There are games named after their heroes; others named after their villains. There are a few – well, perhaps only one – named after their love interest. But Silent Hill is named, unusually, after its setting, and rightly so. However involving the stories, and however sympathetic the characters, it’s the town that dominates – brooding, unsettling, unnerving. Which is why the idea that Silent Hill would make only a cameo appearance in one of its own games seemed at the time a concept as bizarre as a Resident Evil without zombies.

But after two increasingly extensive street-by-street recreations – made uniquely bizarre by the Japanese interpretation of small-town Americana as much as by its twisted history – the developers were adamant that a geographic shift as well as a thematic one was necessary for reinvention. Player response to Silent Hill 2’s lengthy stretches (and lengthy nerve-stretchers) where nothing happened had also been duly noted, and it was decided that Silent Hill 3 would address this with a new, more aggressive fear. The result was steeped in the schizophrenia of Silent Hill itself: both utterly predictable and utterly unexpected, an object lesson in the series’ progressive themes and regressive gameplay.

Picking up from the events of the original title, to the extent of walking in its bloody footprints at the conclusion, SH3 is a relentless roadtrip thriller, far removed from the introspective melancholy of the second game’s Gothic love story. It opens with a fuzz of guitar rock not on Silent Hill’s grey fog-banks, but the deep red sunset of Anywheresville, USA: late-teen heroine Heather self-sure and wilful where previous male leads (including, as players would discover, her father) dithered and doubted. Threatened by a chance encounter with her past as the Central Square mall hits closing time, shutters dropping and crowd wallah fading into the series’ trademark isolation, her only concern is not with dramatic resolution, but simply to get home. First slipping behind the shopfronts into the mall’s grimy innards, she then slips behind even that into its malignant Otherworld – given the right circumstances, it seemed Silent Hill was a state of mind rather than a plot of land.



Her eventual escape from the mall sees the world flicked back to an eerie, but more comfortably familiar, emptiness as she braves the subway to catch the last train home – although this takes her only as far as an unscheduled stop at an abandoned station. From there, Heather’s path careens through disused underpasses and sewer channels, a construction site, an office block, her neighbourhood: each location sometimes supernaturally twisted, but more often as claustrophobic and forbidding as only suburbia can be. It’s a tumble down the rabbit-hole of urban decay, of paint sloughing from walls, scarred concrete, off-white sodium glare, set to a litany of television static, faulty air-conditioning, dying machine noise. When areas transform into the Otherworld – which itself is a condemned building’s fire-sale of chainlink fences and ultraviolet insect lights strung over diseased tilework – the difference no longer seems so extreme, more some sort of karmic sarcasm.

Silent Hill has created a thoroughly modern vision of hell, a truly urban urban legend that thrives on making us mistrust the environment we live in – the very environment supposedly protecting us from primal fears of death and decay. By SH3 the checklist of implicit danger from bathrooms, mirrors, televisions, stairwells, elevators and even closed doors is so great as to carry the whole first section of the game on a mounting wave of panic: the actual appearance of monsters is almost a relief, a chance to take refuge in something reassuringly unbelievable.

This first section contains almost no plot exposition: it focuses entirely on the assumption – however naïve it will seem to us as horror-jaded observers – that Heather can get home, bolt the door against the outside world and be safe, if only for a moment. Of course, just as SH2 offered the player companionship for just long enough to wrench it away, Heather returns to find herself cheated of that safe moment, discovering that Silent Hill has invaded not just her home turf but her home itself, and has evened an old score in the process.

It’s at this point that the series’ sadistic – if somehow uplifting – theme of breaking its lead characters’ wills in order for them to forge a new reserve of determination is given its most expertly choreographed scene. When Heather’s helpless grief turns to a thrill of rage upon realising her uninvited guests are still within striking distance, all the motivation for the game’s second half is communicated in her reaction – conveyed in wordless detail as her face and her resolve visibly harden. The decision she makes will take her – and the game – back to their birthplace: Silent Hill. But like any return to a home town brought on by tragedy – even a town unable to wake from its nightmares – it’s a fleeting visit, denying players the ability to aimlessly wander the familiar streets and instead pressing them grimly on.