Now that I’ve finished the first three Silent Hill games, I have to say that all of them are three of the best video games I have ever played, and 3 is not even close to being an exception. Whenever I finish one of these games, they affect me for practically a month afterwards. It’s such a great experience that I keep reflecting back on the whole thing: the great environments, the ambiguously mysterious plots, and the entire world of Silent Hill.

The third Silent Hill game is a direct continuation of the plot of the first Silent Hill. 2 was a standalone story, and while it seemed that the first game had its own conclusion, 3 shows that the troubles are not over. Harry Mason and his daughter Cheryl have relocated to avoid the evil cult from the first game that chase after Cheryl with intent to get her to fulfill her destiny and give birth to the cult’s demon god. Harry renames Cheryl “Heather” and the two manage to avoid the cult for a good time. Then a cult fanatic named Claudia shows up while Heather is at a mall and things start to get strange as people begin to disappear, monsters stalk the town, and many locations take on deranged, nightmarish appearance like the “other world” of previous Silent Hill games.

Gameplay-wise this is practically identical to Silent Hill 2. The controls and combat have been fine-tuned and are perfect for a survival horror game. Good enough so that the player will never become frustrated simply trying to explore, and stiff enough that the player will struggle to combat many enemies or run, causing them to panic when they should and making them feel like they’re really trapped in the nightmare world of Silent Hill.

In a way, both the game and player have just the right amount of control over each other. There are some minor differences. Heather moves a lot more fluidly than James Sunderland in Silent Hill 2, making this the first game that seems like it’s designed around free-roaming 360 movement rather than the outdated tank controls (that sometime have their purpose, letting you choose the exact direction you want to go in case the camera angles suddenly change so you don’t go running back to where you came from).

Silent Hill 3 is certainly the hardest game in the series. For the first (and arguably only) time in the series the monsters are legitimately threatening. They hit Heather for a decent amount of damage, have a fucking ton of stamina, and while you still have a large abundance of health items, you might actually find yourself using them this time, as you should.

Oddly enough, the actual bosses of Silent Hill 3 are easier than ever, and it’s very easy to defeat most of them without even being hit. Ammo is scarcer than ever and guns have been powered down a bit, so you’re relying on melee weapons more than ever, all of which have their own purpose, other than the default knife which is just there for the beginning. You get a long range weapon, a medium range well-rounded weapon, and a very strong but heavy weapon that all work better against certain monsters (though the long range weapon is sort of under-powered, as the medium range is hardly shorter and a bit stronger).

A new addition to the series is that you can set beef jerky to distract the monsters as you run past them. This usually only works on the more feral monsters, so the most threatening ones won’t fall for this. I didn’t use this tactic much at all. The one complaint I can think of about the combat system is that I hate how you are supposed to hold the X button to use your weapon’s secondary attack. It is extremely unintuitive and I have to get used to it every time I play a new Silent Hill. If I want to slash downward, my first instinct is to press X and forward, or X and back, not hold down the button. It’s jarring. This doesn’t really fall under clunky combat adding to the horror of the game, as its something easily adapted to. It’s just annoying.

One other complaint I have is that the game never makes a point of telling you how to zoom in (pressing L2 and L3 together or something stupid like that). I discovered this very late in the game and was disappointed because there are many parts in Silent Hill 3 where something horrifying is happening in the background just out of sight, and you’re supposed to be able to satisfy your morbid curiosity to use the camera and take a look at what’s there. There was a ton of work put into this game’s environments and I feel I missed out on a lot of that by discovering this feature far too late into the game.

A real interesting aspect of Silent Hill 3 is that the majority of the game is actually spent outside of Silent Hill. Heather is trying to find her way home from the mall and only goes to Silent Hill once she reaches home. This means you have to explore a lot of modern-looking urban areas such as a mall, subway, art studio, and more. On the other hand, these environments looking mostly new and fresh, while putting an interesting twist on the usual decrepit buildings spread throughout Silent Hill, just aren’t as scary as those. Until the “other world” takes over, that is.

Everyone knows the other world is the scariest part of any Silent Hill game. The evil power that collides with the real world and turns it into a hellish nightmare. When it comes to these areas, there is no question that Silent Hill 3 is the scariest game in the entire series when at its worst (best?). Rarely is a room wasted in Silent Hill 3, and there is disturbing background imagery everywhere. It’s extremely unsettling, and combined with the stronger enemies pervading the areas, the player never, ever feels comfortable. It’s fantastic.

There is a part of me, though, that feels that many of the pre-Silent Hill areas were underutilized. As said before, there is a part of the game where Heather must explore and escape an art studio, and there is so much fucking potential for scares and creepy shit there that it even makes my head spin. But you barely ever see any scares or disturbing imagery related to the art studio or art in general, so this area, along with a few others around it, is mostly unmemorable.

Even at their most mundane, however, the player will still feel intrigued by these areas and want to explore them despite their fear, so at the very minimum, they serve their exact purpose. It’s not all disappointment, though. The areas when you reach Silent Hill are stellar and extremely creepy both in and out of the nightmare world. There’s a total of three different areas to explore when you reach Silent Hill, which is slightly less than half of the game, but it’s a great ride to the finish that makes the player end up feeling satisfied.

You even revisit an area from Silent Hill 2, the first time in the series you return to an area from another game. I’m a pretty hard-shelled person when it comes to horror, and even I was anxious to escape the deranged areas in the last stretch of Silent Hill 3. They’re also full of more “gimmicks” than the other dungeons. That is to say, rooms or sub-areas that have unique events/scares that the player will be surprised by. It’s a lot of fun, and you’ll never know what’s coming. Near the end of the final dungeon, I found myself shaking. I think the Silent Hill areas in 3 might all be the best areas in any Silent Hill game. I just wish the first half of the game could stand up to them.

The story of Silent Hill 3 is…. good. For the most part. There’s a few tense moments that make it worth following along, but most cutscenes feel pointless when characters hardly say anything of worth before the cutscene is over a minute late. And you don’t see another one for nearly an hour. The characters are likable, the villain very annoying and unlikable, as they should be.

The motion capture is extremely good (particularly Vincent, who is very animated in his performance) and the voice-acting is top notch for a videogame. The final battle is extremely satisfying with how invested I was in the lore of the series after playing the first two games and finally being able to put a close to the series with my own hands. I did think the ending was extremely abrupt and disappointing, and the song that plays over the credits of the good ending is quite possibly the worst song ever recorded for a video game.

Also disappointing was how there’s only a total of two different endings (three if you count the joke ending), and you can only get one ending your first time through the game. I was playing the whole time with the impression that what I did mattered and not all of it was mandatory and that I would hopefully be rewarded with a good ending. Well, my choices didn’t really matter, and I got a stupid ending, so that sucked. Silent Hill 3 does have the most replayability out of all the games though, with a variety of bonus weapons and costumes the player can earn from repeat plays and getting high rankings.

Akira Yamaoka provides a soundtrack as usual, full of his typical tricks of the trade that are still effective. The opening pop theme song with female vocals is hilarious and I really don’t think it’s a fitting opening for this game like the first two openings were. It’s a good opening song, it just doesn’t suit the game.

I have the feeling that I said more negative things than positive about the game, but I can assure the reader that that certainly isn’t how I feel. I fucking loved Silent Hill 3, just as much as the two before it, and sometimes even more. Another one of my favorite games of all time, and the scariest part of it all is knowing that I’ll likely never play and experience something like them again.