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Silent Hill 3

Sure, the Horror genre of videogames really started with the Resident Evil series. But it was a little title called Silent Hill that really took it to a new level. Silent Hill contained themes that were more akin to the wonderfully weird film, Jacob’s Ladder, or any number of David Lynch films, than to the simple “jump out and say boo” type of scare you get from Resident Evil. Across three games, the series hasn’t become dilluted or lost an ounce of the impact that started with the original.

In the original game, you play the role of Harry Mason, who ends up in the resort town of Silent Hill after a car accident in which his daughter disappears. Over the course of the game, Harry uncovers one of the most sinister plots to ever grace a video game, all the while questioning his own sanity and still looking for his missing daughter. The bar was set for horror games with Silent Hill and the only games to even come close to this bar were its own sequels.

Silent Hill 2 takes place well after the original, and doesn’t tie into the original game at all. In Silent Hill 2, you play the role of James Sunderland as he wanders the town of Silent Hill in search of the wife he thought had been dead for years. Silent Hill 2 had much more of an adult theme than the original did, dealing with strong sexual themes, blatant homicidal characters, and of course a heaping helping of the expected fear.

So finally we get the next installment of the series, and up until the day of its release, I didn’t know a thing about the game. Not out of ignorance, nor is it out of any sort of dislike for the series. No, I wanted to go into the new game completely spoiler-free. No previews, no reviews, nothing. I feared that anything might give away more of the plot than I really wanted to hear. I’m going to keep the actual review as spoiler-free as possible, so if you haven’t played it yet, this review should be safe to read. There are some plot elements mentioned, though, so if you’re as concerned as I was, you may want to just skip to the end now.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Silent Hill 3 takes place in the same timeline as the first game, and is set some years after the original. This is your cue to stop reading and go play through the original game, if you haven’t done so yet. You play the role of a girl named Heather in this installment, though, which makes for some interesting developments later. Heather seems like a normal teenage girl, visiting the mall, and doing a little shopping. Before she leaves, she runs into a private detective who has been hired to find her for an unknown reason. Heather gives him the slip and then things begin to get weird.

Now the odd thing (and the thing I didn’t pick up on until later) is that Heather isn’t IN Silent Hill. I assumed the mall was the mall that Harry fought the worm in in the first game. You know, maybe Silent Hill has gone back to normal after all these years and was habitable again. Not so. All of this weirdness has managed to get out of the town and affect Heather and possibly everybody else. It’s not until about halfway through the game that the setting changes back to the town we all know and fear. This was actually my only major gripe with the game, if it really counts.

You see, until Heather goes to Silent Hill, there really is no plot development. You spend hours trying to get back to Heather’s apartment, gong through multiple locations without a single plot-advancing cutscene. Most of the first half of the game is just action and exploration, sort of mirroring what the Resident Evil series has become. That’s not to say it’s bad, but I love the series for its always-advancing story, which doesn’t happen here. Not to mention another Resident Evil trend that starts to emerge is the lack of psychological fear in the early part of the game, and in its place, the “boo” element of things jumping out at you. Luckily, once you actually get through the first part, the game reverts back to the game we have been expecting and more.

Now one thing that people had been mentioning (before I could tell them to shut up), is that Heather has a wider range of weaponry than Harry and James did. It was assumed that with things like machine guns, Heather would be more “Rambo-like”, with the ability to mow through mass amounts of enemies. Luckily, this isn’t true. While Heather does end up with some powerful weapons, she’s even worse with them than Harry and James were. She fires the machine gun rather wildly, and her horrible aim means that it’s useless on all but the largest of the bizzare creatures roaming around. Other than that, the controls and such are nearly identical to the earlier games, which is great, because while fighting is an important element, I play it for the thrill and the puzzles.

The logic puzzles are on par with the best of the puzzles from the earlier games, but there may be a few too many inventory puzzles, at least early on. However, I do wish the game’s creators would finally reward you more for playing the game with the higher puzzle difficulty levels, but once again, all of the game’s rewards for finishing are combat related.

I will say this, though. The graphics are easily some of the best, if not THE best to ever grace the PS2. The characters alone are so detailed and so expressive, it’s hard to believe it’s a PS2 game. It’s not like games like Final Fantasy X where the faces are heaily detailed in closeups and then revert to much lower polygon models during gameplay. The characters are ALWAYS highly detailed. You can tell it’s a trick, however, by watching the surroundings carefully. The Silent Hill 3 engine seems to undraw any object that isn’t shown on screen, thus freeing up the system to maintain this level of detail. If you can catch it, you can see some objects pop into existance if you change the angle very quickly. It’s not easy to do, but it’s a way to discover just how Konami did it. However, as a result, the camera is a bit broken. Many times you’ll find yourself entering, say, a hallway and having the camera facing the opposite direction of where it needs to be. Easy enough to fix, but often, the camera will try to swing back to a very inconvenient angle. I believe that the camera is tied into the undraw system and tries to focus on areas with the least amount of polygons. I could be wrong, but it’s not that big of a deal. It just means more reliance on the camera centering button. The biggest problem stems from trying to orient the camera properly when you come across a blind hallway or T-junction, and you know there are monsters somewhere in the area. It makes for some unnecessary damage to Heather.

The environments are truly horrifying, too. It’s more akin to the stuff Harry saw in Silent Hill 1, with strange bloody heaps everywhere and the iron platforms that seem to span an endless abyss. And while, you do end up in the same hospital that James was wandering around in Silent Hill 2, the effect from Heather’s version of the nightmare makes it almost a brand new location, even though you do see many of the same things James did. A cool thing the programmers did is if you have a save game from Silent Hill 2 on your memory card, you’ll run into some of James’ handiwork in the hospital. Very nifty, and Konami’s one of the only companies that does things like this. I kind of wish I could see this, but my copy of Silent Hill 2 is the Xbox version, and alas, no Silent Hill 2 goodies for me.

Let’s move onto the sound, because the sound in the game is as much of an element as any of the graphics or puzzles. In the first games, you could detect the presence of a monster by your radio kicking out a burst of static. It was kind of a cool idea to let you know something was coming, but Silent Hill 3 improves this in a slight way. It still works the same way, as the radio goes nuts when there are creatures nearby, but now it doesn’t just kick out white noise. Instead you’re treated to some horrible (in a good way!) noises coming from the radio. It’s almost like music from a band formed entirely by tortured, damned souls. It really adds to the creepy factor.

The music is easily the best in the series, and even outshines nearly other game out there right now. It really sounds like a very high budget film soundtrack. They hit perfection in melding the soundtrack to the game. The opening theme, “You’re Not Here”, is excellence in music, and you’ll find yourself watching the opening movie over and over just to hear the song. That is, until you remember that Konami was awesome enough to include the soundtrack of the game as a seperate CD in the package. I don’t often listen to the soundtracks that sometimes get included in games, but this one finds itself being played often at my house.

So yes, Konami has successfully done it again. I think that if the storyline had had more presence in the first half of the game, it would easily be my favorite game in the series. As it stands, that honor still belongs to Silent Hill 2, but not by much. And that’s also not to say that I didn’t like any of the games in the series. They are all masterpieces of game making, and it’s good to know that the series is in no danger of running out of steam. Now I just have to cover myself with a blanket of silence regarding the next game in the series, which is confirmed to be in the making. I can’t wait.

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Posted by Jeff Shedden on Aug 16th, 2003 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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