Silent Hill 3

Wow, they really did just make a sequel to Silent Hill 1. 

I played this on my twenty-year-old PS2.

I enjoyed Silent Hill 2 a great deal, and it's probably a better and more influential game than the original, but something about the first game's atmosphere appealed to me more, so the fact that this is, in many ways, a direct followup to Harry Mason's adventure was a welcome surprise. I'd heard this spoken about generally, that 1 and 3 are sort-of-a-pair while 2 and 4 were similarly related, but I don't think I'd prepared myself for just how connected the first and third games'd be. There are some fun callbacks to 2 in here as well, but by-and-large this is a game that assumes you've played and are familiar with the original.

I'll try not to get into the specifics because I enjoyed discovering things as I played through this (and wish I'd actually known less about it going in) but it picks up and runs with a lot of the more folk-horror-y cult stuff from the first game rather than continuing with the introspective horror-as-metaphor-for-trauma that made up so much of 2's identity. That latter type of horror is great and, again, Silent Hill 2 is a fantastic game but, for me at least, the blunt and in-your-face nature of horror-for-horror's-sake freaks me out and gets my heart racing more than the slower-burn this-is-your-fault stuff.

As for the game itself, I don't know what there is to say. It's more of the same, really. You've got a flashlight, tank controls, a radio that detects nearby enemies, and an assortment of weapons and healing items. The biggest change with this game is one that's less obvious and that's in its structure. It's a far more linear game than either of its predecessor because there isn't a whole lot of backtracking or exploration to speak of. This fits the more intense nature of the horror, in my eyes, but I will admit it was odd to play one of these games without a long, somewhat aimless sequence wherein I roam the streets of Silent Hill. For the most part there's really only one or two routes available to you but there's always something interesting to be found down those routes as a result.

Heather is a fun protagonist, maybe my favorite out of all these survival horror games I've played so far. She's a plucky teenager with a lot to say and she just has so much personality. Her voice is clearly still felt in item descriptions and in the commentary she provides when examining things in the environment and her dialogue is filled with sarcasm and bluntness that I found to be a welcome relief from some of the tension of, you know, Silent Hill.

I don't have any major complaints with this game. There were a few instant-kill walls and scenes but save screens were common enough that I never felt like I lost an unreasonable amount of progress. Getting punished for going down an obviously-dangerous path seemed about right whenever it would happen, even if needing to replay a sequence occasionally did feel annoying.

I think my final rank was "5.5/10"

 

 

As a final bonus, I'll leave you with MINMO.