Silent Hill 3
Description official descriptions
In Silent Hill 3 the player controls Heather, a simple teenage girl. One fine day she goes shopping, but suddenly finds herself trapped in a strange, terrifying place - the eerie town Silent Hill. She hears footsteps; disgusting, creepy monsters attack her, and she has to defend herself. Exploring Silent Hill - and her own past - Heather must find a way to escape the dreadful town.
The third installment in the Silent Hill series is similar to its predecessor visually and gameplay-wise. Like the previous entries, it is a survival horror game combining action-based (predominantly close-ranged) combat and puzzle-solving. The game is somewhat more combat-oriented than the preceding installments. Heather is able to side-step and block some attacks, but in general shares with the other protagonists of the series their relative ineptitude in combat.
Spellings
- サイレントヒル3 - Japanese spelling
- 寂静岭3 - Chinese spelling (simplified)
- 寂靜之丘3 - Chinese spelling (traditional)
- 사일런트 힐 3 - Korean spelling
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Credits (Windows version)
138 People (121 developers, 17 thanks) · View all
Graphic Engine Program | |
Character Program | |
System Program | |
Collison Program | |
Converter Program | |
Event Program | |
Monster Program | |
Shadow Program | |
Camera Program | |
Another World Evil Effect Program | |
Effect Program | |
Sl Tool Program | |
Sound Program | |
Character Modeling & Facial Motion | |
Monster Design & Modeling | |
[ full credits ] |
Reviews
Critics
Average score: 80% (based on 44 ratings)
Players
Average score: 4.1 out of 5 (based on 121 ratings with 8 reviews)
Dammit, get out of my nightmares SH3.
The Good
- Gorgeous graphics that hold up remarkably well 8 years later
- Akira Yamaoka's finest soundtrack; which is saying alot.
- Story is a valid and memorable extension of the original
- Memorable characters & writing overcome bad VO's
- Great boss fights
- Scary. Really, really really scary.
- Fantastic sound design rounds out production values
- Strong artistic sense thanks to Ito's twisted designs
- Almost perfect balance of atmosphere, psychological horror, and even some gross out/shock horror.
**The Bad**
- Voice work slightly improved over past games, but not by much.
- Weird performance issues even on modern computers
- Ugly lack of Vertical tearing, and no - forcing V-Sync won't work.
- Some enemies can be more annoying than anything
- Retreads some areas from the previous game.
- Story, while good - lacks the emotion and poetic nature of its predecessor.
- Same gameplay flaws as before
**The Bottom Line**
Awhile ago, I reviewed the brilliant
Windows · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2011
The Good
I loved the voice acting of this game, very well executed. I also loved the sound effects of this game, very realistic and interesting. also the graphic's in this game are soo realistic, that's almost hard to separate reality and fiction in this game. I also loved the connection between this game and Silent hill part 1. Very nice connection of the two storylines here, I think the production team really put quite a bit of heart into this installment of the series.
The Bad
The challenge was a bit cheap at times, your health goes down way too quickly at times, and you die too easily.
The Bottom Line
I would describe this game as a solid installment to the Silent Hill series. However, if you are not a Silent hill fan, then I suggest that you rent this title. Some people may find some of the puzzles, and storyline of this game a bit confusing, I understood it. However, those that did not play the first Silent hill game, will find theirselves lost with this title.
PlayStation 2 · by David Bryan (21) · 2007
And I thought parking was a nightmare.
The Good
Silent Hill 3 begins with a girl having visions of a nightmarish amusement park while she daydreams at the mall. The girl's name is Heather and waking from the dream, she's confronted by a private detective who hints that there's something mysterious about her past. Heather gives him the slip, sneaking out a bathroom window, but finds the mall has changed—stores are closed, people are gone, and strange creatures from her dream now lope down the backroom corridors. Welcome to Silent Hill.
At the start of the game, the player picks the difficulty level of the game for the combat and puzzle portions. Setting easy, medium, or hard for the combat is a pretty standard feature, but making the same adjustments for puzzle solving is a nice touch. On the easy setting, a puzzle might be absent or its solution blindingly obvious, medium requires some brainwork, and hard can be insidiously evil (but often poetic). Regardless of the settings, the game's ending is the same (at least on the first play-through).
In terms of game play, Silent Hill 3 is accessible to the newcomer, but if you haven't played the original game (or at least Silent Hill 2) the story might be elusive. Having played the original game, I still found myself reading a walkthrough of it just to clear up some of the finer story points. This, of course, would be the big difference between Silent Hill and the Resident Evil series. While Resident Evil puts you in charge of paramilitary characters, the protagonists of Silent Hill are the Lovecraftian doomed Everymen.
The opening levels in the mall set the tone for the game. In the mall, Heather runs past monsters to duck into open stores, where she finds inventory items or solves puzzles. Certain events trigger Silent Hill's signature feature—the transition into the nightmare world. When this happens, the mall's floors turn into a rusty, corrugated metal, the walls drip with blood, and more monsters appear. Now in the nightmare mall, Heather must revisit locations to find new items or explore areas which were previously closed off. It's unsettling, which is Silent Hill's second signature feature.
Following this model, Heather's adventures take her to an apartment building, an office building, and a hospital familiar to Silent Hill fans. There are also some frightening detours into the subway, the sewers, and, of course, a nightmarish amusement park. In addition to the private investigator, Heather also runs into Claudia, a cultist who also knows something about Heather's past, and Vincent, who delivers the game's most chilling line.
Silent Hill has a fare assortment of monsters: dogs whose mouths open vertically, not horizontally, giant walking cancers, and the classic mutated nurses. Heather is surprisingly well-armed against them: handgun, shotgun, katana, etc. Her best weapons, though, are the maps she finds. Heather records information about puzzles, locked doors, and the location of the many player-friendly save points. Heather's other equipment offers trade-offs: a flashlight lights the way, while drawing monsters' attention and a Kevlar vest reduces damage, but slows her down. The handheld radio returns, buzzing static when monsters are near and there are various health restoratives to be found.
I found this entry to be more engrossing than scary, which isn't to say that Silent Hill doesn’t offer more than its share of chills, but it's probably wordier and subtler than most survival horror games. Graphics are great, with cutscenes blending into game play, and the wall textures are amazing, especially the squamous ones. Voice acting is great and the music is so good the game comes with a separate soundtrack CD.
The Bad
I really enjoyed the first Silent Hill—it offered multiple endings, most of which were bleak, placed you in confrontation with allies, and told a very disturbing story very effectively. I liked this game but found it lacking in several ways.
Silent Hill 3 has monsters you've never seen before and some of them just look silly. There are bizarre tripod things, weird bipedal creatures that look like miniature, headless ostriches, and one of the bosses screams phallic image. Not that these things aren't dangerous, but… really? I also don't understand why the monsters of Silent Hill change from game to game.
So some of the monsters are silly but dangerous, thankfully, Heather's well-armed. Too well-armed and too proficient with the arms she has. When's the last time you found a katana? Close quarters, in the dark, with monsters all around—how accurate are you with a gun? How fast can you reload it under those circumstances? It's amazing how collected Heather is, but it's astounding what she actually reacts to. After fighting the phallic image, Heather finds a newspaper rack with papers a few months old. That freaks her out. The worm didn't.
The Bottom Line
As I was playing this, Silent Hill 4: The Room was released. At this point, I'd like to see some of the mysteries of Silent Hill cleared up, rather than new installments taking place in its surrounding areas. I'm not saying that I wouldn't like to see more games, but perhaps they could be set in earlier times. I'd like to see a story arc, instead of sequelization.
Having said that, Silent Hill 3 is a very good game that fails to kick up the genre or the franchise.
PlayStation 2 · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2004
Trivia
Budget
The budget was US$3Million.
DVD
A DVD was also released on the same day the game was released, called Lost Memories - The Art & Music of Silent Hill. The DVD includes illustrations, sounds, trailers, production materials, and the hidden endings of all the Silent Hill games - all in all 200 minutes of footage. The disc also features unlockable hidden bonuses.
Extras
The US and Japanese version ships with a bonus soundtrack CD which features music from the game. The CD has five tracks, which includes a track that was not used in the game.
Graphics
In the PC version of Silent Hill 3 the rendering resolution can be increased up to 4096 by 2048.
References
- The game starts with a nightmarish sequence, after which Heather —the main character— wakes up at a diner, in a shopping mall. When she gets out of said diner, we can see its name: "Happy Burger". In Silent Hill 2 there was a local called Happy Burger, in the corner of Sanders St. and Neely St.
- Two of the stores encountered in the mall are named after women from Goethe's Faust: Boutique Marguerite and Helen's Bakery.
- Near the end of the game, the player will encounter areas identical to the end of Silent Hill. This includes camera positions, captions and even notepads (used as a save point in Silent Hill). These notepads have messages on them from Silent Hill's protagonist, Harry.
- The game features numerous references to Silent Hill 2 (2001), including several small Silent Hill 2 posters in the Mall. When playing the game with a Silent Hill 2 save game on the memory card, other references appear:
- In the Mall, you are given the option to retrieve something from a dirty toilet. When doing so, Heather will crouch and hesitantly move her hand towards the toilet, accompanied with suspense music. At the last moment she comes to her senses, turns to the camera and says "Gross. Who would do something like that anyway?". (In Silent Hill 2, the player had to retrieve a wallet from a clogged toilet).
- When examining your mailbox in the apartment building, Heather comments that there is no mail, not "even from a dead wife". Silent Hill 2 starts with the player receiving a letter from his wife who has been dead for three years.
- When examining the fence on the roof of Brookhaven Hospital, Heather says "it doesn't look like it's about to break". James from Silent Hill 2 was thrown through the fence off the roof.
Awards
- GameSpy
- 2003 – Scariest PS2 Game of the Year
Information also contributed by Dr. M. "Schadenfreude" Von Katze, Karthik KANE and Tiago Jacques
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Hints for Silent Hill 3
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Official European homepage
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Silent Hill 3
Official North American website -
Silent Hill 3 (Japanese)
Official Japanese website
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Contributors to this Entry
Game added by Unicorn Lynx.
Windows added by Slug Camargo.
Additional contributors: Macintrash, MAT, Jeanne, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Rik Hideto.
Game added June 5, 2003. Last modified January 27, 2024.