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Looks great, less filling
It’s difficult to believe that occult-shadowed Silent Hill was once a bright, sunny vacation spot. But evil forces were called up and the tiny town was plunged into decay. The actual game series that is Silent Hill is similarly decaying: What began as uncommon brilliance on the PlayStation, has degraded into a convoluted and senseless exercise in flexing visceral muscle while offering less and less in the way of engaging play.
Recall if you will, the first game: your daughter was beside you, in the passenger seat of your vehicle at the time of the accident. It was snowing and you couldn’t see. You hit something—no, someone—and when you woke, you found that your daughter had disappeared, swallowed by the mist in a broken town where blood and wraiths run freely. Your daughter’s inexplicable disappearance compelled you to play, to put up with clunky, tank-like controls and perfunctory fight mechanics to discover her whereabouts. So taken were you by your singe-minded mission that the subtle incursion of the bizarre swelled dangerously, tantalizingly, at the edge of your perception.
The second game told its less intriguing story in a much more focused fashion. Your wife summons you to Silent Hill with a cryptic note. She says she is waiting for you in your special place. A touching invitation, but for the fact your wife is dead, going on three years. Only the exceptionally tedious fighting and running and door handle rattling sabotaged what could have been the best game in the series. Certainly the script melded the horrifying with the melancholic to arrive at something truly memorable and haunting, but in the end, Silent Hill 2 was like a brilliant short story that somebody decided to stretch ill-advisedly into a novel.
And so we arrive at Silent Hill 3. I braced myself as I rented the game, tried to suppress flashbacks of a terribly disappointing third installment of Ninja Gaiden from way back when. Regrettably, things don’t get off to an auspicious start: the game simply drops your teenage girl protagonist, Heather (brownie points to Konami for featuring a female) into a nightmarish scenario typical of the series and says "there, go find out what's what." To which you want to respond, "um, what for?"
Don’t get me wrong, there are reasons why this game received the attention that it did—for one, it’s a work of art by PS2 standards. The charging, stirring sonic opening entitled, "You Aren’t Here" is brilliant, and it makes me think how much more whole the previous two games might have been if some ‘real music’ had been composed for them as well. The tune does well to lock what memories I have of the game into my head even now when I have been away from it for some time.
Aurally, the game impresses beyond musical composition: the pocket radio, as much a staple of the series as anything else, continues to create 'white noise' to alert you to the presence of undesirables in your vicinity. Monsters make positively revolting sounds when nearby as well. The voice acting on the whole is weak (when hasn’t it been?) but the standout performance of the main character more than makes up for the lameness of the others. Konami certainly found a talented youngster to play Heather's role. The banter she offers is genuine as well ("yeah, whatever"), and clicking on objects often elicits a very personal, teenage girl response from her. The attention to detail is admirable.
Though perhaps even more admirable are the visuals in Silent Hill 3—this is as photorealistic as it gets on your PS2. This is as natural as human gestures have looked, as detailed as skin and fabric and blood have looked. And the monsters in the background…! Konami have managed to make those monsters that, in similar games, just hang around and appear grotesque, actually move in truly alien and aberrant ways, twitching and lolling and gesticulating this way and that as your eyes struggle to piece together their pulpy incompleteness…
The monsters you actually get to fight aren’t nearly as scary of course, since they have to be fully realized 3D models. That said, of all the Silent Hill games, this instalment presents the least scary monster menagerie. The evil dogs look real, and the skin damage to many of the 'human' assailants is believable, but who cares if they don't frighten us, even a little? The bandaged children from the first game, and the Pyramid Heads from the second—now those guys were frightening. And they were memorable.
As if to compensate, the programmers have given us much cooler weaponry with which to slay the uninspired cast of bad guys. You actually get to wield a katana (yup, that’s a sword), as well as a submachine gun (yup, that means a lot of bullets). So if the confrontations don't really get your pulse racing, at least doling out death is a bit more interesting than before.
The weapons at your disposal do help keep things moving at a decent clip; however, while Silent Hill 3 is the fastest paced of all the games, the apparent lack of a purpose for the protagonist makes it seem more tedious, because our actions feel pointless in the scheme of things. The game does not proceed from normalcy to madness. It begins bizarre and stays that way. Furthermore, the nature of our character’s struggle (or at least what she thinks it is) is not known from the onset, so it’s difficult to care about her or her mission, because we don’t know who she is, or what that mission might be.
This approach (the quest for identity), can work if handled carefully, but Konami’s people have cocked up the material considerably. A typical, successful approach involves giving us—and the heroine—a calling, and switching it up it later when new information surfaces. Here, the developers opt instead to leave us in the dark for the majority of the game, before clumsily spelling everything out (more on that in a second) in rambling CGI bits toward the finish.
In the end, Silent Hill 3 is the most graphically intense chapter of the series that has become known for being "like Resident Evil, but scarier". Regrettably, this chapter might be the least deserving of that distinction—it’s not truly frightening at any point. It's not that the potential isn't there: if the proper build up was implemented, moments like the treacherous dash down the roller coaster tracks could have been heart-stopping. As it is, the writhing background monsters are often unsettling, and the puzzles and fights are well paced (an improvement over Silent Hill 2), but our character never establishes any sort of relationship with us, and after awhile of not knowing what the hell she’s on about, you’ll want to leave her in the lurch.
Indeed, more effort seems to have been made establishing forced, amateurish connections with the notoriously nebulous story of Silent Hill, than developing any unique story of chapter 3 proper. It's unfortunate, because Heather is a wonderful protagonist who we simply can’t get behind, and she is unhappily drowned in near-unrelenting and ineffectual in-your-face nastiness. Unhappy for us: This is like Hannibal to the first game's Silence of the Lambs.
Borrow or get it on the cheap to see how sweetly your PS2 can make walls crawl (you have to see this to believe it) and rooms grow and blood splash onto super-realistic characters. You’ll get a kick out of the introductory scene too. Here, our heroine appears confused and fearful of the dark and unclean things that skitter beneath iron bars, as the inexorable guitar charges on in spite of everything. Pity you mightn't.
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More Reviews by Marc Golding [+]
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