One lonely night, I hopped onto an auction website, and I saw what I hadn’t been expecting to find. A copy of what seemed like a lost game from a lost series. The kind of game I saw in magazines when I was younger, but never got to play.

Silent Hill 3.

The name alone sent shivers down my spine. It was a game from a different time. And at a reasonable price. I did what anyone would do – I bought it. And then I waited, and then I played it.

Silent Hill 3 is not the best game in the series. Silent Hill 2 has the better story. The Room innovates more, pushes further. The original game is claustrophobic and terrifying.

But there’s something about Silent Hill 3. Do you know the kind of feeling you get from the kind of creepy, “cursed” footage? Silent Hill 3 was an eminently popular game (and in fact remains so, in memory at least), but there’s something remarkable about the feeling I had when I played it – this feeling that I had indeed found something lost, cursed, and altogether haunting. For those three or four shadowy hours of my life I played through Silent Hill 3 for the first time, I experienced something that no other game had really ever given me up until that point – genuine terror.

The kind of ad that haunts.

I didn’t actually finish Silent Hill 3 first. I stopped when I got to the Amusement Park, then I jumped ship and played Silent Hill 2, then Silent Hill 4: The Room. Then I finished 3, Origins, and Shattered Memories, now I’m working on finishing 1. I played the whole thing out of whack, really. But that didn’t matter. Even if I hadn’t played it in canonical order, each game retained its core potency. Each game I’ve played has proven to me it can stand alone, remaining always interesting and, especially in the case of the Team Silent entries, genuinely creepy.

Everything in Silent Hill 3 is geared to be uncomfortable at least, and mind-searingly creepy at worst. The trauma, as Vincent says, will likely be seared into your brain. The few moments of respite come as eyes of the storm, often before or after some terrible twist of Team Silent’s knife, where you can think about what came before, or fear at what is to come next.

Silent Hill 3 is the culmination of survival horror’s traditional design – you pick up weapons, healing items, and explore sprawling yet restrictive maps. It is not perfect. Some enemy types are frustrating, or are simply not as scary as they could have been. But when you reach Brookhaven Hospital just past the midpoint of the game, Team Silent stop messing around. If you thought you were frightened before, Brookhaven Hospital in the third installment seems to be a refinement of everything that they have learned from making the previous games.

Screeching, otherworldly noises. Nurses who can run, and who are armed with guns. A lack of ammunition. A profound sense of isolation and otherworldliness. A fantastic scene in the basement, where you find a wheelchair, abandoned by something, wheel still spinning as you approach, and a trail of blood leading around to the elevator. And what is it you find there? Something that the main character will refuse to look into. It’s too dark – and too creepy. The fear just builds from there.

Every aspect of Silent Hill 3 is geared towards this fear. This frightening notion that we might not have control over our own destiny, our own body, and that our past is something inescapable – the journey Silent Hill 3 takes you on is not quite as compelling as Harry’s search for Cheryl in Silent Hill, or for James’ quest to find Mary in 2, but there’s an urgency that few of the other games have.

Silent Hill 3 deserves a place in your gaming collection, even if just for a little while. Stop off, enjoy; there’s a lot of sights to see. None of them you will particularly enjoy – but that’s the point.

I hope to share more about this game’s intent and design at some point in the future. Keep those radios tuned.
Thanks for reading.

Welcome to Silent Hill!

Silent Hill, a quiet little lakeside
Resort town. We’re happy to have
you. Take some time out of your
busy schedules and enjoy a nice
restful vacation here.

Row after row of quaint old houses,
a gorgeous mountain landscape,
and a lake which shows different
sides of its beauty with the
passing of the day, from sunrise
to late afternoons to sunset.

Silent Hill will move you and fill
you with a feeling of deep peace.
I hope your time here will be
pleasant and your memories will
last forever.