Silent Hill 3

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.

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.

The Good
For those who have some familiarity with the precedent Silent Hill series, this third installment is just like a walk in a known territory, only to discover this territory VERY upgraded with relentless fear factor turned up on max. If you were a previous vacationist in Silent Hill (namely SH2), coming back this vacation should feel like exactly like if you never left. So, has it been that long? The concept of this game is now up to date with the new graphic technology available. In character build, Konami tried to make this experience a bit less lonely than in SH2. Not that is a Swat-based game, though. You'll have the chance to meet some un-un-unusual types along the way, with their own agenda. You probably wouldn't miss chasing blonde little girl-brats around town, like in the previous game.

The monster concepts kept the psycho frantic head-shaking tortured appearance, looking like they were straight out of Adrian Lyne's motion picture "Jacob's Ladder". Actually there are more to this "climbing down Jacob's ladder" metaphor than only in the creatures. The whole approach of the game presents (or continues) the concept of the "Otherworld", with a lot of stairs and elevators-to-Hell and, of course, ladders. And when you see the Otherworld taking over, you can get to witness bucolic locations turning from "zombish" abandoned look, to utterly satanic with a little twist of religion on the side. The monster art again brings the deviant deformations of existing creatures, using mostly human figure to increase terror when you look at them, giving you the distinct impression that some monsters were (are?) human once.

The game design, as most aspects of the game, is more-of-the-same with map-based exploring, checking out locked or opened rooms, looking for keys and figuring out some puzzles that vary from "Dumb" to "Einstein", including an interesting Shakespearian book puzzle. The main props are all the same. You get to have the sam'ol radio and the good'ol pocket flashlight, and the guns are mainly the same also (9 mm, shotgun), except for introduction of a katana sword, with a lot of damage points (yes, you actually can defeat a boss with it), and a huge maul that is very hard to use. In the replay mode you find a submachine gun in the inventory, but is more to make a cathartic effect. Many times in this game you WILL say "MY, oh my. if only I have a machine-gun..."

Graphically speaking, looks like Konami is using the same Capcom quality especially in human skin figures. You can actually see the expression/emotion face lines even from a distance. I'm talking in-game here, guys. Not only in cinematics. The set design is more or less the same, although is less grainy than in SH2, but the human characters gained more skin texture making Konami turn to Vertex/pixel shader technology that is available only in Geforce4 Ti, GeforceFX and Ati Radeon graphic cards. That is the issue that no doubt is the most question-raising in the game. Even the demo in early November already announced. Some say this demo was really a scared warning from Konami that really didn't know how gamers would react to it.

The sound in SH3 is suitable for those with a big sound rig at home with any sound card that supports Live 5.1 audio. The voice acts are not Oscar worth except for the Heather’s voice actress that really delivers even when she dies, screams or cries. The detective’s voice should have been my father’s. And he’s not an actor. The role of Claudia, despite the fact she’s a true carbon-copy of Cate Blanchett’s “Galadriel”, is fairly voice acted. But the true triumph in SH3 is the sound effects and ambient music (?). It boosts up to orbit the fear factor. Is like in a David Lynch’s twisted backward played opera, using human organs for instruments.

The Bad
Watch spoilers ahead! The storyline is unfortunately one downer in SH3. Then again is not that of a big downer. Is just doesn’t keep up to the other Silent Hill games. The Demon possession-based with New Order Satanists trying to bring the Paradise plot is not really the most inspired background. Even so the game actually does not start in Silent Hill, so there is another town with the same curse that has relation with the curse in Silent Hill? Is confusing. But this is background only. The way this story develops throughout the game, unfolds a gruesome sheet of subplots that smoke-screens the uninspired storyline a bit anyway.

The Bottom Line
Silent Hill 3 is definitely the most gruesome, dark satanic game to the date. Make no mistakes; it WILL chill you to the bone. Expect human slaughter houses, torture chambers, ornaments made with human parts, child-mummification, evisceration, amputations, driven to both Silent Hill and Resident Evil gamer. No similarities between these two games involved. The game is a slow-paced work of gothic art with the wit of the occult. Not a futuristic-weapon loving trained chick fighting science aberrations. This is to say that SH3 and Resident Evil are alike, but different, and will please the same kind of gamer that is looking for plain fear.