Silent Hill 3 Review

Where the second game was interior and symbolic, this one is a body horror story about being used. Heather is seventeen, angry and frightened in a way that reads as a real teenager rather than a horror protagonist, and her performance is the best in the series. The art direction escalates into genuine physical revulsion, all wet meat and hospital tile and things pulsing behind grates, and the amusement park sequence remains one of the ugliest and best staged environments anyone has built.

Technically it is the peak of the series on the hardware, with facial animation and lighting that the second game could not attempt. It is also the most conventional of the three in structure, a sequence of dungeons connected by corridors, and the combat inherits every problem the series had, including a lock on that fails in crowds and melee that trades hits by accident. The plot rewards having played the original and rushes its own ending. Relentless, specific and deeply unpleasant in the way it intends.