll love to play on stream that I might crash and burn on the sheer novelty of it all.

I get that probably sounds strange. Part of the issue is that I have an unusual streaming set-up. The internet at my actual place of living is not exactly reliable, so I need to stream somewhere else. That’s fine – I have that place, and can stream there – though not all the time, and having to leave my own house in order to stream is not something I always feel up to doing. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to stream – just that I can’t stream as often as I would like. But at the same time it is almost like a wall that protects me from potential burnout. Some days I just want to leap on stream and play something cool, or share what I’m working on, even, but the very nature of my own internet woes means that what I produce has to be pre-packaged or carefully thought out.

Analysis, by its very nature, is retrospective. It requires considered thought and reflection in order to analyze. Considering my chosen online name has the word analysis in it, that’s the kind of content I want to continue to create. Which, of course, puts me at a bit of a crossroads. Not in terms of how I continue to write for this website, or write video essays (I’m roaring away on several different scripts right now and having an awesome time), but in terms of how I stream. Because on the one hand, I am potentially opening myself up to a form of content that by its nature is not really analytical. Certainly I’ll be talking about horror games, literary analysis, and game design as much as is possible during these streams, because that’s what they are vehicle for, but the actual game itself that I’m playing might not be the center of that discussion.

The worry is not so much “I’ll run out of things to say” (I feel I’m quite good at filling the silence with thoughts), but more that my streams won’t have as much structure to them. And if they don’t have as much structure, I sometimes worry that I’ll suffer burnout from the pressure I place on myself. I guess the reason I wanted to make Silent Hill 4: The Room and attempts at a Ten-Star Run the focal point of this year’s early streams is that I can use this game that I know and love to bits. I can play it in a way that transcends traditional ludic-literary analysis and moves into the heady lands of intense immersion within a single game and how everything within it clicks together. And from a routine scheduled stream that people can check in every week and watch, I can grow into a better streamer – and grow into a streamer with more certainty about what he will be making every week, regardless of whether I expected to play a game or not. Maybe somedays I should just rock up without a plan, and see how everything unfolds from there.

Maybe one day I will be in a position where my internet is good enough to do those kinds of streams, or my inherent motivation is enough. Maybe that day will come when I have more experience – I hope that day comes this year. I look forward to seeing you there on Twitch!

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