Silent Hill 3 Review
I know teenage girls can go through hell, but this is a bit much for poor Heather.
Developer: Team Silent
Publisher: Konami
Release Dates: EU 23rd May 2003 (PS2), 31st October 2003 (PC), Japan 3rd July 2003, NA 5th August 2003 (PS2), 21st November 2003 (PC)
Platforms: PlayStation 2, PC
Previously on Silent Hill, Harry Mason took his adopted daughter Cheryl to the titular town for a holiday at the suggestion of his daughter after the loss of his wife and her mother Jodie. Upon arriving they get into a car crash and Cheryl is gone, sending Harry searching high and low through this hellish town to find her. After learning the truth of his daughter that she was a split being from Alessa Gillespie and killing the town’s Cult of the Order’s destructive God Incubus, Alessa and Cheryl are reincarnated as a newborn baby, given to Harry by the Incubator, a completed form of Alessa and Cheryl prior to her reincarnation. Accepting the newborn as his newly adopted daughter, Harry leaves Silent Hill and raises her.
17 years later, Heather Mason is enjoying a nice day out at the mall when her world is suddenly turned topsy-turvy when she’s questioned by private detective Douglas Cartland about her birth and enters a nightmare realm in the mall wrought with monsters and unsettling scenery. Finding her way out she is then confronted by a woman named Claudia Wolf, a member of the Order from the first game, who tries to tell her about her true self. Being the sassy teenager she is Heather tells her where to go, but then things only escalate once she finds her way out of the nightmare mall and eventually leading her to go back to Silent Hill once again.
Somehow, Silent Hill 3 began development as a rail shooter while development on what would become Silent Hill 4: The Room coincided, consisting of a much smaller team than Silent Hill 2, but retaining its core members as well as some newcomers. After discovering it wasn’t working, Team Silent scrapped a year’s worth of work and within 9 months Silent Hill 3 was born, and if that ain’t a thematic coincidink. As a result, Silent Hill 3 feels like a shorter experience than its predecessors with a fair amount of cut content, but it is also much more concise because of it. Silent Hill 3 is evidently a direct sequel to the first game and nicely wraps up Heather and Alessa’s story.
Silent Hill 3 plays much in the same way as 2. Same inventory screen, same combat, same controls, same everything. It’s all plenty familiar and it works and I never found any problems controlling Heather, even if her movements are like James’ being tank-ish. Combat is as simple and fun as before and is easy to get a grasp of, so the controls are still great. You can take your time walking around at a leisurely pace or hold square to run or if you’re stationary can block . Triangle opens up your map, if you picked one up for the area you’re in, X to interact, circle to toggle your torch, L1 and R1 is to sidestep left and right, L2 will swing the camera behind you and R2 will ready your weapon with X to attack. Pressing L1+R1 will give you a quick turn. Select opens your inventory and Start pauses, reversing Silent Hill 2’s Star and Select options. Once you start a new game, you’re immediately thrown into hell the second you start playing. Heather traverses an abandoned and spooky amusement park, digging around souvenir shops, avoiding horribly creatures lunging for her, and eventually coming across a rollercoaster. Only when she travels the track by foot an oncoming coaster comes steaming ahead prompting Heather to wake up in the mall’s cafe. Poor girl had dozed off and had a terrible nightmare, waking up to a late summer sunset with everyone gone.
You get different toys to play with as Heather starts off with a knife as a weapon and mysterious locket in her inventory. Later she’ll get to pick up some of the usuals such as a handgun, shotgun, uzi, and varying melee weapons such as a stun gun, pipes, swords, and maces. You can even find a silencer for the handgun which I used maybe once but never really found a sound reason to use it, even though it does limit being bombarded by enemies. The game is generous in giving you just enough ammo to keep you going, moreso on a second playthrough when you can adjust the amount of ammo you pick up, earning 10x the amount. Unlike Resident Evil, which wants you dead, Silent Hill wants you alive as long as possible to torture you through its hell.
The puzzles make a return and of course there’s difficulty levels to choose from for puzzles and combat. Easy difficulty naturally makes it easier to beat enemies and you get a bit more supplies and less hinderance in your battling. Harder difficulty will have monsters in greater number, behaving more aggressively and are tougher to bring down while limiting your supplies. The proper hellish experience! And for the puzzles, easy difficulty makes puzzles much more simplified and easier to solve, sometimes outright stripping certain items you have to pick up to solve the puzzles. Normal will give you the puzzles as intended with challenge enough while hard will really test your intellect, giving you more puzzles and all of them much more complex and vague to solve. AI smooth brains need not apply. Otherwise the puzzles are pretty fun. Some are very creative in their approach, design and solution and a good majority of them will really get you thinking, one even testing your literature knowledge with Shakespeare. At first you would get a little lost running around the halls of the mall trying to figure out where to go, what to do and how to solve one particular puzzle or another, which I spent a few hours trying to find my way around, but the reward is very satisfying. Later puzzles become very intriguing and tie back to the first game prompting some really cool callbacks and a nice wave of nostalgia.
You get some very haunting and creepy levels to explore in Silent Hill 3, some directly drawing from its primary inspiration Jacob’s Ladder. Once you’re through with the mall you find your way heading back home. First stop is catching your train, which the underground stations are based entirely on the train station scene in Jacob’s Ladder, even directly referencing Bergen Street. You wander up and down levels trying to find the right platform, certain areas being completely dark, and winding up confronting more monsters until you catch your train. You then come across a construction area then stumble into an abandoned office building. I always have trouble with the train station section because I always get lost. Conventionally you would follow the signs, right? You’re told where to go and what platform to go to, so you follow the signs only… It’s not the right platform somehow once you’re there. It’s so confusingly laid out and the map isn’t entirely clear to navigate this labyrinth, when you somehow find it. Everytime I play it, I always wander around completely lost until I stumble upon what I need and it feels impossible to develop muscle memory for this section. Every other part, it’s no problem. The subway station? Forget it. I need a precise walkthrough for that. But maybe one day I’ll get it.
Anyway, going through the office building you’re required to solve a few more puzzles to escape the building which has the exit guarded by a monstrous growth. Throughout you solve some more puzzles, enterting some curious rooms until you find one that transitions you to the nightmare realm where things really get freaky. New enemies come out of the floors, more unsettling imagery forebodes what’s to come, and hauntingly there’s a sealed off section down a hall walled by a piece of glass. Behind it is a lone wheelchair outside an open door with light coming out and the hallway completely dark. This game is wrought with haunting imagery like this, it’s fantastic. A theory was that it is in reference to the film Section 9 as it matches pretty closely, but Team Silent artist Masahiro Ito says it’s more referencing the wheelchair uses from the first game. You eventually escape this building by solving a fantastical puzzle collecting pages of a fairy tale, the last of which gives Heather a way out, reciting an incantation from the story defeating the monster and all others in the building too. Now you can escape.
And finally you head home! Only all that’s waiting for you there is heartache, and what a gut wrenching heartache it is. Heather comes in, calling out for her dad Harry only to find him a bloody mess slumped in his chair. After crying at her dead dad’s lap, Heather confronts the culprit on the roof, and who else would it be but Claudia? Who is deliberately trying to boil her blood in anger so that Heather can birth her God. Heather slays Claudia’s monster assassin then returns back home where Douglas is investigating Harry’s body. Heather interrogates Douglas who says he only wants to help and warns Heather on the dangers of revenge. After a brief burial for her dad, Douglas takes Heather back to Silent Hill, where Heather’s memories start to come back, thanks to a notebook Harry left behind for Heather.
Once there you revisit some familiar sights from Silent Hill 2. It’s essentially the same map though with some areas shut off and different lighting thanks to a red sunset. You can revisit Heaven’s Night optionally, but more familiar is Brookhaven hospital. It’s pretty cool getting to revisit this area but this time it’s much more twisted. With James it was more clinical and cold with padded walls and wandering nurses. Here things quickly turn more hellish as the walls are replaced with quivering flesh and perilous walkways. If you’re playing on a harder difficulty and you’re not careful with your footing, you will fall to your death off a surprise chasm in the walkway. And in this area comes my favourite haunt; the mirror scene. Heather stands before a large mirror and nothing seems to happen, only when you go to leave the door is locked. Then there’s a creepy slurping sound as trails of blood crawl along the floor and out and through the sink from the opposite reflection. You run around trying to figure what to do only to notice your reflection is now standing still and the blood continues to crawl on both sides of the reflection. The you in the mirror changes, growing darker, and you panic. You try the door again, but it’s still locked. You keep trying until finally it’s unlocked and you’re free. This room is so unsettling and like something from right out of a nightmare. If you stay in this room you succumb to the possession and you will die, if you’re morbid enough to want to see what happens. But I think it’s a creepy portend to later in the game and of the true self of Heather. She is the reincarnation of Alessa Gillespie after all, and perhaps it is her destiny to go full evil and birth this destructive God… What is also interesting is the game’s use of mirrors. Early on, Heather says she doesn’t like mirrors as it gives off the feeling of looking into an alternate world and that creeps her out. She doesn’t even have mirrors in her own home. So for this mirror scene to play out so horrifically pays off incredibly well.
With the hospital over and done with after confronting Leonard Wolf, Claudia’s father, and dispatching him and learning more of Claudia’s evil intentions, you finally make it to what you saw in your nightmare at the start of the game; Lakeside Amusement Park. There are some very lovely touches and further callbacks to the first game, as you may recall you go through this amusement park in the first game. Along the way you will find a pad written on by Harry, the same pad that serves as your save points in the first game, chronicling his thoughts and his desire to find Cheryl and save her from this hell. Not only is this a wonderful callback to that game, but it’s an emotional anchor between Heather and her dad and you and your time in the first game. It binds you with Harry and Heather deeper. The amusement park is an amazing and pivotal level because it ends with Heather confronting her darker half. The Alessa that could be, the one to bring about God and destruction of all. She’s darker than Heather and more sadistic. What cooler boss fight to have than one against yourself? So you gun that self of yours down, kill it dead, and then comes an incredibly illuminating aspect for Heather. She comes to terms with who she is, who she was, and embraces her whole self with all of her memories unlocked. A reincarnation of the Incubator, if you will. And after the amusement park she comes to the church where it all comes to an end…
Anyway, my point for now here is the scares, the pacing, the levels, the monsters, the bosses and how you progress is all incredibly laid out and is scarier than its predecessors. The game’s art design and graphics are phenominal in accentuating this creating an atmosphere that is unsettling and haunting to be in. Heather looks greatly empathetic and you connect with her, the monsters are monstrously unsettling and incredibly varied each with their own purpose and intent behind their designs, and Dark Alessa is a haunting presence of Heather’s darker self on what you will become if you massively fuck things up. Even in its writing there’s layers upon layers of subtle details that you won’t pick up on in your first playthrough but will realise later on. It oozes its influences, subtext, and geniously lays it out for you to discover and interpret. The look and feel of Silent Hill 3 is phenominal making it an amazing horror game that not many can match.
To accentuate the horrors you need good sound. Akira Yamaoka strikes again and to quote Snoop Dogg “This motherfucker don’t miss!” The sound design is creepy, the monsters horrific, and the voice acting is fantastic. It retains that deliberate awkward line delivery giving that sense of otherworldly unease like you’re in a nightmare, that things aren’t quite right at all, with Heather sounding remarkably the most human and Claudia easily the most creepy. What’s cool is the actress who played Angela in 2, Donna Burke, also voices Claudia. Douglas makes you sympathise for him, especially with the line “No one will cry for me when I’m dead.” Tragically his voice actor, Richard Grosse, died a month before the game’s release. There’s another character, Vincent, who is at odds with Claudia, adds an even eerier and creepier atmosphere that while seemingly is on the side of Heather makes her question her reality deeply. She remarks of the monsters she killed and he confuses her asking “They look like monsters to you?” The delivery really throws a wrench in all perception of reality and morality for Heather. There’s a lot of great performances throughout, such as a creepy phone call Heather recieves in the hospital alluding to her birthday seemingly getting her age all wrong saying she’s 38 when she’s 17 (dig into it and do the maths and you’ll see it all adds up), and Leonard Wolf’s forboding performance as to Claudia’s intentions.
The greatest performance, though, has to be Heather played by Heather Morris, who the character was also named after. She plays her so very independently as well as incredibly sassy and sarcastic with a sharp tongue yet equally empathetic making it so quick and easy to care for Heather. She puts across how tortured she feels, how disgusted she is with what’s going on around her, and how distressed and conflicted within herself on her indentity and who she truly is. What especially gets to me and cuts deep is how she plays Heather being so distraught over the loss of her dad. As conflicted as he was accepting her, he was good to her all her life, did the best for her to protect and look after her, and making her a good person. He was the one good thing in her life and it was all taken from her by some psychotic zealot. While Heather gasps at the sight of her dead dad and kneels over him in his chair and then at the end crying for her dad is painful. Someone give this damn girl a hug already, she goes through so much.
The music is even more incredible than before with Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, most known for playing Motoko Kusanagi in the Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex series and dubbing Cowboy Bebop, contributing to vocals, a first for the series. You don’t hear it in the game, but in the soundtrack she narrates segments alluding deeper to the story of Silent Hill 3 of its mythology and gods. She sings on a couple of tracks too, the title song being You’re Not here and my favourite song being the studio mix of I Want Love, a poignant song for Heather. A version of it is played during the car scene with Heather and Douglas as they head to Silent Hill adding a deeper layer to the scene. Lyrically it’s indicative of the love that Heather desires, especially from a paternal point of view. There are some fantastic and eerie atmospheric tunes. Float Up From Dream plays on the main menu, End of Small Sanctuary is a fun, melodic and chill rocky tune that fits Heather’s normal life nicely before it all goes to hell. Some of the tracks appropriately harken back to the first game with some banging and clanging noises of the nightmare realm as well as the original Silent Hill theme playing during the credits with lyrics added to it. The whole soundtrack, voice over work and sound design is superb and Akira Yamaoka’s work is continuously remarkable here.
Eventually, Heather works her way through Lakeside Amusement Park, discovering left over notepads from her dad’s previous visit, and confronts her darker self. A tense battle on a carousel against Alessa ensues and Heather then becomes her whole self. She is Alessa and Cheryl and she comes to terms with that, moreso when she delves deeper into the otherworld of the church uncovering a diary from her dad and especially her old room from her past life. The same room Harry investigated from the first game which also includes Cheryl’s old sketchbook she took with her in the first game, with Heather remarking humourously about how she ridiculously drew her dad on the cover. You revist other familiar rooms too such as the hospital room Alessa was confined to while the Order imbued her with their God for her to birth. The room makes Heather deeply uncomfortable, past memories from that life reawakening and she wants out of that room. It’s all a fantastic pay off and even greater development for Heather’s character, a full circle moment for her to know who she is.
The game ends so well too. In a final confrontation with Claudia and Vincent, he tells Heather to kill Claudia as he believes she’s gone way too far off the deep end, wanting to destroy all of mankind to rebirth something more horrid. Claudia shanks him and Heather argues against Claudia’s foolish plans, how a God born from hatred cannot create a perfect paradise. Which is true, nothing good ever comes from hate and anger. All Claudia has done was to incite that anger and hatred within Heather so that she may grow and birth her terrible God. Heather keels over, the possession taking a hold of her, but she refuses, holding it back and barks at Claudia “Shut your stinking mouth, bitch!” And then addresses the little locket with the red orb inside of it, the gift from her dad; an aglaophotis. Heather takes it and her body violently rejects the fetal God, vomiting it up. Claudia freaks out, consumes the fetus so that she might birth her God instead and unfortunately does so. One final battle between Heather and the hideous God, which bares a striking resemblance to Alessa, and finally all is well. Everyone involved in this madness is dead and there’s no God to rise up and destroy the world. With that burden relieved off Heather’s shoulders after a good stomping on the dead God’s dome, reality starts to hit. Particularly how she doesn’t have her dad anymore. Hearing her cry for her dad is so upsetting. After that emotional turmoil she picks herself up and leaves, but not before looking back cautiously at something… She then goes off and leaves with Douglas, joking again as usual, and truly embracing who she really is, now going by what her dad originally named her, Cheryl.
There is some amazing thought put into the plot and art design of this game with so many layers of subtle themes and imagery going on, particularly of identity, young womanhood, and pregnancy. In fact this game is banned in some places due to its depictions of what is essentially Heather having an abortion as she rejects birthing the God. As such it makes this game particularly the scariest horror story for conservative white Christian Americans, the big babies. The plot of the game is essentially all about revenge and the costs of it, but beneath that there is so much more going on and the way it is handled and executed is done to perfection. So much so that there have been many women over the years finding some deeply relatable experiences with Heather in this game.
Given the horrors in this game it always warrants multiple playthroughs. Something compells you to experience it all over again. And of course there are lots of rewards and unlockables for your time. Complete a playthrough by beating the final boss with a melee weapon and you unlock an unlimited ammo uzi making subsequent playthroughs a little more chaotic, ceaselessly gunning down monsters and bosses. It’s pretty fun and comes in handy to unlock the flamethrower from killing more monsters with guns than melee weapons. Conversely, if you beat the game killing monsters with mostly melee weapons you unlock the beam saber, which is of course just a lightsaber though with a leopard print hilt for flair. Sneakily these weapons are hidden on a new playthrough but you can’t miss them once you go through another playthrough; the infinite uzi is in an alleyway outside the women’s toilets once you escape the window, only head the other direction and not the way you’re meant to and it’ll be nestled on some boxes. The beam saber will be lodged in a door handle opposite the door to your second save point in the first corridor in the mall. You also get unlockable outfits, a majority of them unlocked through cheat codes, and there’s a lot of them.
Naturally there are multiple endings too. Kill very little and take very little damage and you get the good ending, which is also the canonical ending. Go on a murder spree and take a lot of damage and you get the bad ending where Cheryl becomes Alessa, kills Douglas and everything ends grimly. I’ve always been reluctant to get the bad ending, but even when I tried to get it I still got the good ending! And it wouldn’t be a Silent Hill game without a UFO ending. Upon multiple murderous playthroughs and accumulating 333 kills you unlock the Heather Beam, a special beam power. One of the outfit unlocks is a special one with a Sailor Moon esque rod called Transform Costume. Equip it and you get a magical anime girl cutscene to put it on. Wearing this while using the Heather Beam gives it an upgrade to the Sexy Beam. Kill 33 enemies with this and once you reach Heather’s apartment complex you get the UFO ending. Marvelous.
Silent Hill 3 might be the shortest of all the Silent Hill games, as is evident from its extensive cut content, but it didn’t have as long a development period as its predecessors. However, it is still a remarkable sequel to the first game and finely wraps that story up wonderfully. There are some issues with the camera in places, such as during the final boss half of the action is chopped off which is a real shame, and the combat may not be for everybody, and the subway level is confusing as hell to navigate, but it is very hard to find fault in this game anywhere else. Artistically and creatively there is so much going on it is inspirational. As a horror game it is frightening and disturbing and would probably put any young woman off of wanting to have children. But all good horrors bring out empathy, and it certainly does to me with this.
I am always torn between which Silent Hill game is my favourite. I love all four games for varying reasons. I love this one because it’s such a great sequel to the first game and I adore Heather. I love the first one because it is such an incredible entry into this nightmare and I love the second game (and its remake) for being so creative and having such a tragic, guilt ridden love story driving it. I also love the fourth one for being an incredibly creepy ghost story expanding out from Silent Hill. Whenever I play each one my opnion flip-flops. “Ooh, this one’s my favourite— no wait, I like this one mor— ohhh but this one…” But if I really, really had to choose and make a list, I believe Silent Hill 3 would be at the top and I would say that is simply because of Heather. She’s an amazing character with a resounding conflict that ties perfectly to the first game, she’s fiercely independent and multi dimensional, she’s relatable to a lot of young women, and she tugs at my sentimentality too. I hate seeing the hell that she’s made to go through and the heartbreak she has to deal with in losing her father. I would love to see a follow up to Heather in another game (should really be saying Cheryl). I want to see the kind of woman she grows up to be. I want to see if she worked with Douglas after and if she got into working to protect children. That feels right for her to do. Or maybe the Order is brought back and she fights to snuff it out again, stopping any children from coming to harm from them. That would be so good.
Arguably this is one of my favourite, perhaps most favourite, horror games ever and as grim as it is it’s a joy to play and a great inspiration for me. Everyone should play it. I can’t wait to see the eventual remake later on too. I got so giddy when I saw the seal’s easter egg in the Silent Hill 2 remake.
Where to Purchase:
eBay: £27 - £772 / $60 - $19,700 (WHAT?!)
Amazon: £24 - £160 / $22 - $300
CeX: £55 - £80