[Game Review] Silent Hill 3

Note: This review contains spoilers.

There is a part late in Silent Hill 3 where Heather, our protagonist, finds herself in an amusement park in the Silent Hill series' trademark otherworld.  Monsters abound as well as rusty gate textures, horrific squealing, and all manner of bloody, violent scenes.  But there is a brief section in this level of the game where Heather ventures through a fully functioning Haunted House ride.  The ride is hokey and tame compared to the rest of Silent Hill 3's horrific design, and allows for a nice sense of fun before the game begins its final descent into the endgame.  This little scene, more than any other, encapsulates exactly what Silent Hill 3 is: a winking nod to the franchise up to this point, and a final ride toward something like a series conclusion.  Of course, with hindsight we know the series was far from over (much to our horror - and not in a good way), but for many the Silent Hill franchise ends here (or after the controversial Silent Hill 4: The Room, a game I would like to play one of these days).

I'll say this: for the first half of Silent Hill 3, I wasn't giving it enough credit.  Coming hot off of Silent Hill 2, the game immediately felt off to me.  Instead of the slow burning, surreal start that James Sunderland gets in the prequel, Heather suddenly finds herself in the otherworld amusement park that bookends the game.  Her inventory is full of almost every weapon in the game, and she fights her way through monsters until finally you wake up and find yourself in a mall, all of it just a (prescient) dream.  Such a sudden, aggressive beginning felt immediately jarring for me, given the series' history of subtlety.  Not wanting to judge too early, however, I pressed on.  The games plot for the early half is virtually nil: a private investigator finds you for a woman named Claudia, who tells you some nonsense about how you are required for some ritual for her cult in order to birth God.  This sounds like a pretty solid set up, but its told to you in two conversations, and for a bulk of the 3-4 hours the first half of the game takes, you aren't going to get anything else other than that.  Your mission for this part of the game is essentially to get home, although the continuous switching to the cultish otherworld complicates matters.  You start at the mall, make your way to the subway, then a construction site, and finally an abandoned office building before being let out onto the streets to find your way to your apartment.  Inside, you find your father murdered by Claudia, and a sudden urge to go to Silent Hill and take revenge.  The game quickly picks up from here, but it was about at this point when I began to hastily judge the game.  After all, it seemed like the game had largely spun its wheels for nothing but padding.  By this point in Silent Hill 2, we had visited the streets of the foggy town, an apartment complex, and were more than likely headed to the hospital.  Silent Hill 2's level structure mimicked James' experience with his wife's illness: the apartments, the hospital, the prison/labyrinth, and finally the hotel, a place home to a special memory before his wife's illness.  The game goes from the literal to the metaphoric, and provides some context for the deeply personal narrative that is on display.  The levels in Silent Hill 3 up to this point, however, seemed at best a string of cliche levels for a video game.  It is to the game's credit, I think, that I didn't realize sooner what the game was getting at.  Rather than sinking into a surreal miasma like before, the game allows for a much more mundane introduction.  You visit the regular teenage haunts: the mall, the subway, a construction site or abandoned building - teenage hotspots suddenly turned into enclosed spaces of horror.  While Silent Hill 3 isn't nearly the sublime masterpiece its predecessor was, it's a powerful meditation on teenagers, coming of age, and the fear of motherhood that comes with being a teenage girl. 

The themes are tightly intertwined, and come roughly threefold: coming of age with its sudden sexuality, responsibility of adulthood, and the fear that comes with it; fear of motherhood and the social pressures from men, religion, and society at large; and the winking, fourth-wall breaking acknowledgment that maybe the Silent Hill franchise was becoming more of a burden than a gift to the team behind it.  The first two themes are reliant on one another, and the third comes from occasional jokes like the haunted house, and symbolism within the game's plot.

The plot finally takes off once you get to Silent Hill, where you realize that you are the reincarnation of several characters from the first Silent Hill, and that you are the foretold future mother of God, according to Claudia's cult.  Claudia isn't the only person forwarding this cult's dogma, however.  Her father, Leonard, believes her mad, and wants you dead so the ritual can never be complete.  Another man, Vincent, who is a priest like figure in the cult, also doesn't want Claudia to succeed, but chooses to use a talisman to stop the ritual.  Leonard fails after you kill him and Vincent's mystical solution ends up being a dud.  As the game reaches its climax, you take a pill your father had given you inside a locket and it forces a sudden abortion of sorts.  Heather doubles over and vomits a fetus looking creature.  Claudia quickly swipes it up, eats it up, and falls into a vaginal whole in the ground where you must kill a feminine boss (noticeably missing stomach and womb) simply called "God".

Yeah, it's a bit convoluted.  Silent Hill 3 is a mess, but a mess well worth getting lost in with the series' most relatable character.  Heather feels like an everyman better than James or Harry did in previous entries in the series, her observations changing as you progress from teenage dismissal to unsettled inquisitiveness.  Her progress from running away from the demons chasing her to her hunt for Claudia (and thereby confronting her own personal fears) is an incredibly subtle arch, and it is what made her one of my favorite video game characters in recent memory.  Her Silent Hill is covered in bloody walls, imagery of babies and tortured women - a Silent Hill that desperately wants her to be mother to its God, while reflecting her fear of it.  Motherhood isn't a choice for her here, its entrapment.  With the death of her father, Heather is forced to confront the adults in her life and take ownership of her body, with the least subtle but still impactful ending you could get.  I'm afraid of spelling things out too much here, because the game isn't exactly thematically subtle.  Heather's characterization might be, but the plot around her basically screams what its intentions are with every fleshy squelch.  It's one of the things that keeps the game from truly living up to its potential.  The other thing is the gameplay itself.

Combat has gotten somehow worse since Silent Hill 2.  Possibly there was a realization at Team Silent that 2 was too easy, and to fix this you are overrun with more monsters than you could kill, many of them taking so much ammunition to take down (and being extremely risky to fell with melee weapons) that it is much more worthwhile to just run past most of them.  This could increase the tension, in theory, but in practice tends to be more annoying than anything.  Many of the creatures, like the dogs or Slurpers will stunlock you if you get too close, making getting past them tiresome.  Some of the monsters are well designed and symbolic (such as the Numb Ones, who look like a cross between a penis and a fetus with legs), but many just seem to be horror monsters with very little thematic purpose (like the above Slurpers).  Exploration is roughly the same, although some of the early set pieces seemed a bit clunky to get around in, particularly the subway which felt confusing in all the wrong ways.  Puzzles have been simplified some, with only one I had to look up while playing where you have to watch bloody footprints walk over to the obvious secret door before you can actually open it.

The game feels held together by tape and string, something almost acknowledged by the game itself in its postmodern nods to itself.  At the end of the game, after Heather's aborted fetus is birthed by another into God and she finally kills it, she catches her breath and says "That's it, roll credits", before beginning to sob.  Because it isn't over.  Within the story, the trauma of this entire experience doesn't just cease to be because she killed the bad guy.  It's still there.  They tied up the plot started in the first game, and finally Silent Hill as a series felt finished, but thematically, there is a lot hanging in the air. The game knows that this wasn't a passion project.  There is reason to believe the game was initially supposed to be very different before intervention by Konami in both plot and gameplay, and it shows.  The game has this air of "this again" to it, a self-aware nod that they know they are retreading the first game, and that the story they want to tell is being hampered by the form it's forced to take.  The haunted mansion is just a ride, something to give you a goofy fright and move on from.  Placed in a game whose personal themes are struggling to burst through a convoluted plot of cults and reincarnation and God, it feels like a neon arrow saying "this part of the game is the ride - nothing of substance here".  Its flaws may make this game difficult to swallow as a complete work, but it's more than worth the dissection.  What could have been is still something pretty remarkable in what it is.



8.0