Silent Hill 3 finds itself in the deeply unenviable position of being the first Silent Hill game to not really have an identity of its own. When you’re following a game as titanic as Silent Hill 2 I think it would be easy to be destroyed by the question of what the fuck you do next and I’m extremely glad that Team Silent had the good sense to make the answer “not that again.” Conceptually I think there’s something interesting in the idea of returning to a lot of the aesthetics and narrative ideas of the original game, as the unbelievable technical mastery over the PS2 that’s on display here definitely affords them a little bit of victory lapping that warrants such a thing. Still though, I’m glad that this game manages to firmly stake its own atmospheric identity even if I think ultimately it doesn’t all come together quite as well as its predecessors.
A big part of that is the overarching narrative of the game. At first I was kind of put off by the structure. Where previous Silent Hills stuck to the same formula of dropping your character in the titular town and making those foggy streets the hub world of sorts between the “dungeon” locations of municipal buildings and hospitals and stuff, 3 is a very linear game that shuttles you from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon with very little narrative tissue as Heather Mason just tries to go from the mall back to her apartment with very little understanding of what the fuck is happening to her.
And that’s kind of all you get! For a long while! Initially I was fatigued by this gauntlet of what in previous games would be considered set piece dungeon areas back to back to back to back but I came around. Partly this is because all of these areas are just good – Silent Hill 3 really is all killer no filler. Partly, though, it’s because I don’t find the actual narrative of the game particularly interesting. There is a renewed focus on the cult from Silent Hill 1 and they’re back to their old hijinks some seventeen years later. There are seeds of good shit here – conflicts between three emergent factions with differing philosophies about the purpose of their dark god and how best to weaponize it against the world, implications of what the lives of surviving characters from the original game (and at least one who didn’t) looked like in the intervening time – but none of that stuff is really given any time to be developed into anything more than cool seasoning sprinkled over something that feels disappointingly seen-before for this series. I’m conflicted about it though, right, because the REASON this stuff is so underbaked is because almost all of it is squished into the back half of the game to make room for The World’s Most Stressful Walk Home, which is sick! Also, I’m about to get into MORE shit that is very cool in this game, and that stuff persists into that second half as well along with these things that don’t work as well, it just sucks that the thing that was sacrificed here is, ostensibly, the primary narrative of the game haha.
Who even CARES though because the TRUE focus of the game is Heather Mason, perhaps the best video game protagonist of all time? She’s a delight, an absolute pleasure to inhabit and spend time with. She faces a gauntlet of intensely physical and increasingly targeted psychological horror and meets almost every challenge with annoyance and fury. Eye rolls and ughs and a brandished katana rather than fear. Even in her relationship with the game’s one other overtly cool character (something this series has never REALLY had and it’s nice! I really like Douglas – SH1 contrived a lot of situations to keep Cybil and Harry off the same page) who is a fifty-something year old man she is the clear leader, and she never lets any of the villains get in her head. She’s goofy, she’s angry, and always ready to fuck up some asshole cultists who don’t understand who they’re dealing with. A Queen.
And fitting this protagonist who is much more self-assured and much less susceptible to bullshit than the ones we’ve previously seen in the series, the game’s atmospheric dials have been adjusted accordingly. Of course the heavy symbolism and psychologically specific nature of the monsters and locations is still there, but it’s less intense than in either game, and it does seem to roll off Heather’s back a bit, like water off a duck’s. She’s not a scared, traumatized kid and she’s not committed any great sins; she’s not in a place where this stuff is gonna just work on her automatically. To compensate, everything else is dialed up. The fidelity offered by the PS2 is taken full advantage of in a different direction than it was in Silent Hill 2, and only two years later Team Silent is squeezing every polygon out of the machine. It’s a technical marvel, maybe the most photoreal game on the console, and every nasty, gritty detail is dialed to eleven here. Things are grimier, rustier, flakier, bloodier than they’ve ever been, a real sicko grungefest. Monsters are more varied and more aggressive, but Heather is more mobile and has better tools for dealing with them at her disposal than her forebears. The sound design is at a series high, leaning harder than ever into the industrial crunches and whines and pounding clanks. The appearance of any enemy is not just a threat to Heather’s health but now a jarring assault on the senses in a much more visceral way than ever before.
There’s also the introduction of a lot more General Horror stuff in a way that I think really works for the game. Each Silent Hill game has progressively flirted more and more with the idea that the town and the otherworld are just kind of Normal Haunted, by, like, ghosts and shit, and 3 takes this and runs with it, leaning into Haunted House Bullshit in a way that I could never get enough of. Be it a ghost pushing me onto the train tracks, getting scary messages in the hospital, or the literal haunted house sequence you run through in the amusement park late in the game, it was ALWAYS scary and ALWAYS fun. The game’s sense of humor is a lot more overtly goofy than Silent Hill 1’s but it works completely, never kills the vibe, and always contributes to a scare even as it’s making me smile. It’s a hard thing to balance but Silent Hill 3 makes it look easy.
I feel like this review has bounced around a lot, like I’m describing a lot of disparate things that maybe sound weird on paper and that’s because Silent Hill 3 feels like that, a bit. A mish mash of a lot of really different elements that I wouldn’t have expected to work as well together as they did, and in fact it did take a couple hours to start winning me over. But despite what I personally found to be a somewhat unsatisfying main plot (that is, admittedly, buoyed by its focus on a character who has quickly become one of my personal favorites in any game), everything here just kind of clicks. It’s just fun. A Silent Hill game that’s not as focused and cohesive is, it turns out, still a game made by a team of master craftsmen at the absolute top of their game, at least at this point in time. It really seems like they can’t go wrong!
A big part of that is the overarching narrative of the game. At first I was kind of put off by the structure. Where previous Silent Hills stuck to the same formula of dropping your character in the titular town and making those foggy streets the hub world of sorts between the “dungeon” locations of municipal buildings and hospitals and stuff, 3 is a very linear game that shuttles you from dungeon to dungeon to dungeon with very little narrative tissue as Heather Mason just tries to go from the mall back to her apartment with very little understanding of what the fuck is happening to her.
And that’s kind of all you get! For a long while! Initially I was fatigued by this gauntlet of what in previous games would be considered set piece dungeon areas back to back to back to back but I came around. Partly this is because all of these areas are just good – Silent Hill 3 really is all killer no filler. Partly, though, it’s because I don’t find the actual narrative of the game particularly interesting. There is a renewed focus on the cult from Silent Hill 1 and they’re back to their old hijinks some seventeen years later. There are seeds of good shit here – conflicts between three emergent factions with differing philosophies about the purpose of their dark god and how best to weaponize it against the world, implications of what the lives of surviving characters from the original game (and at least one who didn’t) looked like in the intervening time – but none of that stuff is really given any time to be developed into anything more than cool seasoning sprinkled over something that feels disappointingly seen-before for this series. I’m conflicted about it though, right, because the REASON this stuff is so underbaked is because almost all of it is squished into the back half of the game to make room for The World’s Most Stressful Walk Home, which is sick! Also, I’m about to get into MORE shit that is very cool in this game, and that stuff persists into that second half as well along with these things that don’t work as well, it just sucks that the thing that was sacrificed here is, ostensibly, the primary narrative of the game haha.
Who even CARES though because the TRUE focus of the game is Heather Mason, perhaps the best video game protagonist of all time? She’s a delight, an absolute pleasure to inhabit and spend time with. She faces a gauntlet of intensely physical and increasingly targeted psychological horror and meets almost every challenge with annoyance and fury. Eye rolls and ughs and a brandished katana rather than fear. Even in her relationship with the game’s one other overtly cool character (something this series has never REALLY had and it’s nice! I really like Douglas – SH1 contrived a lot of situations to keep Cybil and Harry off the same page) who is a fifty-something year old man she is the clear leader, and she never lets any of the villains get in her head. She’s goofy, she’s angry, and always ready to fuck up some asshole cultists who don’t understand who they’re dealing with. A Queen.
And fitting this protagonist who is much more self-assured and much less susceptible to bullshit than the ones we’ve previously seen in the series, the game’s atmospheric dials have been adjusted accordingly. Of course the heavy symbolism and psychologically specific nature of the monsters and locations is still there, but it’s less intense than in either game, and it does seem to roll off Heather’s back a bit, like water off a duck’s. She’s not a scared, traumatized kid and she’s not committed any great sins; she’s not in a place where this stuff is gonna just work on her automatically. To compensate, everything else is dialed up. The fidelity offered by the PS2 is taken full advantage of in a different direction than it was in Silent Hill 2, and only two years later Team Silent is squeezing every polygon out of the machine. It’s a technical marvel, maybe the most photoreal game on the console, and every nasty, gritty detail is dialed to eleven here. Things are grimier, rustier, flakier, bloodier than they’ve ever been, a real sicko grungefest. Monsters are more varied and more aggressive, but Heather is more mobile and has better tools for dealing with them at her disposal than her forebears. The sound design is at a series high, leaning harder than ever into the industrial crunches and whines and pounding clanks. The appearance of any enemy is not just a threat to Heather’s health but now a jarring assault on the senses in a much more visceral way than ever before.
There’s also the introduction of a lot more General Horror stuff in a way that I think really works for the game. Each Silent Hill game has progressively flirted more and more with the idea that the town and the otherworld are just kind of Normal Haunted, by, like, ghosts and shit, and 3 takes this and runs with it, leaning into Haunted House Bullshit in a way that I could never get enough of. Be it a ghost pushing me onto the train tracks, getting scary messages in the hospital, or the literal haunted house sequence you run through in the amusement park late in the game, it was ALWAYS scary and ALWAYS fun. The game’s sense of humor is a lot more overtly goofy than Silent Hill 1’s but it works completely, never kills the vibe, and always contributes to a scare even as it’s making me smile. It’s a hard thing to balance but Silent Hill 3 makes it look easy.
I feel like this review has bounced around a lot, like I’m describing a lot of disparate things that maybe sound weird on paper and that’s because Silent Hill 3 feels like that, a bit. A mish mash of a lot of really different elements that I wouldn’t have expected to work as well together as they did, and in fact it did take a couple hours to start winning me over. But despite what I personally found to be a somewhat unsatisfying main plot (that is, admittedly, buoyed by its focus on a character who has quickly become one of my personal favorites in any game), everything here just kind of clicks. It’s just fun. A Silent Hill game that’s not as focused and cohesive is, it turns out, still a game made by a team of master craftsmen at the absolute top of their game, at least at this point in time. It really seems like they can’t go wrong!