(I wrote this review like half a year ago and I don't remember what I wrote have fun)

im not a lesbian but im completely in love with this game

can't believe this game actually took me 3 30 hrs and its still some of the most dense and claustrophobic and terrifying and well paced experience of my entire life in the horror department it felt like i played 30 hours of this masterpiece im not joking fr fr

after playing silent hill 1 (liked it) and 2 (loved it) last year i forgot about this series completely until i suddenly remembered that silent hill 3 actually exists

the game wastes literally no time and already throws you into the action they know what you want and you'll get it and this is probably the moment I realised it was gonna get real freaky in here its just scare after scare after scare trauma after trauma after trauma and for the possibly 4 or more hours youre gonna spend with it they will make sure you get shit in your pants real quick

the first ever location you'll meet is an amusement park and if you played silent hill 1 you'll recognise this location and you'll soon meet the protagonist of this game my child and my love Heather Mason now . if you say she's a bad protagonist or annoying or whatever your WILL catch my hands shes the sweetest child and she can do no wrong and most of all she wants NONE to do with this paranormal psychologically draining shit and honestly ? I can get behind this feeling

this is surely a weird and sudden change in protagonist since we were kinda used to the troubled and kinda emotionally unavailable grown ass men of the first and second game so to have a young girl as the main protagonist could give a new perspective to the entire story and silent hill in general and I love the fact that it's inherently biased by the fact that she is in fact a girl and the game knows it the people around her know it and even the nightmares she has know this fact

shes moody and loses her temper real quick all in all she can be seen as a rebellious teenager cliche + the shard tongue she got those snarky and sarcastic comments she gets out of her system here and there but she's def more than that she's still an emotionally troubled person and also really sensitive and kind . clearly the situation gets her v stressed and psychotic but wouldnt that make everyone downright exhausted people would say shes a bitch but theyre just incels keep moving

apart from being incredibly complex superficially she has quite a convoluted and troubled mind and quite escalates into an introspective lens in the later parts of the game but possibly one of the best examples is in the first parts of the game where she sees herself in a mirror and says that her reflection kinda feels like a false image or an imitator and while this has some plot relevance (more on that later) it makes it apparent that she can get very intrapersonal at times

the point is I love her as a person who's studying psychology this series of games is literally a database of case studies I wish I was joking rn should I make my thesis on this lets think

the first thing that I noticed ingame is that the graphics got so much better to the point that this still feels like a game that could've come out some years ago honestly its incredible heathers model and expressions are amazing and so are the other characters and monsters and environments really they pushed the ps2 graphics to the extreme in this one it's just an unbelievable sight and when so much of the horror is done by environmental elements and eerie dialogues it's something that heightens the entire experience to another level completely

i enjoyed in particular the new monsters that interestingly enough encapsulate some aspects of heathers even unconscious reality to the point that the guy youre gonna meet the most (the closer) straight up looks like a onahole I was so confused honestly and the double heads faces look like vaginas opening up . yeah this game is full of vaginas i guess but yknow what this is kind of like female dread centered and I can only respect that + insane cancers literally look like that ugly bastard tag on that one hentai porn site and the pendulum looks like to breasts/torsos sewn together and the hypersexualised nurses trying to fuck heather up real good but the one that really got me incredibly uncomfortable and kinda scared of the implications it brought upon is the slurper (great name) theyre like humanoid figures on 4 legs with long tongues and shorts or whatever so this is BAD + they slurp up carrion and fluids + the fact that they shove heather on the floor and climb on top of her is sooooooo umhhh liiiike theyre sexual implications are so in your face like the phallic forms the elongated tongue the aggressive and quick attacks idk this for me truly represent the epitome of heather fear of rapists or stalkers or something and this kinda made me truly feel bad shes only 17 and already got monsters and terrors that feel hypersexual in nature which is something that I can understand in silent hill 2 as james is a grown ass man but the implications that she's already so damn scared and somehow forced to defend against the sex sphere is just too much and too sad I mean probably I'm reading too much into it but I guess in the country of daily molested girls on trains some people would know how hard it is sometimes to live as a young girl and approaching a world that is not seeing you as a person anymore but as a sexual object and I guess this is kinda implied in the fact that heather only wears a miniskirt and is kind of a prey of these otherworldly penis looking figures

the femininity and maternity topics come up in the game itself and story a lot and not at least once this game makes you entertain the thought of being a girl or being a mother this is just The Female Experience from the first second to the last one and its pretty depressing to see probably this is not something that the developers were trying to convey but it makes you feel some type of way about this stuff and it's surely a feat

among the other stuff the monsters also act completely different from silent hill 2 they were kind of suffering around grieving and occasionally trying to cave james skull in (see: daddy pyramid head and his big mace) but in this one they just FULL ON ambush you everywhere and every single time they're just so fucking aggressive and fast and molest heather in any way shape or form wow this is so not gonna be a metaphor for the societal abuse that women have to live through because patriarchal standards . p fucked up heather

environments play a damn big part in the whole picture and I'd say the usual silent hill formula for scary places was took to the extremes encompassing the filthiest bloodiest rustiest structures ive ever seen in this series every single location ie either a v liminal and dark environment when its in the real world or possibly the most disgusting place ever in the otherworld the station and the hospital and the amusement park and even heathers own apartment building has this scary and extremely uneasy feeling that's just ughhhh insanely addicting every single location bears a new connotation of scare/disgust and its just a neverending spectacle of dread that could've come out of critically acclaimed (not) saya no uta

battle system got a bit rejuvenated after the other 2 games they actually said maybe let's put some thought into this instead of just giving some grown ass man a pipe and a pistol and it pays off breaking the fucking necks of these monsters is great and i would do it again any time (big fucking lie since I killed possibly 3 enemies in this game I dodged every single one of them)

and this game would be nothing without the atmosphere . people . its to my incredible hearts content that I can say that this is possibly the most oppressive terrifying martyrizing torturing psychotic landscape of horrors this series has ever had and I'm SO INTO IT every single room is just FILLED with visual and additive ok actually maybe only additive overstimulation because when I think of visual overstimulation hyperdemon comes to mind so yeah the environmental sounds and monster noises and even the radio alerts create a soundscape so layered and complex and chaotic that completely annihilates any organ out of your auditory system im so sorry and + to even heighten the whole suffering (me a masochist) I even put the radio on almost max sound because I wanted my senses to explode once and for good and its incredibly disgusting to my nervous system and still I wanted more and more every single room can either range from deepest silence with just few and distant noises or a complete fucking mess of sounds from hell + it has to be said that the OST does a great job of atmospherical dark ambience with metal clanking around eerie cries and screeches from god knows where

in the end. really cool soundtrack lmao I LOVE youre not here btw that song is something else and something that heather would 100% listen to im just sure about it lets go

this game feels like period cramps (im a man)

scene where claudia swallows the fetus

i love the symbolism of the save point