Silent Hill 2 Remake released not even a year ago, but we aren’t here to discuss that today.
Instead, I want to talk about the somewhat overlooked Silent Hill 3. And oh boy, do I have a lot
to say. If you’ll indulge me for a while, then I can either take you on a pleasant trip down
Memory Lane, or perhaps convince you to pick up a 22-year-old game about a teenager
aborting the fetus of a demon.
Cough.
I recently had the pleasure of replaying SH3, which took me back to my teen years. A good
friend of mine, who is a diehard Silent Hill fan, admitted that despite having even gone through
the more recent, glitchy Silent Hill Downpour, this game just…didn’t catch his attention. So I
wanted to take a closer look to analyze the game to see why it clicked with some, but not
others.
The first thing to note is that this game is incredibly combat-heavy, at least in comparison to the
earlier two games. I think fans often misremember details from old franchises, and this one isn’t
immune to that. SH2 had plenty of combat – but SH3 takes it to another level. I still vividly
remember walking into Brookhaven Hospital, now ready to fight the nurses after being surprised
by them in SH2…and seeing one lift her arm far, far away. Wondering what she was doing with
that steel pipe – and staring at my screen in slack-jawed awe and confusion when she shot me
with a revolver.
So I quickly showed her the business end of a my lead pipe, drank a mysterious health drink,
and told the director of the hospital that he’d need to post some job openings on Indeed very,
very soon.
As was true of any game in the PS2 era, Heather (our teenage protagonist, replacing the
downtrodden James) can inspect the environment around her and will make comments to the
player. Whereas James’ comments were mostly just acknowledging his environment in a drab
and objective way (perhaps befitting of his personality), what I found really interesting about
Heather’s comments is how much she sounds like an American teenage girl. Remember, it was
mostly older Japanese men working on this game.
She’ll sometimes touch on a personal anecdote or personal taste, and as the game goes on and
her character evolves, she’ll even respond differently when presented with the same
environmental cues. For instance, she’s horrified and confused when she first sees a corpse –
but after an important plot-twist halfway through the game, while she still remarks on the cruelty
of how the people around her have perished, she notes that there’s just nothing she can do for
them and she needs to keep going. The character writing in SH3 is incredibly strong, and
although I didn’t consciously connect the dots when I played it as a teenager, I think this is why I
always gravitated toward it more than SH2.
On the flip side…
My dear friend noted that he could never get past the first half of the game. And replaying it, I
realized why. The first half keeps you in a large shopping mall with some rather large enemies.
To emulate the actual size and scope of a shopping mall (as well as the size of the enemies),
the developers kept the size ratio realistic. The ceiling is impossibly high, and the hallways are
large enough for 10 people to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and still have room to spare.
That being said, this is a game with a fixed camera angle, and it takes advantage of darkness,
fog, and things that obscure the player’s vision. Actually navigating the darkened mall, with all
its doubling back to solve puzzles and the eventual visual noise of seeing the “otherworld”
version of it, wasn’t fun. It was a chore. In fact, if it weren’t for my memory of having really
enjoyed the game years ago, I wouldn’t have continued.
And I think this is due to the way in which the game was developed.
A little background: the developer, Konami, initially created Silent Hill to be a direct competitor to
Capcom’s Resident Evil, both of which I love dearly. But Konami didn’t really give Team Silent
(the small team dedicated to creating the franchise) much to work with. They weren’t sure how
to compete (if I remember correctly, the team didn’t want to emphasize combat as this would
draw a direct and possibly unfavorable comparison with their competitor), so they eventually let
the team do whatever they wanted, sort of throwing their hands up and walking away. In fact,
some (if not all) of the CGI cutscenes in the first game were purportedly created by a single
person, staying late nights and working on multiple machines.
Why is this important? Well, it shows that Konami’s vision for the franchise has never really
been clear. So it’ll be a little less shocking to learn that SH3 was originally ordered as an on-rails
shooter, akin to the House of the Dead 4 arcade games you see out in the wild. This was clearly
not in Team Silent’s wheelhouse, and they took things in a different direction.
But I do wonder how much of the first half of the game’s level design was leftover from that
concept. It could explain the massive size of the environment, despite most of it being empty.
Unfortunately, I think that empty feeling and the sense of spinning your wheels so early in the
game is what put some people off from it – which is a shame, because the narrative and voice-
acting in the game not only holds up today, but it outright shines in some aspects.
The big plot-twist of the game is that Heather isn’t just some random teenager, but is the
adopted daughter of Harry Mason, the first game’s protagonist. To help conceal this twist, the
back of the box actually lists her last name as Morris, which is the voice actress’s name, not the
character’s.
Heather is being stalked by a detective who wants to tell her something about her “birth”, as well
as a cult member who seems to know her…but doesn’t, at the same time. Strange monsters
and otherworldly horrors quickly ensue. Heather eventually makes it back home and tries to tell
her dad about all the weird things that have happened to her that day, but to her shock – and
the player’s – Harry is…dead.
That’s right. No cutscene or hint leading up to his death. The protagonist of the seminal first
game is killed off-screen, and he wasn’t even able to put up a fight.
And here, the voice actress absolutely nails the horror and heartbreak of the scene. The way
her voice cracks and how she breaks down sobbing while also trying to speak is absolutely
heart wrenching to hear, and then you have the famous Akira Yamaoka’s bass-heavy score in the background, underlining the deep, foreboding feeling while a violin plays along with
Heather’s sorrow.
I actually streamed my replay live to two friends, one of whom was familiar with the franchise,
but neither of whom had ever seen this game. We’d been joking around about the sometimes-
wonky combat and the frustrating number of one-hit-kill scenarios that led us to a game over
screen. But during this scene, both of them went deathly silent. None of us could bring
ourselves to speak. Even my attempt at comedy in the ensuing boss fight, where you can get a
taste of revenge, fell flat. And I knew this scene was coming.
I can’t speak for the others, but suddenly, Heather’s goal became my goal. I understood, from
this teenager’s perspective, why she threw caution to the wind, and although she was integral to
the plot, didn’t really care about what the cult wanted or why they did what they did. She had her
eyes set on one thing, and one thing only.
Revenge.
Everything about this scene, including Heather’s reactions to checking her surroundings, feel
painfully human. Whereas she wanted nothing more than to get back to him before, she
suddenly recalls things he told her, like how he’d never leave her, and calls him a liar. Obviously,
this is a reaction to having lost him and now feeling betrayed. Through letters left by Harry in
between games, which we can later find, we see that Harry sometimes doubted his ability to
raise Heather and even resented her because she, technically, wasn’t Cheryl. And we see how
he fought to reconcile this and love her anyway.
So, what does the cult want? Well, this plot makes a lot more sense if you played the first game.
I, unfortunately, hadn’t played the first game before playing this one. I’d only played SH2, and I
was tardy to the party on the entire franchise. I’m old enough to have grown up with a PSX, but
not quite old enough to have played most of the M-rated games in its library as they released,
so it took me quite some time to even find SH1 to play.
For the uninitiated: back in the day, Harry and his wife found an abandoned baby on the side of
the road. They adopted her and named her Cheryl, but then Harry’s wife unfortunately passed
away. SH1 opens with Harry taking Cheryl to Silent Hill for a little vacation, but they get into a
car wreck when a girl who appears to be dressed in a traditional Catholic uniform wanders in
front of his car.
Cheryl disappears, and he and an officer named Cybil discover that Cheryl is actually part of the
soul of the person who wandered in front of him: Alessa. Now, the first game was heavily
inspired by Stephen King’s Carrie, and follows some of the same beats. Alessa is special in that
she’s psychic (King’s favorite trope), and she lives in a cult community (replacing the “religious
fanaticism” of Carrie). Her mother is much like Carrie’s mother in that she’s an extremist.
The cult believes that Alessa is the key to birthing their god, and in a move that is certain to win
Mother of the Year, Alessa’s mother attempts to perform the ritual in her own home. This results
in a horrid house fire, leaving Alessa looking a lot like Anakin Skywalker after Mustafar. Much
like Anakin, her fatal wounds won’t kill her, nor will they heal, as the demon is keeping her alive.
To prevent the cult from getting what they want and to give some version of herself a shot at
happiness, she splits her soul in two, creating Cheryl.
Now, this writer, who really just wanted a relaxing vacation with his daughter, is tasked with
killing a cult’s deity to get his daughter back. Alessa and Cheryl merge, and to give themselves
another shot at having a normal life, give birth to another version of themselves.
This is Heather.
And now the cult is trying this mess all over again with the next generation.
Except this time, Harry’s not here to save Heather. Nobody’s coming to her rescue. She has to
save herself. And the unceremonious and tragic passing of this mantle can’t be understated.
Fueled by vengeance, but without Batman’s code of honor, Heather tears through Silent Hill in
search of Claudia (the cult leader spearheading all of this) and learns that much like her
previous self, she’s pregnant with the cult’s dark deity. The more anger and vengeance she
feels, the closer it comes to being birthed. This is why Harry was killed, to force Heather down a
path of anger and vengeance.
An interesting note is that if you replay the game and pay close attention to the seemingly
random items and events Heather witnesses, they’re all hinting at this. In the shopping mall, she
finds a ladder that’s just out of reach, and has to find and use a coat hanger to pull it down.
Shortly after acquiring this coat hanger, she learns that she has an unwanted pregnancy. Even
Douglas’ stalking her, albeit for an ultimately altruistic reason, sets off her alarm bells and
makes her feel very vulnerable. Other beings stalk her as well, all with different ideas in mind for
her.
I was never a teenage girl, but even as a fully grown adult man, I felt Heather’s discomfort.
The game’s ending depends on whether you gave in to Heather’s desire for revenge. In the best
possible outcome, she can be seen mourning Harry, and we got an outro song that riffs on the
original game’s opening to bring it all full circle. And even in the soundtrack version of this song,
the last minute or so is complete silence. A moment of silence for Harry Mason.
Graphically, SH3 holds up surprisingly well. I even noticed things in the animation that I didn’t
notice as a teenager: namely, Heather can acquire a medieval mace (don’t ask) to use as a
weapon. Those things are…heavy. And the way she has to through herself back just to swing it
makes it feel as heavy as it should be. Akira Yamaoka and Mary Elizabeth McGlynn deliver a
soundtrack that’s both haunting and extremely nostalgic for the early 2000s rock/mall scene,
making it very appropriate for Heather.
The gut-punch of having lost Harry, specifically, will be missed if you haven’t played the first
game. But Heather’s re
action and desire for revenge is an easy hook for the player to engage
with.
If I had to take the game to task for anything, it would be the bloated environments in the first
half of the game and overuse of darkness and blood crawling on the wall, making visibility a real
chore. That, and the sheer number of times Heather can be instantly killed because you
interacted with the environment in an incorrect way (hit by a rollercoaster, hit by a train,
swallowed by a monster, falling off a cliff…)
VERDICT
Play it. The game holds up and doesn’t really feel dated outside of its puzzles. The only things
that don’t hold up, and weren’t really that great to begin with, were the early design choices
regarding the environment and one-hit-kills scenarios. But if you want a character-driven horror
game that doubles as a tragic coming-of-age story, then you’ll find something to love here. I
managed to snag a PC copy years ago, which is how I replayed the game – but not without
some issues. Your other options would be to bust out your PS2, emulate, or play the HD re-
release on PS3/360 – but if you try the last option, be warned that there were a myriad of
unresolved technical issues that could severely mar your first experience.
I’m hoping Bloober, responsible for Silent Hill 2 Remake, graces us with a remake for this game
as well. But that would probably entail remaking SH1.
Fingers crossed.
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