Silent Hill 3 Updated Preview
We spend some time with the recently released European version of Konami's latest survival horror sequel.
Although Silent Hill 3 is not scheduled for release in North America until the first week of August, this past weekend saw the European release of Konami's long-awaited survival horror sequel. Up until now, we've only enjoyed access to all-too-brief demo versions of Silent Hill 3, so now that we've had a chance to spend a few hours in a darkened room with the full European version of the game, we thought we'd give you some idea of what you have to look forward to.
As was the case in Silent Hill 2, the game offers varying degrees of difficulty for both the "action" and "riddles" options so you can effectively customize the game to suit your taste. There are easy, medium, and hard settings for both options, meaning that were you to play the riddles option on easy the first time through, you could then replay the game with additional puzzles another two times. The game also offers both 2D and 3D controller settings--allowing you to choose either a Resident Evil-style system in which you have to push up to move forward, or a setup in which you move the analog stick in the same direction you wish to move Heather on the screen. Although the Resident Evil system might prove tricky for you if you're not familiar with survival horror games, it's actually superior because it allows you to easily keep moving in the same direction even when the camera angle dramatically changes.
As we previously reported after playing Konami's demo version of the game, Silent Hill 3 kicks off with a dark and disturbing dream sequence that'll see you fighting for your life in an abandoned amusement park. Any fight you put up against the monsters at the park is futile, though, and once Heather "dies," she awakens in a shopping mall cafeteria feeling a little perturbed by her nightmare. After a brief encounter with a creepy old man--who Heather manages to elude by climbing out of the window in a washroom--it's time for you to explore the Central Square Shopping Center, which, although appearing to be relatively well maintained initially, degenerates into an unrecognizable, decaying structure overrun with monsters as you progress. Unfortunately, Heather's ability to explore the expansive shopping complex is severely restricted, and with locked doors far outnumbering those you're able to open, your progress through what initially appears to be a labyrinthine three-story building can often feel much too predetermined and linear to be rewarding.
It's only when you manage to locate a map of the mall that you really become aware of just how large it is, but it's unfortunate that such large areas of it are inaccessible in the beginning, as this inevitably results in you either attempting to open the same locked doors on multiple occasions or having to refer to the map--which indicates your current position, as well as the locations of open and locked doors, puzzles, and save points--constantly as you navigate the often featureless hallways between important locations. Rooms that you're able to explore include washrooms, offices, and stores, mostly--although the majority of them are barely recognizable. And, as every open door reveals either supplies, an item, or a puzzle in need of solving, the lack of rooms that don't have an important role to play in your progress serves to reinforce the idea that you're proceeding on a linear course through the early parts of the game.
One of the reasons why so many of the doors in the game are locked could be that none of the monsters seem able to navigate doorways or staircases. While this lack of monster mobility keeps your enemies in the locations the game's designers intended for them, it also takes away much of the tension that you'll feel every time you're able to hear a monster in the darkness before actually catching sight of it. The larger, more powerful monsters that lumber around certain areas of the mall are relatively easy to sidestep in all but the most confined of spaces, and should one of them--or a group of smaller monsters--attack you, respite is only an unlocked door or a couple of steps up a staircase away. We're certain that such areas will become fewer in the latter stages of the game, but the fact that we were able to easily kill one large monster with a handgun simply by standing at the top of a broken escalator was disappointing--particularly since the other aspects of the monster AI are so impressive.
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