Silent Hill 4: The Room

To do: Document the prototype version. Investigate whether or not entering the iwa_teststage.bin room is possible. Also, see if it is possible to spawn TEST00. Unused Eileen animations for when she's in her bedroom through the peephole (such as her eating a burger), including an unused haunting. Verify if every animation used in the attached video is indeed unused (and see if there are any more). Subtitles point towards there possibly being unused dialogue (more notably, Eileen has some quotes that may be unused). Apparently, there are some unused sounds in the files. More unused models and animations are apparently in the files. Unused debug features. More unused textures (enemy_cell_textures.bin has a very small texture of a man - is it ever used?). Version differences, e.g. PC and Xbox versions are missing graphical effects. Up until March 20, 2025, the GOG version was missing some hauntings until they were properly re-enabled. Early cutscene that uses Henry's early model, alongside an early Eileen model.

Silent Hill 4: The Room follows Henry Townshend, an everyman who becomes trapped in his apartment and must find a way to escape.

This was the last game in the series that Team Silent would develop prior to their disbandment.

Unused Items#

There are a few leftover items in the game that have no use in the final game. Due to the fact that they have art assets and a localized description already implemented, it is likely that these were cut late in development. If you hack them into your inventory, they cannot be actually be used anywhere.

Channeling Stone	Dirty Stone
Stone imbued with a strange power.	It's a filthy stone, covered in dirt and dust.

Obtaining These Items#

One of these items likely would have come from the toilet in your apartment. When interacting with the toilet in the final game, the following messages will appear:

There's something in the toilet...
Should I grab it?

I'm not brave enough to do it...

It is not known what item would have been retrieved from the toilet, but it would make sense if the Dirty Stone was the item that would have been pulled out, due to it coming out of a toilet and all.

The Channeling Stone seems to have been planned to be obtainable by washing the Dirty Stone. Both items have the same oval shape, and the following string can be found near the strings relating to the Channeling Stone:

You washed the Dirty Stone.

Unused Text#

English Dummy Messages#

There are a few dummy strings in message_common.bin that reference a generic item. This may have been used early in development before any items were actually added to the game as a way to test the item system.

english dummy message
It is full and an item cannot be taken.

english dummy message
The item was taken.

english dummy message
Is an item taken?

Sample.bin#

There is a file called Sample.bin that was presumably used to test the .bin file format. In it, it contains three unused strings.

GOEGOEGOEGOE

NAENAE

SILENT HILL 4

Remnants of UFO Ending#

Silent Hill 4 was originally planned to have a UFO ending. This is evident by the following leftover string which would have been used to show that the player has achieved the ending in their savegame.

U.F.O.

It is likely that the cut items above were used to obtain the U.F.O. ending due to how U.F.O. endings were triggered in previous Silent Hill entries.

Unused Rooms#

Subway World#

Scene 6#

To do: Figure out if anything more can be learned about or from the files in the ARC

The Subway World has an inaccessible scene, scene 6. Loading into the scene will dump Henry into a black void with nothing in it. Despite containing nothing, this is' an actual scene, complete with its own ARC file and scene table entry. However, the ARC file is sparse and only contains collision data as well as one other unidentified file. The game will spam "illigal data" errors while in this scene, presumably due to the scene not having an actual model to render.

The map in this scene will show the map for the King St. Line, though the player arrow will usually be either off the screen or in a nonsensical position, with the space of scene 6 seemingly being a lot smaller than the map expects.

Unused Models#

Henry#

In the file anm_test.bin, there exists an earlier version of Henry's player model. His face is much more "cartoony" and less realistic, and his normal blue shirt has been replaced with a Brown jacket and green undershirt. He is also wearing a belt with a yellow belt buckle.

In-game.

Through model swapping, it is possible to replace Henry's normal player model with this earlier version. Henry's final animations fit correctly over the early model and they share the same skeleton, so it is possible this change was made later on in development.

Spiral Staircase Scenery#

Unused models with animations that resemble the scenery for the spiral staircase areas, depicting some rather strange and grotesque visuals. There are many empty enclosures present in these areas and the models are located within the spiral staircase's files, suggesting that these models may have been used as non-interactive decorations at some point before being removed, possibly for censorship reasons.

Watch on YouTube

Watch on YouTube

Unused Textures#

Anime Textures#

In the em_test.bin file, there exist two textures of some characters from adult visual novel Moekan as the last two textures in the file. These are never displayed in-game, so it is unknown why they are included, but they include mipmaps.

Texture 0x39	Texture 0x40

Unused Animations#

Room 302#

Eileen has a few animations that appear to be unused. Notably, one of the animations seems to resemble some of the game's haunting sequences, in which she twitches in front of the peephole while making gasping noises.

Watch on YouTube

Front Door Peephole#

An animation of Frank Sunderland standing still in front of the peephole with his mouth moving strangely, present in rl.sh4 file under the names d_064.sdm and d_064.xmd. Its purpose is unknown and it does not appear to loop properly, indicating that it was never finished.

Watch on YouTube

Cutscenes#

A short unused cutscene. Internally, this cutscene is placed in-between the scene where Henry meets Joseph and the three versions of the scene with Eileen, potentially indicating that this scene may have been used when losing track of Eileen in some way. This scene is meant to play in Apartment 301 (cm15.bin).

Watch on YouTube

Oddities#

Unused Difficulties#

The game has 3 difficulties, Easy, Normal and Hard. Internally, these values correspond to the values 1, 2, and 3.

Likewise, the tuning data for all enemies that defines the health, speed and so on of each of their possible subtypes contains a value for each difficulty. However, almost every entry which defines difficulty-specific values actually defines 5 total values. These values would be used if the game were to somehow theoretically be set to difficulty 0 or 4. Unfortunately, such difficulties are inaccessible and the function responsible for changing the difficulty will actually force the difficulty back to Normal if any attempt is made to use it to set the difficulty below 1 or above 3.

Given that Silent Hill 2 and 3 both featured a Beginner difficulty, and Silent Hill 3 included an unlockable set of Extreme modes, it's possible that Silent Hill 4 was also planned at some point to include both an easier and harder difficulty. The developers at the very least made the effort to fill in tuning values for difficulties 0 and 4 for every enemy.

mzXX.bin#

To do: Older format? PS2? There's 4 files in this so it's not nothing

An ARC file with some relation to the Water Prison World (identified as mz in the files) exists and goes unused, following the same naming scheme as scene ARCs but with XX instead of a scene number. It doesn't contain any valid level data, so what it might be is a mystery.

Outside Room 302, Scene 22#

The game is split up into "stages" and "scenes", where "stages" correspond to the various levels/worlds and scenes are rooms within those.

For the most part, the 2nd visit to each world is actually the same "stage". One exception is the Apartment World and "Outside Room 302", which are actually completely different stages (6 vs. 8) despite being very similar.

For the most part, the scenes within both stages line up. Scene 10 corresponds to Room 104 in the Apartment World, and also corresponds to Room 104 in "Outside Room 302", for instance.

One interesting exception is Room 301. In Apartment World, Room 301 is scene 22. However, in Outside Room 302, scene 22 is completely absent. It has no files corresponding to it, nor an entry in the game's scene table. Instead, Room 301 in Outside Room 302 uses scene 15, which is that of Room 201. This seems to be a result of the fact that in Outside Room 302, the two rooms are connected via stairs. Since this essentially makes them a single room, the developers seem to have opted to just graft the two together under Room 201's scene ID.

Still, this does leave a gap in the game's files, which could imply that an actual "Outside Room 302" version of Room 301 on its own may have existed at one point. It's worth noting that the "door" ID (used to determine where to position Henry on entering a room) when entering this room from the Room 301 door is still 22.

param.bin#

The file param.bin is an unused file containing an early version of the game's enemy data. Notably, it includes an entry for TEST00, and also completely lacks the Patient/Nurse enemy (this is just one of several factors suggesting this enemy was added fairly hastily later in development).

TEST00 most likely doesn't actually correspond to an actual enemy, and is likely just a placeholder for the first entry.

References#