It's so rare that I buy a videogame and play it straight through until the very end. Oh, it's not rare that I buy a videogame, but it is hard for me to make time to sit down and actually play it. When I saw that Silent Hill 3 was finally coming out, I knew I had many gaming hours to log in.

SIlent Hill 3 is the 3rd in the survival horror series that is actually more scary than the Resident Evil series that spawned this type of game. The games are all set in the dark mysterious town of Silent Hill; seemingly cut off from the rest of civilization and perhaps reality itself. Rather than the American horror movies that inspired the Resident Evil games, the Silent Hill series seems to be more inspired by horror novels (with streets named after horror novelists even) and Japanese "slowbore" horror films. The first Silent Hill game came out on the Playstation system and is still a great game by todays standards (although the graphics don't hold up as well, it's still very playable). It told the creepy story of a man lost in a very foggy town seemingly broken off from the rest of the world while searching for his lost daughter. Silent Hill 2 came out on the Playstation 2 with much better graphics and seemed to be unrelated to the first, but was set in the same town years later and followed another man in his quest to find his wife who wrote him a letter from the town...even though she had been dead for years.


This latest Silent Hill Game again seems unrelated to the other two games, but is it really? In a departure from the other two games, this game starts with you as a 17 year old girl (who is 13 years old if you play the Japanese version...more on why they may have made this change soon). You wake up in a mall and are soon hounded by some creepy old guy who says he's been hired to track you down in a matter regarding "your birth". You evade him by escaping out of a bathroom window but upon reentering the mall things start to change. You find the mall deserted and filled with creatures with oddly shaped bodies and "parts". This is why I think the age of the girl was changed. Those parts and bodies at times look like certain "private" parts of animal anatomy that most people wouldn't want battering them around. That in itself is pretty disturbing, but like all the other Silent Hill games it manages to find tons of ways to keep you disturbed AND playing.


Like I said, I buy a lot of games, but I have trouble sitting down to their finish and I played this game straigh to the end within a week or so and then went right back to it for all the extras and I'm still working on the other endings. The locations in the game are done really well from the "normal" and "creepy" versions of the mall, a spooky subway, and finally the town of Silent Hill itself which has changed little from the last game, but you get to go to different places you weren't able to last time...AND if you have a same game file on your memory card from Silent Hill 2, you'll even see references from that game in this one. The graphics are excellent (as it the spooky sound) and the cut scenes blend right into the gameplay. There are alos lots of (literally) unexpected suprises all over the place. You KNOW there will be suprises, but that in itself isn't enough for when they happen. It's shorter than the last two games, but I think it's my favorite so far. There aren't as many pointless walking back and forth from puzzle to puzzle problems as the others and that is a welcome change. And, YES, this game is related to the first game, but I'm not going to tell you how! That's for you to find out by buying and playing this game. Just don't play by yourself in an empty house at 3am too much as you'll find yourself looking over your shoulder...often...like I did....often.

(Chris Beyond is the editor of No-Fi "Magazine"
and has fought demons in the mall since high school)

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