Silent Hill 3
Midnight in the mall of good and evil
"Silent Hill 3" introduces us to a brand-new character, a 17-year-old girl named Heather. The series has always relied on more-or-less everyday, believable characters -- no elite force cops or ninja secret agents here -- to immerse the audience in the experience. We really feel for Heather, as she is easily the most human and embraceable protagonist in the series thus far. All the poor girl wants to do is go to the mall.
Heather goes to the mall, all right, and then everything goes straight to Hell.
Orange is for anguish, blue for insanity
Like its predecessors, it plays from a third-person perspective, but visually, "Silent Hill 3" is in a ghastly league of its own. The bleak and deserted surroundings of the game's normal world are bad enough. Making matters worse (or better depending upon how you look at it), reality in the "Silent Hill" universe has an unpleasant habit of shifting without warning to a much darker, uglier, and mysterious doppelganger of itself.
Bare, innocent rooms become dark, corroded cages. Extensively marked maps are wiped inexplicably clean. Unremarkable floor tiles and bathtubs become befouled with rot, rust, and gore. The very walls will throb and bleed. And most of this happens long before the worst of the monsters start showing up.
Monsters are everywhere, and not just your garden-variety videogame monsters but really nasty-looking ones that your eye can't even categorize. "Silent Hill" creature designer Ito Masahiro knows what's disturbing, and even the way some of the game's monstrosities move is just scary, bad, and wrong.
Each time you think the downward spiral that is "Silent Hill 3" couldn't descend any deeper into dread, it suddenly does.
Have gun, will unravel
Heather might qualify as a girl next door, but she's got plenty of weapons at her disposal. She wields pipes, a switchblade, guns, and even a katana. Heather's new arsenal even includes the always deadly beef jerky. (We'll leave the possible applications of that most deadly of snack meats to your imagination.)
Your ability to fight and kill is nothing without the ability to solve the puzzles of the "Silent Hill" world and the secrets to Heather's own identity and past. All players have slightly different tastes, however, and "Silent Hill 3" allows you to select separate difficulty settings for the combat- and logic-oriented aspects of the game. That strategy worked in the last game and does here, as well. If you're a basically logical type but a butterfingers with a weapon while under combat pressure, "Silent Hill 3" is watching out for you.
What God wants, God gets
While "Silent Hill 2" diverted a bit from the original's supernatural themes to present a more internalized horror story, "Silent Hill 3" is as occultic as ever, and rife with questions of religion, belief, and destiny.
There are no special advances in core gameplay mechanics, just good overall improvements and tweaks. As before, successful completion of the game (with different approaches and difficulty levels) can result in five different endings. By your works shall ye be judged.
Music and silence
Yamaoka Akira, the talented (and disturbed) audio designer working on "Silent Hill 3," really runs the gamut here. The soundtrack includes female vocals (a series first), guitar-heavy rock licks that expertly incorporate older "Silent Hill" musical themes, and even percussion-heavy tracks that reference (but don't copy) musical scores of certain modern horror flicks. We think we caught a whiff of "Angel Heart," among one or two others.
Nine circles of separation
All hype and scare-the-girlfriend jokes aside, "Silent Hill 3" is a truly disturbing, frightening, and bloody experience (more or less in that order). This is the current high-mark of scary games, period, with production values that put most contemporary horror-flicks to shame. If you're an especially sensitive, impressionable type, stay the hell away from this game, because it will worm its hellish images into your nightmares.
Horror Fan Trivia Bonus: Note the name of the subway line, Bergen Street, that Heather looks for in the game.
"Silent Hill 3" (PS2)