Enjoy your nightmare
The game mechanics remain the same from previous Silent Hill titles. You'll explore abandoned buildings, solve puzzles, fetch key items, unlock doors, run through silent hill, and fight bosses. The amount of monsters you'll encounter are limited to a selected handful, and each monster are disturbing and creepy. There's the Cerberus that's all bandaged up with bloody wounds around itself. The large mannequins who act like tanks. The pistol wielding nurses. One enemy in particular which you'll find obtrusive are the bloody mannequins with blades twirling, cutting through concrete as they approach you. These monsters are indeed creepy, but what makes the game really stand out are the environments and the atmosphere.
Silent Hill 3 flaunts what it does best, and that's giving players a good scare. The amount of detail paid to the environments is remarkable. Each room you'll enter will have blood stains and a decay look to them. Adding to that is the strong atmosphere that feels like your inside a nightmare. As you proceed through the areas, you'll never be able to judge the distance in front of you. The pitch-black darkness added to the grainy textures prevents players from ever feeling too comfortable. But of course, there are plenty of save points around resembling a red symbol which you can save.
Item management is well implemented. You can literally carry over 100 items in your inventory. You'll be carrying various weapons like a Katana, pistol, submachine gun, stun gun, or a steel pipe. There are also plenty of health kits and ammo scattered throughout the game. Some players may find it too difficulty to navigate through the abundant dark hallways. My suggestion is to hit the option and crank up the brightness. Even after finding a flashlight, I still had some instances of walking blindly from door to door.
Using a melee attack isn't as smooth as it could've been. Heather will perform a three hit combo which doesn't hit unless your perfectly aligned to your target. Not that it's a big problem, but when your inside a very dark room and you want to kill whatever monsters in your path, an auto-lock function would definitely help (which is certainly available through easy mode or after consecutively dying).
There are an abundant of cut scenes that either fills you in on a clue or introduce a boss battle. They all look great and fun to watch. Some cut scenes are brief 1-3 minutes while others may take a considerable amount of time. As you watch the cut scenes, you'll adore the bleeding environments, the haunting music, the strange mellow characters. One thing that I didn't find too great is Heathers' lack of emotion. Her facial features are severely lacking variety, and her tough-girl mentality doesn't quite live up to what Silent Hill is all about. Nevertheless, each and every line are well delivered and you'll find the characters totally creepy, but Heather will leave you scratching your head.
The story isn't all that great either. Unlike the first two titles which were psychologically disturbing. The religious take on horror in Silent Hill 3 doesn't stick with you long, even after you beat it. When you play Silent Hill 3, it's more about the experience and addictive game play rather than the story.
Ranging from 2-8 hours of sheer game play, Silent Hill 3 adds more incentives to replay with bonuses like Infinite submachine gun, flamethrower, light saber, and various costumes and endings to unlock. If you can overlook its very dark environments, you'll be rewarded with a really addictive horror game. There's three sets of difficulties for battle and puzzles, so players of all skill levels can easily pick this up and play. It's nonlinear game play lets players do a whole lot of fun explorations around the beautifully, nightmarish environments. Take a ride down to the amusement park and have fun with your nightmares.