Silent Hill 3

aka: Jijing Ling 3, SH3
Moby ID: 9324
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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)

The game where the Silent Hill series should have ended.

The Good
Silent Hill 3 is one of the best survival horror games on the PS2, and it shows. The game excels in areas such as graphics (which are so much more detailed and well executed than the ones in the previous titles, and are actually some of the best in the whole PS2 game line) and sound (maintaining the gripping quality we were used to in the series). The plot might seem a bit convoluted at first (particularly if you haven’t played the first Silent Hill, as this is its direct sequel), but in the end it does the series justice and actually provides interesting food for thought. What is probably the main attraction in the game though, is its constant feeling of dread and despair. Unlike Silent Hill 2, which provided a more subtle, psychological type of horror, Silent Hill 3 is actually very visually (and audibly) compelling in conveying its horror elements. It is graphic, it is gruesome, it is scary and it is wonderful. Everything, from the environments to the enemies, to the characters themselves, is incredibly dark and moody - including the main character. Heather looks like she was designed to pass on a feeling of stress and fatigue to the player right from the start of the game, with those big dark circles under her eyes. And of course, speaking of dread, one character cannot go by unmentioned - Robbie. That is the cutest-yet-scariest bunny I have ever seen in my life.

The Bad
The main negative aspect of Silent Hill 3, if one might call it so, is a rather curious one - it is simply the fact that the previous entry was the pinnacle of the series. While this may seem like an unfair derogatory comment, the fact of the matter is that Silent Hill 3, despite having made certain improvements, still isn’t as gripping as its predecessor - while Silent Hill 2 made me dwell on it for quite some time after I had finished it, finishing Silent Hill 3 just didn’t have that long-lasting effect. Aside from that, it simply suffers from the usual Silent Hill problems, such as not-so-great controls and sometimes poor camera angles. However, these are minimal issues that do not detract from the experience at all.

The Bottom Line
Thus, Silent Hill 3 is not without its flaws, and certainly seems to lack a certain something the previous title possessed that contributed a lot to the mystique of the series. But when all is said and done, the game essentially marks the end of the GOOD Silent Hill games, not only providing a satisfying conclusion to the first game in the series, but also standing proudly on its own as an excellent survival horror game - in fact, one of PS2‘s finest.

PlayStation 2 · by Rik Hideto (473497) · 2014

A masterpiece of Survival Horror and the last real Silent Hill.

The Good
From the very first moment I played the original Silent Hill, I knew that it was something special. The combination of traditional Survival Horror elements with a renewed focus on scaring the player with smartly written dialogue, intelligent camera use and a terrifying set of circumstances gave Silent Hill an edge that Resident Evil clones just didn't have. Silent Hill was a supremely negative experience, not in regards to the game but in regards to the atmosphere within it. Walls bleed and warp, disfigured enemies stagger from the shadows while your radio wails and Akira Yamaoka's masterful soundtrack pounds and shrieks in the background. It's a combination of atmosphere, soundtrack and aesthetics that helps the Silent Hill series transcend more mediocre Survival Horror pursuits.

Silent Hill 2 presented a more focused, cohesive experience with a more realized town to explore. Everything about the game was refined in relation to its predecessor. The mythology of the town was expanded upon in really subtle ways, expanding on our understanding of the underlying concepts and realities that the town was built upon, while incorporating an adeptly crafted story about a man who may or may not be suffering from a mental illness.

Silent Hill starts in a fairly unfamiliar fashion. Heather finds herself in a nightmarish Amusement Park. After escaping this nightmare she finds herself in a noticeably more mundane place; a Shopping Mall. It seems she fell asleep in a fast food restaurant. The way the game begins, with a horrible nightmare transitioning jarringly into this abject normality is part of the masterful psychological orchestration that runs through Silent Hill 3 like blood through your veins. Every meticulously crafted environment is filled with hints, mythos or elements to enhance the atmosphere. Using these elements Silent Hill 3 scares you in a decidedly unique fashion. Instead of relying on cliche's or cheap jump scares Silent Hill 3 relies solely on what your mind can compose from the elements provided for you. It's a masterpiece of mise-en-scene, with environmental details or strange creatures performing arbitrary activities while ignoring Heather augmenting the sense of dread provided by Akira Yamaoka's droning compositions. In many instances Heather seems to appear just when the horrific events have finished occurring. For instance, at one point she finds herself in a basement with a wheel chair lying on its side, the wheel slowly turning down while a trail of blood leads around the corner and into the open doors of an elevator shaft. The sense of dread accompanying this scene filled me with more fear than any pile of corpses of things jumping out of a closet ever could. The game lets your mind paint a picture and those with active imaginations will get the most out of Silent Hill 3.

Heather controls more or less like James from Silent Hill 2. The control scheme has essentially remained consistent since the original game. Holding R2 readies your weapon while pressing square while holding R2 allows Heather to guard herself from attacks. Heather quick turns, controls fluidly and using her feels like Team Silent polished the control scheme to perfection. There is not one aspect of it I can fault.

Heather's weapon choice is somewhat more varied than in previous games, with access to the obligatory handgun and shotgun in addition to more exotic things like a maul or sub-machine gun. The guard move adds a degree of strategy to fights and as usual the level of light and movement from enemies affects Heather's accuracy when firing weapons. Finishing the game while fulfilling certain secret criteria allows access to more weapons upon completion of the game. I will not ruin these for potential players however. I will say though that they are interesting, useful and balanced in their own ways, with each one requiring a level of aptitude to be used effectively.

The way Silent Hill 3 flows is significantly different from both the original and the sequel. The first half of the game is fundamentally linear, giving the feeling of a series of "dungeon" areas being sewn together with a sensible flow that adds credibility to the narrative. The second half of the game does actually take place in Silent Hill and although your exploration opportunities are limited I preferred the focused feel of this game with slight exploratory elements rather than the exploration taking precedence over exposition. There are many familiar places to explore, albeit rendered with a proficiency unlike I have ever witness on the Playstation 2.

This brings me onto the sheer amazing graphical achievements pulled off on the console. Games like God of War and Final Fantasy 12 look amazing in their own ways however they do also seem far too cartoon like. Silent Hill 3 is the only game I have ever played on the PS2 where I've felt like what I'm looking at it is real. Heather looks beautiful (in every sense of the word) and has been rendered with such meticulous detail that she looks like something that belongs in a high end Xbox game. Every single supporting character and enemy in the game exhibits this same level of astounding care from everything from the eyebrows to the lips and tiny imperfections in the skin that could have easily been left out but weren't. Environments sit molding with brooding atmosphere under amazing lighting effects and brilliant volumetric fog. Neon signs glow with a dirty vigor, casting odd shades of purple and pink over blood stained chairs and desks. Walls seem to creep with a disgusting film of moving skin and a well used church sits empty with mutlicolored light cast through stained glass windows. The world of Silent Hill 3 is amazingly organic and this sense of realism augments the sheer creeping dread felt by the player as the wander the empty hallways of the abandoned buildings and slime encrusted tunnels.

Lastly I would be doing the great composer Akira Yamaoka a disservice by not mentioning his haunting yet beautiful soundtrack. Every track that accompanies Heather's journey acts to assist in endearing ourselves to her, emphasising her youth and inexperience or her inner turmoil as she struggles to come to terms with everything she is experiencing. The soundtrack is Heather, yet it is also the environments. The soundtrack fights you as hard as the shambling monstrosities that inhabit the otherworld that Heather wanders through. It screams and shrieks and bangs and fills your head with a sense of lingering negativity and fear.

The Bad
The lack of adventuring around Silent Hill may seem like a detriment to you if you were hoping for another extended jaunt around the empty streets. Within the portion of the game where you are given relatively free reign to explore there is very little to see and do.

Some enemies are irritating, badly designed and will constantly knock you down. You might say that you could simply kill them or use beef jerky to distract them but if you are like me and take the "Survival" part of Survival Horror very seriously you will be frustrated by the constant knock downs, which Heather is very prone to, while trying to run past or avoid them.

Some characters like Douglas could have been explored with a little more depth, there is a slight revelation about his past later in the game however it is more or less totally inconsequential.

The Bottom Line
Silent Hill 3 feels almost perfect when you are playing it. It's an amazing experience, filled with such unrestricted negativity juxtaposed against the occasional tender moment of raw human emotion. Heathers journey is frightening and harrowing and yet as a gameplay experience it is fulfilling, satisfying and addictive. There are so many extra's to uncover when you have finished the game from more than 10 extra costumes, weapons and difficulty modes.

The few minor faults present in the game are overshadowed by the degree of mastery expressed by Team Silent when playing the game, which you will be playing for quite some time after you finish it.

PlayStation 2 · by AkibaTechno (238) · 2010

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 Silent Hill 2: Restless Dreams and praised it for its tense atmosphere, disturbing psycho-sexual imagery, and most importantly - one of the, if not the, greatest story ever told in a video game. So what about Silent Hill 3? For some reason, SH3 is often ignored. People recognize the original as a classic and of course the start of the series, I am VERY far from the only person to praise the hell out of #2, SH4: The Room gets a lot of stick for being the weakest of the series and I'm pretty sure that 0rigins and Homecoming were just bad dreams and don't really exist despite people continuously mentioning them to me. I have to ask... why is SH3 the least talked about? I know that it wasn't necessarily poorly received, but it deserves more credit dammit. Do you want to know why? It scared me so damn much that my balls fell off and eloped with my manhood and left my as a whiny little child. While it certainly isn't as poignant or emotional as its brilliant predecessor, I consider it to be the most frightening of the series and no other game save for perhaps Amnesia has scared me as much as it has. After the surprisingly good Shattered Memories," I've been on a Silent Hill binge and recently replayed through Silent Hill 3, and guess what? It's still scary as hell and is very well made overall. Silent Hill 3 is a direct sequel to the original, and takes place 17 years after the Good or Good+ endings of Part 1 - in which Harry fights the Incubus rather than the Alessa Incubator, and after killing the Incubus and stopping him from impregnating Alessa with the god of the demented cult known only as "The Order," Alessa's spirit hands Harry a baby to help compensate the loss of his daughter Cheryl when she returned to Silent Hill and reunited with the other half of Alessa's soul. He names the new baby Cheryl, but after The Order makes an attempt on their lives - he flees and has her change her hair and go under the pseudonym Heather Morris. The game begins in a nightmare, where Heather visits a bizarre and twisted Amusement Park in the otherworld and is killed. She wakes up inside a Mall Diner, and is approached by an old man by the name of Douglas Cartland who wishes to question her. She thinks that he is lying about being a private investigator, and more an investigator of privates and ditches him by going into the womens lavatory and then crawling out the window and entering another part of the Mall. Yet strange things begin happening, a hideous monster is found consuming a corpse and Heather stops it with a gun, and as she moves on she soon learns that the whole mall is filled with monsters and after meeting the bizarre and mysterious Claudia Wolf, she takes an elevator which transports her into the otherworld and thus begins her descent into hell. It deals heavily with The Order as they chase Heather and do all in their power to fill her with hatred so that the god that has been in her womb since her "birth" can finally be born now that her 'time has come.' The plot isn't quite as brilliant as its predecessor - but it is much more well written than that of SH1's plot and SH3 also has the distinction of enriching the mythos of the series more than any other entry before or since. It explains The Order and their beliefs in much greater detail and fills in many questions about them and the incident in the first game and it makes them more memorable as villanous zealots, though that is also due in part that the witch Claudia Wolf; brainwashed by Dahlia Gillispie from the original game; is easily the most memorable "Human" villain in the series. Sorry Walter (The villain of Silent Hill 4.), I love you but Claudia wins out through being far more treacherous and while I won't spoil it for the good folks who haven't played this game through, what she resorts to at the end of the game is certainly memorable for all the wrong reasons; namely for making me wish I hadn't eaten before witnessing it. The "politics" of the otherworld are also expanded upon. It was made evident that The Otherworld is in many ways a version of hell, and that people are judged and punished there. We actually get to see this in great detail as the mysterious Valtiel (The hand of god) punishing various men and women. Valtiel is also important because while he is hardly the leader of the Otherworld, he is clearly a man of high power as he controls the change between our world and The Otherworld, twisting a valve that in turn - twists reality. He is also important in that while he does not have full control over what the monsters do (Which is why I claim he is clearly not the full overlord of the Otherworld.) he is there to protect Heather and grant her passage. Don't be fooled, Valtiel ain't the good guy and he doesn't care about Heather himself - he only cares that the baby god nestled in her womb makes it safely; and it can be assumed that he is more than willing to put Heather through eternal suffering to do so, due to the fact that if Heather dies in The Otherworld (Though not if she dies in the foggy world.) he will drag her body away and resurrect her. One of the standout elements of SH3 are its production values. I absolutely adore Akira Yamaoka's music for the series, in fact I'm listening to the games soundtrack right now and I'll probably turn on the SH2 soundtrack when its done. This is very high praise considering the high standards he has set - but of all the Silent Hill games (I'll even recognize Homecoming and 0rigins for his music, but ONLY his music. Well... okay, there was one disturbing monster in 0rigins, the Carrion. THAT IS IT.) I think that this soundtrack is easily the best. Not only does it introduce us to the lovely Mary Elizabeth McGlynn's voice, it is easily the most melodic and memorable beat-wise and the atmospheric tracks in game are superb as well. The graphics are also stunning - they were absolutely fantastic by 2003 standards, and believe it or not replaying it 8 years later I was still surprised. Silent Hill 3 has aged better than most any last generation game (Even Doom 3 and FarCry have aged somewhat less gracefully in my eyes. It helps that I was able to hack the game to run in 1920x1080 and witness it in full HD glory and that it has some fantastic lighting effects and high resolution textures. The models are memorable and characters are very well rendered and animated, and the monsters may not animate like proper humans.. but then again, why should they? Their bizarre movements are just as disturbing and bizarre as they are. The Otherworld sequences will give you some of the most shocking images ever seen in a video game, and many of them can easily be missed without the ability to view it in HD like I did. There are tons of great effects, generated by something in the credits that is somewhat laughably and blatantly named "The Evil Effects Engine." Yes, 15 technical directors were set aside to create an "Evil Effects Engine," in fact according to the credits there are 3 separate engines; the main one, the lighting engine (Which is carried over from SH2 - not that that is a bad thing.) and the evil effects engine. The Evil Effects engine really impresses, the otherworld is packed with slimy detail as blood realistically and continuously sweats out from pores, limbs twitch and flail, and later on a clever smudging tool makes it appear as if the skin of monsters itself is twitching individually. Two good places to see this effect are in the Otherworld Hospitals store room, where Heather will be locked in with a mirror. Very slowly, blood will seep and as it turns darker, the dark blood will turn into tentacles and the tentacles and blood will spread rapidly throughout the room and Heather's reflection soon begins to bleed and become covered in said tentacles, and once she is consumed - the real Heather will die. There's also a memorable moment near the end where various rooms are covered in a strange red haze that slowly seeps in and covers the room and strangely has an amount of depth to it. It's a shame these effects were never, ever used again. The biggest issue I have with the graphics is that being from an older period when widescreen and ultra-high resolutions weren't as commonplace, they didn't bother implementing widescreen or high resolutions. This means that you'll have to do what I did and change the resolution through the .ini and find a FOV hack to make the game not look stretched out. There's also an issue with vertical tearing, and the damn game doesn't give you any ability to get rid of it. No V-Sync option, and don't bother forcing V-Sync in your video control panel. It won't work, and trust me when I say this isn't like a lot of games with vertical tearing that are only slightly noticeable, the tears are massive and annoying. There's also some strange performance issues on modern computers, the full 4096x4096 textures lag to high hell once you get out into the fog of Silent Hill or heavily detailed areas of The Otherworld (I.E., all of them.) and even lowering the texture details, it may do this. The graphics also work because the artistic design is fantastic. Like SH2, the artwork was done by the twisted genius Masahiro Ito (Look up his homepage if you like horror art.) and is as raw as the ESRB and CERO (The Japanese rating board.) will allow it to be. Like SH2, most of it relies not just on slimy grotesqueness - but also psycho-sexual imagery. I use that term because most of the monsters have some form of sexual attribute to them, more often than not a taboo or frightening aspect which shows that as beautiful as sex can be, it can also be very, very ugly. The "theme" they carry is a bit different from SH2 though, while SH2's monsters were meant to represent and demonize sexual abuse, dominance, and misogyny SH3 has a focus on sexual innocence and childbirth; and not the happy side of childbirth either. An example would be the Numb Body, one of the first monsters you face. They earn their name for staggering about misguidedly as if they are numb (At least numb in terms of connections to their limbs - their bone chilling cries suggest that they aren't numb to pain.) and the fact that they mock the human body through abstraction, and their skin is not unlike that of a rare, disturbing and fatal birth defect (Nameless here so that someone doesn't look it up out of curiosity and find themselves disturbed. Those who have seen the deformity I'm talking about will know why I draw the comparison) and represent the fear that Heather's baby will be born deformed and in agony. Rounding out the technical aspects of SH3 is the sound design itself. Sound is one of the most important aspects of any horror game, and SH3 gets it down pat. With the exception of the pendulum's screeching which is more migraine inducing than scary, all of the monsters make disturbing and bizarre sounds. The Numb Bodies and nurses probably freak me out the most with the Numb Bodies vaguely human, vaguely animal groans of agony or the nurses constant and heavy breathing. Whenever I hear that damn breathing, I imagine a nurse standing 5 feet behind me and panting over the idea of torturing or maybe even salivating over the idea of eating me. Yet the most disturbing sounds of course come from the atmosphere itself. The atmosphere is just as thick as its predecessor (Though in a more traditionally horrific way) and plays on the fact that less is more. Even something as simple as hearing the sound of thumping from another room or the ceiling is unnerving, and whenever you hear whispering or echoes of an unseen monster growling or wailing you suddenly get a feeling of dread that something is following you and that makes the actual appearance of a monster, even if it wasn't the one you heard, far scarier and eliminates the need of monster closets. Of course, the radio also returns - and like before, it warns you of monsters and sends you into bloody paranoia when you hear it crackling but can't see through the distance. Gameplay wise, Silent Hill 3 is more or less unchanged. That is both good and bad. Truthfully - gameplay isn't and never has been the series strength, controls are weird, camera angles are bizarre, and combat is frustrating and you'd think that swinging a pipe is like swinging a 100lb dumbbell by how long and clumsy it is. However, this DOES work to the games advantage in some areas - afterall, you aren't supposed to be Rambo. You are an average young woman, and the confusing cameras and harsh combat only serve to make the game more terrifying by inducing the feel of disorientation and panic that one likely would succumb to when in a horrifying nightmare battling a monster with giant penises of death on their arms (And no, I am not joking about giant penis of death arms. Go to the Silent Hill wiki and search "Closer.") and trying to run from a horde of murderous nurses with deadly magnums. There are some places though where the combat DOES feel unfair. On Normal difficulty, the game is much harder than any of its predecessors and being a survival horror game - that's fine, but some monsters simply make combat unfair. The worst offenders are the slurpers, with the pendulums in close second. The Slurpers scurry around on the floor and earn their name as they are the carrion feeders of the otherworld and slurp up all the blood and goo and the like, and when they see Heather - they will knock her down and then try to mount her. (Yeah, I know, eww. Then again it's supposed to make you say eww.) What makes them so annoying though is that you can't heat them with any melee weapon except the slow mace (Which despite being pretty powerful, is a worthless weapon since it takes so long to swing, and while its long reach may be advantageous if you master timing the weapon - more often than not while Heather begins the swing, the monster will be 2 feet and instead of receiving a mace they'll just got a tiny bit of steel rod and have time to mutilate her.) and I don't feel like wasting precious bullets on them. They really just attack with mosquito bites, although their... uhm.... humping can do a fair amount of damage, Heather can usually get to her feet before they mount her and knocking her other doesn't really damage her more than maybe 2 points, but it's damn annoying to be getting to an important area and get knocked down by a slurper and it is doubly annoying to get knocked down by one when you are out of ammo and a gaggle of the more dangerous monsters are following you. The Pendulums are also annoying. Not only is the noise they make migraine inducing and far too loud, they fly and cannot be hit by melee weapons and they chew bullets like candy, and often stun Heather or knock her down and their blades do heavy damage. The other monsters are more fair, and there are also some great bossfights. One complaint of SH2 was that the boss fights, while memorable for the disturbing creatures you fought, lacked the clever nature of the original SH1 bosses and really just came down to "Pump thing with bullets till it fall down go boom." and while it is true that you are still mostly just pumping lead or bashing the bosses, they actually have specific weakpoints and strategies like the first game and require more thinking. A memorable one is a fight with a monster (Though considering his name, humanoid figure, and not being a manifestation of Heather's mind and seen very clearly by Claudia - I believe he is either a mutated human or simply a guy in a weird costume.) known as The Missionary, who can block bullets with his blades and must be fought with well timed hand to hand combat. It was cool to use the Katana and have a match of blades. The level designs are good, but there is an underwhelming use of areas from past games; especially #2. Probably the biggest offender is the return to Brookhaven Hospital. The layout hasn't changed at all and there's a lot of deja-vu from SH2. To the games credit, it DOES focus mainly on areas that you couldn't explore in SH2 (Apparently broken locks can unbreak at will for other people) and The Otherworld of Brookhaven Hospital is reformed completely, not unlike "Nowhere" from the first game and is actually the most memorable trip to the otherworld next to the chapel towards the end of the game. It's still disappointing that they didn't take us to new parts of Silent Hill though, especially when there's a huge chunk of the south region that has never been explored. Once again, the games credit though - the first act and a half of the game is spent outside of Silent Hill which does add some fresh locales to visit. All in all - if you want a scary game to play in the dark, want to see some of the most twisted and sickening imagery ever put into a game, and enjoyed any of the other Silent Hill games - this is an extremely memorable and raw entry into the series. Don't let yourself be disappointed if you expect its story to stack up against its esteemed predecessor, and enjoy the game for what it is: Genuinely horrific.

Windows · by Kaddy B. (777) · 2011

[ View all 8 player reviews ]

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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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.