Silent Hill 3

The pinnacle of psychological horror—Heather’s nightmare drips with grotesque beauty (that Otherworld transition!), the soundtrack is a industrial lullaby of dread, and the cult lore chills to the bone. The subway and Brookhaven are masterclasses in tension. Flawless, terrifying, and personal.

Silent Hill 3's gameplay is boring, you can just run past and ignore most enemy encounters and resource management is non-existant. Puzzles are mostly braindead, consisting of just mixing together items in obvious contextual situations or getting a number from obvious clues. The narrative is also weak, Heather's characterization is non-sensical and its theming comes across as juvenile and moronic. As an audiovisual experience it's impressive, but the game offers little outside of that.

Not as immediately impressive as SH2: the design is less unified (lots of fairly arbitrary monsters, and the mall where a great deal of the game is set might seem arbitrary), and familiarity with SH1 is more or less required for the narrative to be comprehensible, let alone impactful. Still, it is, in the end, about something just as real, and I'll not soon forget the conclusion. Plus Heather's sullen refusal to engage with the metaphysical is delightful.

As an older game and an older Silent Hill game, the controls feel a bit dated, and the combat isn't anything to write home about. Nevertheless, it has a great atmosphere and is very much worth a playthrough to experience what it offers. Great soundtrack capturing teenage angst at times and jangling nerves with industrial dissonance the next.

On the Silent Hill graph, 3 appears to be at the peak of the series, but if you click the magnifying glass in Excel a few times, you'll notice it's actually a few pixels to the right. We have a game that feels like a Silent Hill game, but has not fixed any of the flaws, so ended up pretty inessential and forgettable to me. Two is still the best, four still plays better, and one is still more engaging.

Silent Hill 3 starts the extremely unfortunate downturn for Team Silent from which they would never recover. There are glimpses of brilliance in Silent Hill 3 but the whole is a pretty uneven experience as the story and thematic elements are only a couple more good ideas away from being fully realized. Not that this is a bad game, the atmosphere is still palpable and the monster design is fascinating from start to finish.

This one just fell flat. It wasn't as good as the other ones I had played.

I peed.

One of my favourite horror games of all time, the list of things this game does right is outstanding. A realistic female main character whose strengths and weaknesses are developed through gameplay and story without feeding into the 'women are weak and must be protected' trope? Check. A psychotic, demented shifting world that doesn't rely on massive jump scares to shock you, but rather a creeping sense of dread as you plunge further into your mechanical hell? Check. 500 characters is not enough.

There are only so many ways you can mush together hunks of flesh into monsters. At least we are not hitting naked midgets with pipes again.