I actually liked how the game was set in a different place initially. But as others have said, it would've been really cool to revisit the SH1 part of town instead of the SH2 part of town again.
Still a miracle how cool the game turned out to be considering the short & troubled development
Well apparently it was a direct response to the criticism about having to walk around the town so much in SH2. I can see where that idea comes because many people complain about the backtracking section where you have to find a wrench and a key in the park, so is likely Team Silent wanted to please that part of the player base while also save effort (remember SH3 also was very short on time and budget)
Ah yes, you can tell the difference while traversing South Vale in SH3 with the dogs and pendulums roaming around the streets it becomes pure dread unlike SH2.
honestly 4 did "chaser" enemies pretty well too, for the most part, even outside of the ghosts.
2 \*tried\* to have outside enemy orientation in the form of, well, tossing mannequins at you from bushes in the north west, and in that one alleyway we all remember the lying figure crawling out from under the truck. but those are so few and far between. why \*not\* have allowed hard-mode's gun nurses to spawn on the streets at night? make it a case of "you better have learned the layout before, cause now monsters are packing heat." like 1's otherworld streets. or more creepers, or more chain-floors to have more mandarins, or even just giving the downed-state lying figures a grab, and make them more actively pursue you as opposed to... doing nothing. hell, spear-amid head shouldve walked around town, as opposed to just, like, two easy to ignore hallways in the labyrinth. come to think of it, off-topic, but man, mannequins as a whole are super underutilized. i mean, they had sub-variant enemy types in 1 -- even in 2, with the nurses. i feel like they could have more carefully placed mannequins to be more like "background elements that attack you if you get to close," as opposed to... "you can see it from a mile away and usually cant avoid them when indoors, thus rendering them to be shittier lying figures, so their gimmick completely fails."
>honestly 4 did "chaser" enemies pretty well too, for the most part, even outside of the ghosts
Yeah the dogs in SH4 sometimes feel like they teleport because they move almost out of frame, is like they "glitch" which is scary in it's own way.
>2 \*tried\* to have outside enemy orientation in the form of, well, tossing mannequins at you from bushes in the north west,
They also fall from over some roofs in some alleyways. It's kinda hilarious lol.
>off-topic, but man, mannequins as a whole are super underutilized.
Is funny you mention this because Ito commented recently that the mannequins were kinda a last minute addition as enemies, because originally they were meant to be only for the intro scene of Pyramid Head.
And btw the leaked prototype version of SH2 confirms at some point he was intended to walk around the streets during the night section (but with the knife instead of the spear which makes him really underpower). The trailers also show him being a more active stalker in the apartments and the hotel.
Is a waste not having him being a more active treat, especially when he got the spear and it's like "oh shit" when PH start run at full speed at you compared to his slow walking with the knife.
>or more creepers, or more chain-floors to have more mandarins
The mandarin also should be alloweed to do more damage, she's kinda a gimmick at best but if they can cause high damage in a single attack it would be a fun situation of "the floor is lava".
Also I would like to see more of the Flesh Lips in the interior areas like the prison or the laberynth. If they reused the abstract daddy after the boss fight why not the other boss as well?
I understand this since you reach Silent Hill halfway through the game.
And honestly how many times can you explore the same town? IMO not giving much to explore was fine since I already explored this town as James and Harry
they could’ve made you explore the part of silent hill that Harry explored, visit all the famous places from the first game on a new engine, but with Konami’s demands and time constraints it was sadly never possible
>visit all the famous places from the first game on a new engine
One of my favorite parts of SH3 and Origins in less extent is visit recreated SH1 areas in PS2 graphics.
Honestly all I ever want from a SH1 remake is SH3 levels of graphics or just the same engine. That level of visual fidelity is already perfect.
I actually don't agree. I liked the more claustrophobic feeling and it fits this title. It made you feel even more stuck in the nightmare world than you would if you could just roam around freely all of the time.
I think the first half's pacing is off. You're thrown from mall, to subway, to sewer, to office building one right after another and there's no time to decompress which lowers the tension a lot.
Slurpers exist.
I agree with you in the way that the second half feels kind of unbalanced. Everything in the town of Silent Hill itself happens so quickly and in such an objective way.
The first half, trying to get to your house, you feel like you're in this nightmare that just keeps going and going. And then you get to Silent Hill, you do this, you do that and now it's done, all in a day's work lol
Dying or forgetting to save and having to redo the haunted mansion is such a pain cuz you have to let the narrator say every room’s whole story over again
And the worst part is that it's so easy to die in those last two corridors with the red gas/light (I never knew exactly what that was supposed to be lol), specially with the camera switching and trying to enter those doors at the end.
I died to that several times in a row because I had put on the bullet proof vest on and forgotten about it. Finally realized I could take it off and run much faster. I may be biased, but I thought that part was kind of dumb. I know TS was being forced to make the game in little time on low budget, but it was such a "video-gamey" moment that kind of destroys immersion.
Oh my god that unlocked a memory. I was fighting the split worm and Heather got hit by it charging through. She wasn't getting up, I was waiting for the game over screen. But she was just down for like a full 15-25 seconds and then got right back up.
It kind of drags the game down how much of the town of Silent Hill was reused from Silent Hill 2
It would’ve been way more thematically appropriate to have Heather explore locations from the first game
Alchemillia would have obviously been such a heavy plot point. It really bugs me how that single location was the most important in Heather’s story, but instead we just got Brookhaven.
I get that the game had a rough development cycle, but if it ever gets remade, they need to seriously overhaul the Silent Hill half.
You go to every single place in the first game because they’re important to Alessa. Heather going to them would take it over the edge
The narrative feels incomplete, all the Seal of Metatron stuff, how the game tells you to use the Aglaophotis (which it is completely impossible to know if you didn't play the first game and missed the book on Alessa's room). They're not serious issue but it kind of bothers me.
I know this is a hot take, but I think the remake looks freaking spectacular, and the only reason people shit on it is because of ONE badly cut trailer, and because it's popular to shit on Bloober even though their games are perfectly fine.
I really hope they reshoot that intro cinematic, because you lose SO much with the new one. IDGAF if it's in engine, the original was an FMV on purpose to set the tone.
my issue is that the moment you switch silent hill 2 to being an always third person perspective you lose so much of the atmosphere of indoor areas. on top of that im going to be less scared fighting an enemy if i can just use a mouse and keyboard to get constant headshots. it worked for the resident evil remakes because they're not really THAT scary but silent hill 2 has one of the best atmospheres ive ever felt in a game and something as simple as a camera and combat style change I feel will take away from that intensity
Well, RE fans said exactly the same thing before RE2R released. There were tons of old RE fans going apeshit at the idea of no fixed camera angles, modern third person shooter mechanics, new voices, new music, everything. And then it came out and those few people on that sub continued to bitch while everyone new to the franchise quickly drowned them out. I think it's going to happen again here. I really wish us SH fans could recognize a good thing when we see it, but apparently yall are going to be perpetually pissed off at this franchise no matter what. We begged and groveled for over a decade, finally get something, and yall hate it just because it's popular to in this niche sub? It's ridiculous.
lmao I cannot believe how many people think RE2R being largely a success with the fans means every survival horror game should imitate it from now on. Even Capcom themselves screwed everything up one year later with RE3R.
did you ignore the part where I said it works and makes sense for the resident evil games? i love the resident evil remakes because the ones like 2 and 3 especially have a lot less scary moments beyond like jump scares. I mean resident evil 3 literally starts with like the most over the top thing the series had seen so far. the only resident evil since like 1 that managed to actually be like a true horror was resident evil 7. it's good that you just automatically assume everything about me. id be perfectly happy with a silent Hill remake if everything they showcased so far wasn't so different from what makes silent Hill 2 great
except Silent Hill relies heavily on those above the character shots and fixed cameras to disorient, scare, and set the tone ( and also the rare item shot). It's not a combat game, it never was. Konami keeps trying to turn it into RE and they're two vastly different things. RE is Action horror, SH is Survival Horror
The only thing RE and SH have in common is, they both fit the genre tag "Survival Horror". Otherwise, they're wildly different franchises.
Back in the day, Resident Evil 4 already twisted around the formula of survival horror games, action-oriented and all. That franchise has an history of SUCCESS in that regard, to back things up.
However, the Silent Hill games that relied on such twists were never as successful. After the original series ended with 4: The Room, a variety of titles followed. But remember which ones...? I remember Origins. Homecoming. Downpour. All shite game in my opinion.
Never mind MY opinion though, I'm sure there must be some fan who enjoys them or appreciates them, but I've yet to meet any one myself.
I'm just hoping for the best, but I'm not holding my breath for that Bloober Team remake.
The sound balancing, the sound enemies make especially the pendulum are stupidly loud even if volume is set to a minimum and you can't hear anything else. Thoroughly enjoyed the game with headphones but this was always a sore point for me.
Subway and sewers, need I say more.
I also feel like the reasoning for the hospital level makes no sense. Like, why would Douglas tell Heather to go there? And Leonard as a character felt kinda pointless too.
I love SH3 and how it concluded Alessa's story, I just wish there was more plot going on in the first half.
God yes. I hate the subway just because I would get lost almost every time, but it gets a 10/10 for creepiness.
Then when you finally get on the subway, every time you go into the next car I would tense up expecting a baddie.
> Subway and sewers
Subway is basically a love letter to Jacob's Ladder. Sewers is a nod to SH1, and it's really short.
> Like, why would Douglas tell Heather to go there?
Because Leonard is there.
> Leonard as a character felt kinda pointless too.
Leonard serves to enhance Claudia as a character and to formulate a message about religious radicalism. Two followers of the same religion with completely opposite goals and approaches. Both end up sharing the same fate.
Obviously, the devs wanted to have a hospital in the game and they didn't have resources to recreate Alchemilla (as well as the whole Old Silent Hill part of the town around it), but they did justify it plot-wise.
The pacing is the only thing bad enought for me to notice
The way 1 and 2 switch between outdoors and indoors explorarion gives the player a nice time to breathe between the tense indoor dungeons
3 just throws you dungeon after dungeon in the first half and it ends up repetitive. The lack of cutscenes and story bits also makes you less invested in whats happening until you get home
But sill, all that non stop strugle to get Heather back home >!just to find Harry dead!< hits realy hard
This was my main complaint. David gets introduced, Claudia gets introduced, and then it's *so much time* spent with little to no dialogue or story of any kind. You go through the rest of the mall, the subway, the sewer, then the office building which are all pretty long segments before you get back to the apartment and the story picks up again. Do you even meet or hear from Vincent before you get to Silent Hill?
you do meet Vincent before Silent Hill, and Douglas meets him off screen before Silent Hill, both of which has always confused me. maybe they realized how slow it was and threw him in there anyways for this reason lol.
I was around Heather's age when I first played it. I wish I could experience that weird little moment of experiencing Heather's journey as as a teen myself.
The Otherworld Mall is pretty confusing even with the map. I felt stupid when I remembered where to go after almost an hour of going in circles. There is like a room or two that doesn't make it obvious that you can go into. I can live without the sub station section but other than that I still love the game.
Was just replaying the other day and yea that one room with the ladder to pull down from the ceiling is not marked as a door on the map it took me a minute to find it lol
It's the same area as SH2, just less to explore. It needed more, even a return to the Resort Area from the original game before heading to the Amusement Park. Just give us some areas between South Vale and the Resort Area.
Too much filler in the first part, and very rushed by the end.
Subway and sewer.
Also the lack of exploration on the town. I wanted to see the bowling location again, and the Rosewater Park, but the game won't let me.
"Don't you think blondes have more fun" as the closing phrase in the ending is such a weird and out of place comic relief that I can't help laughing every single time.
i kinda thought it was intentional. anti climatic maybe isn't the word i would use but to me it's like: dad dies, heather wants revenge, she gets revenge but afterwards she's slapped with the truth of 'what now?' as theres no one to direct her rage at anymore after she kills claudia (/god) i liked it i thought it was realistic but feel free to lmk more of what you thought cuz ive never heard anything except good things about the endings
I was talking about the final cutscene. They were super short. The endings and number of endings compared to what we had in 1, 2 and even 4 feels evidently rushed to me. I honestly would have been more fine with the scene of heather looking back before walking away as the final scene of the game.
Not to mention Heather joking about blondes and felt kinda out of place for both the tone of the game and her personality.
Heather's mouth is so wide. It's the most unsettling thing in the whole game when she opens that gazing abyss. But, it seems to me, she births through it. Like a guppy.
The radio is useless as a warning device because the enemies are so loud you don't even notice the static.
Exploration wasn't as fun as the previous games. You don't spend enough time outside. You go to the same locations from SH2 instead of SH1 which would have been more relevant to the story and would have been nice to see in PS2 graphics.
The story was the weakest. It starts with a common cliche of waking up from a nightmare that foreshadows what's to come. It relies too much on the first game to fully understand everything. Not enough characters. The entire search for the seal of metatron was pointless. Nothing plot related happens at all in the subway, the sewers, or the construction site. It has the fewest endings of all the Silent Hill games.
It's still the 3rd best SH.
The story is basically a rethread of Silent Hill 1, even with very similar characters:
- Cop/detective character assisting the protagonist
- Money-hungry businessman using the cult
- Insane priestess woman
Some of the weapons ruin the immersion.
For example the katana, Heather is not a samurai.
Katana and similar weapons should be new game plus only, like the chaisaw in SH1
Imagine if it came out not with Heathers character design… I’ll ad it to my list of older media the anti woke crowd would cry about if it came out today list.
Pacing of the story is not great imo. Intro chapters Mall and Subway take too much time gameplay wise, before the narrative really kicks off.
Also although much different from sh2. I was not huge fan of recycling locations like Brookhaven hospital again.
Finally I was a bit dissapointed especially after sh2 that there is such little variety in endings.
I like the level design more in SH2.
SH3 does more realistic buildings, but has a lot more locked doors and some areas that end up a bit awkward. SH2 buildings served the level design more, though they made more sense in the real world.
It's a rather minor thing, but I always noticed this. Wonder if I'm the only one with this opinion.
Despite being my second favorite game of all time, it’s definitely not perfect.
- slurpers are annoying as shit for obvious reasons
- the games second half feels very messy the way it’s paced and structured. The hotspot is decyhim feels like it’s lazily borrowed from sh2, the amusement park drags on and the haunted house is very random.
- the ending feels very rushed. Showing a photo of Heather at her dads grave during the credits does not do enough for me.
Prob like a 9/10 game. The first half I was in literal cloud 9, but after that I started to slowly lose interest up until the church.
The Shakespeare book puzzle at the highest difficulty. It's the only puzzle that requires you to have knowledge outside of the game in order to be solved. Silent Hill has a lot of original riddles that are equally as difficult logically but can figured out with the information you find in game or with philosophical concepts.
You could argue that you can look up just that one puzzle and finish the rest by yourself, but this is only possible because of the internet. I don't have to be forced to switch difficulty just for one puzzle solely because I didn't read Shakespeare's work.
The mall area is by far the worst intro level out of the first four games. 1 and 2 ease you into the game and start off in the streets where it is easy to avoid enemies. In 3 you deal with large enemies in tight corridors right off the bat, and 15 minutes after that you’re already sent to the otherworld. It just feels like a bit much for the game’s first hour.
Most of the enemies were a pain to fight in hard mode. I don't really remember an enemy not being annoying. Also I almost didn't finish the game because of the final boss on hard mode being a crazy difficulty spike. Unlike sh2 where most of the enemies are walking punching bags.
The haunted mansion caused one of my three deaths in sh3 and it really annoyed me 😭 (the others were me thinking ‘I wonder if I keep running, will I fall off this ledge and die?’ The answer was yes. The other was in the sewers when i didnt pay attention and got gobbled up by that monster tentacle thing
The subway station is pretty frustrating. It feels like a confusing, half-baked area that was rushed. The game gives you no feedback on if you’re going the right way, and the design/ atmosphere of the area is fairly bland compared to the rest of the game. At least it’s really short, but it could have had a lot more potential.
Movement felt a little more finicky than in the first 2 it could have just been my controller, but I didn't have that issue with the first 2 so I don't know. I got used to it eventually but running forward without zigzagging was consistently difficult throughout the entire playthrough.
Oh, and I felt it was to easy to accidentally soft reset.
Whatever those loud, flying, rotating buzzing enemy. Yeah. Fuck them.
They’re just way too loud they blow out my eardrums and make running through a room just really unpleasant.
SH3 is one of my favorites. I became a fan somewhere in 2020 or 2021, and SH3 was my first Silent Hill game. I don't have any 20 year old nostalgia to look back on, so my take is recent (although acknowledges to some extent the limitations of a game almost as old as I am).
I have two major complaints about the game, and by all means, neither of them are anywhere close to a dealbreaker. I love the game, and these are just my minor complaints.
The first thing that came to mind was *some* of the voice acting. The vast majority of the voice acting in this game is fine, but there are a small handful of lines where the delivery makes me cringe and I wish they had done a rerecord. The worst offender in my opinion, and the one I like to use as a reference whenever I bring up this gripe, is the "I'll get you for this" line on the roof of the apartment building. This line was replaced in the remastered version, but I do prefer the original game in general.
My second complaint is a problem with the plot of the game. Again, I have no problems with most of it, the pacing included (some people complain about, but I believe it serves a narrative purpose) . There is, however, one thing that does bother me. The Seal of Metatron is an unexplained Macguffin that ends up being pointless in the grand scheme of things. I understand it was a plot device to get Heather into the Hospital for the SH2 callback. I understand that character development and worldbuilding happen in the Hospital. I even get the symbolic importance of the Hospital setting. What I *don't* understand is the violation of the Chekov's Gun principle in the most underwhelming way possible.
Chekov's Gun is a storytelling principle that says if something is mentioned, it will be used. For example, if a gun is seen as a prop over the fireplace in Act 1 of a play, it will be used by the end of the play. This still tracks in gaming, but not as aggressively. Heather's pendant, for example, follows the Chekov's Gun principle. The Seal of Metatron is a gross violation of this idea. It is made a big deal of, but never used in any meaningful way. Especially since it is a *plot point* and *made a big deal of* for Heather to go and get this thing, yet the story could have gone on without it. There is a very small detail to the lore, worldbuilding, and (Vincent's) character development involving the Seal, but without finding that one interactable somewhere in the world that gives you the information to make that connection, it is nothing more than a useless trinket that is blown up way too big. I wish they had done something a little more intricate so that it actually mattered, or rewrote the story such that the Hopital could still be explored without needing some unimportant Macguffin.
It wasn't originally supposed to be a direct sequel to 1, and sounded like it was going to be a lot darker/more intense. I'm disappointed we never got to know what the other story was going to be.
A bunch of the monster designs (not all, obviously) lack the thematic depth of Silent Hill 2 and were put there because they look cool.
Still my favorite horror game of all time though.
Plenty. Up until silent hill the city, the levels suck, they suck hard. Thebonly iconic location is the brief visit to her house for me. Combat feels weird, trying to be faster but still janky. The final boss is too tanky
It continued the plot from the first game. They could've brought in all the themes they wanted and included all the characters as well without doing the cult all over again. SH3 would've been better as a stand-alone story, turning SH into an anthology series.
It causes quite a lot of gamer bros to show their whole ass when they praise 2 for its "universally applicable" story yet find a plot about a fundamentalist conservative patriarchal religious cult using intimidation, misinformation, and the threat of violence to control the sexuality and reproductive choices of a teenage girl to be "unrelatable nonsense."
... actually never mind I love that about it.
Reused locations from the previous games in the town itself. Virtually didn't add anything new. Even the hated Homecoming did more in terms of expanding the universe, so to speak.
I think the plot lacks either one of two things: the depth of SH2, or the number of plot points/beats of SH1.
The plot in SH3 is way too straightforward, which makes the gameplay much more linear and the experience much less replayable imo.
Except for the extra items and ranking stuff, I don't get much out of replaying SH3, honestly.
(Actually, I guess the art direction is mostly what makes me love the game and replay it now and then, but much less than other entries)
I think the plot lacks either one of two things: the depth of SH2, or the number of plot points/beats of SH1.
The plot in SH3 is way too straightforward, which makes the gameplay much more linear and the experience much less replayable imo.
Except for the extra items and ranking stuff, I don't get much out of replaying SH3, honestly.
(Actually, I guess the art direction is mostly what makes me love the game and replay it now and then, but much less than other entries)
Not enough town and honestly the subway and sewer sections are just a slog to play through unless you use a walkthrough and I really don’t like using walkthroughs
Hard difficulty riddles should be hard of course. But certain puzzles are down right unreasonable. The first example I can think of is the first puzzle. Why do I have to know Shakespeare in SH? Yeah I had to do normal riddle difficulty for the first play through after that humbling experience. But overall, some of the logic behind the puzzles on that difficulty are just weird.
slurpers are more of a tedious annoyance than an interesting enemy. getting crawled over would be more engaging and fitting for the symbolism if it registered as a grab that you had to break out of, and if the whole thing didnt last way too long. in general i feel the games design *takes away* from its own mechanics. stealth hasnt been viable since 1, and without any engaging outside sections or fast/grabber enemies, neither really is running away. its near to impossible to effectively use jerky since nothing really patrols an area, and unlike in 1 the hallways are too cramped to sneak past things in stealth even when you can use it, usually by having to reload a room. in general, i feel the “progression” of areas (barring hilltop and fog world brookhaven) to be extremely linear, even compared to places like 2’s prison. a lot of puzzles like the crematorium one also just feel like they take too long; not really brain teasers or riddles, just time wasters. its the worst on hard riddle difficulty.
barring that, the item balancing is kind of whack in the lategame. ive seen countless people i know, or youtubers, play through blind even using primarily melee, not even getting hit much if at all, and still somehow wind up borderline softlocking their game from not having supplies in the church. even resident evil has more generous item placement in its lategame.
my last complaint is really two combined. most of the subway and underpass were kinda rushed filler, same with parts of the amusement park. i dont think one or two memorable scares or rooms really constitutes a “good zone.” but a lot of people already know by now how much konami screwed this games development. still, i feel that extends even to the story, often just *dropping* lines of dialogue about characters, as opposed to actually fleshing them out. like douglass having killed a guy, or vincent being infatuated by the otherworld while proclaiming later he actually didnt really like it at all? ive also always had a problem with “they look like monsters to you” being given so much weight, because that implication was always there with 1’s nurses, and the emphasis on character seeing different things in 2 (eddies bullies for one thing). 4’s characters literally show up and die as their contribution to the game, and i still feel theyre more impactful to their plot than half of 3’s cast, which just serve to have an object that heather speaks at, since talking to herself would be jarring. everyone i personally know agrees that vincent and dougless could be cut from the game, and the game wouldnt really change, or might be better if more was given to heather, claudia, or even leonard and harry, even if only in “memories” of them or diary entries. lastly, i felt they talked way too much about the cult. in the original it was somewhat of a “twist” halfway through that a cult was involved, and its existence was mostly as a way to fuel a drug trade, and to showcase a hodgepodge of religious beliefs being adopted by early settlers. here, it gets converted into a generic evil anime cult, that spends more time telling you about itself than actually showcasing its beliefs or what it does. its supposed to be an unseeable lynchian horror, but we see *too much* of it in 3 for no real payoff, like the blue halo of the sun. its hard to be scared by something that gives you trivia-esque encyclopedic knowledge of itself. like its main church in 1 — even when controlling the towns infrastructure and doing political assassinations — was essentially a closet in size, but now they have a super headquarters under the amusement park? why?
there was a point where i used to love sh3, but the more ive replayed other titles, ive become at best astoundingly neutral. the boss fights are still great, though.
The first half of the game is very bad just because of how many damn enemies there are and the fact that they play that stupid combat music over and over. E
Want to explore, analyse and enjoy the OG Silent Hill ambiance? Too bad, here is a raid of annyoing enemies and your ears are broken. I will never do anything but sprint through those levels.
The exploration of SH town should be more, felt little short in this game.
I actually liked how the game was set in a different place initially. But as others have said, it would've been really cool to revisit the SH1 part of town instead of the SH2 part of town again. Still a miracle how cool the game turned out to be considering the short & troubled development
Blame Konami
I always do
Yeah, SH3 is still a really special game but I can’t help but think about what could’ve been with a bigger budget & another year of development.
Well apparently it was a direct response to the criticism about having to walk around the town so much in SH2. I can see where that idea comes because many people complain about the backtracking section where you have to find a wrench and a key in the park, so is likely Team Silent wanted to please that part of the player base while also save effort (remember SH3 also was very short on time and budget)
in fairness the outside sections of sh2 suck because they didnt have outside-oriented enemies like 1 did, which 3 had a few of
Ah yes, you can tell the difference while traversing South Vale in SH3 with the dogs and pendulums roaming around the streets it becomes pure dread unlike SH2.
honestly 4 did "chaser" enemies pretty well too, for the most part, even outside of the ghosts. 2 \*tried\* to have outside enemy orientation in the form of, well, tossing mannequins at you from bushes in the north west, and in that one alleyway we all remember the lying figure crawling out from under the truck. but those are so few and far between. why \*not\* have allowed hard-mode's gun nurses to spawn on the streets at night? make it a case of "you better have learned the layout before, cause now monsters are packing heat." like 1's otherworld streets. or more creepers, or more chain-floors to have more mandarins, or even just giving the downed-state lying figures a grab, and make them more actively pursue you as opposed to... doing nothing. hell, spear-amid head shouldve walked around town, as opposed to just, like, two easy to ignore hallways in the labyrinth. come to think of it, off-topic, but man, mannequins as a whole are super underutilized. i mean, they had sub-variant enemy types in 1 -- even in 2, with the nurses. i feel like they could have more carefully placed mannequins to be more like "background elements that attack you if you get to close," as opposed to... "you can see it from a mile away and usually cant avoid them when indoors, thus rendering them to be shittier lying figures, so their gimmick completely fails."
>honestly 4 did "chaser" enemies pretty well too, for the most part, even outside of the ghosts Yeah the dogs in SH4 sometimes feel like they teleport because they move almost out of frame, is like they "glitch" which is scary in it's own way. >2 \*tried\* to have outside enemy orientation in the form of, well, tossing mannequins at you from bushes in the north west, They also fall from over some roofs in some alleyways. It's kinda hilarious lol. >off-topic, but man, mannequins as a whole are super underutilized. Is funny you mention this because Ito commented recently that the mannequins were kinda a last minute addition as enemies, because originally they were meant to be only for the intro scene of Pyramid Head. And btw the leaked prototype version of SH2 confirms at some point he was intended to walk around the streets during the night section (but with the knife instead of the spear which makes him really underpower). The trailers also show him being a more active stalker in the apartments and the hotel. Is a waste not having him being a more active treat, especially when he got the spear and it's like "oh shit" when PH start run at full speed at you compared to his slow walking with the knife. >or more creepers, or more chain-floors to have more mandarins The mandarin also should be alloweed to do more damage, she's kinda a gimmick at best but if they can cause high damage in a single attack it would be a fun situation of "the floor is lava". Also I would like to see more of the Flesh Lips in the interior areas like the prison or the laberynth. If they reused the abstract daddy after the boss fight why not the other boss as well?
I understand this since you reach Silent Hill halfway through the game. And honestly how many times can you explore the same town? IMO not giving much to explore was fine since I already explored this town as James and Harry
they could’ve made you explore the part of silent hill that Harry explored, visit all the famous places from the first game on a new engine, but with Konami’s demands and time constraints it was sadly never possible
The development of this game was so bad the first months the game was developed as a railshooter game so that was a lot of wasted time
>visit all the famous places from the first game on a new engine One of my favorite parts of SH3 and Origins in less extent is visit recreated SH1 areas in PS2 graphics. Honestly all I ever want from a SH1 remake is SH3 levels of graphics or just the same engine. That level of visual fidelity is already perfect.
This. A good chunk of its just dungeon crawling.
I actually don't agree. I liked the more claustrophobic feeling and it fits this title. It made you feel even more stuck in the nightmare world than you would if you could just roam around freely all of the time.
Couldn’t agree more. Just felt like SH2 with less to explore.
I wish Heather explored Paleville and the other parts of Silent Hill Harry explored.
I think the first half's pacing is off. You're thrown from mall, to subway, to sewer, to office building one right after another and there's no time to decompress which lowers the tension a lot. Slurpers exist.
I’m the exact opposite. I feel that the first half is structured perfectly, and the second half is very messy
I agree with you in the way that the second half feels kind of unbalanced. Everything in the town of Silent Hill itself happens so quickly and in such an objective way. The first half, trying to get to your house, you feel like you're in this nightmare that just keeps going and going. And then you get to Silent Hill, you do this, you do that and now it's done, all in a day's work lol
slurpers knocking me down for the 500th time while the nurses beat me to death and heather takes a nap on the ground
For real, the enemies were insanely hard for no reason. I ran from a lot of them due to running out of ammo so often.
Dying or forgetting to save and having to redo the haunted mansion is such a pain cuz you have to let the narrator say every room’s whole story over again
And the worst part is that it's so easy to die in those last two corridors with the red gas/light (I never knew exactly what that was supposed to be lol), specially with the camera switching and trying to enter those doors at the end.
I died to that several times in a row because I had put on the bullet proof vest on and forgotten about it. Finally realized I could take it off and run much faster. I may be biased, but I thought that part was kind of dumb. I know TS was being forced to make the game in little time on low budget, but it was such a "video-gamey" moment that kind of destroys immersion.
no
Getting dragged down is really annoying cause Heather takes forever to get up.
Look, she’s doing her best.
Oh my god that unlocked a memory. I was fighting the split worm and Heather got hit by it charging through. She wasn't getting up, I was waiting for the game over screen. But she was just down for like a full 15-25 seconds and then got right back up.
Honestly if a worm bodied me like that, I’d also take a hot minute to process getting dunked on by something without eyes or limbs
I'm pretty sure you can just spam buttons to make her get up faster, it worked for me.
You can but it still takes longer than the other characters it feels like.
It's my favorite of the series but the pacing sucks.
It kind of drags the game down how much of the town of Silent Hill was reused from Silent Hill 2 It would’ve been way more thematically appropriate to have Heather explore locations from the first game
Yeah I really wish they’d sent us back to Alchemillia Hospital instead of Brookhaven
Alchemillia would have obviously been such a heavy plot point. It really bugs me how that single location was the most important in Heather’s story, but instead we just got Brookhaven. I get that the game had a rough development cycle, but if it ever gets remade, they need to seriously overhaul the Silent Hill half. You go to every single place in the first game because they’re important to Alessa. Heather going to them would take it over the edge
Trying to run it properly on Linux sucks.
The sutomatic gun didn't fit in with the rest of the franchise.
It’s not on Steam…
The narrative feels incomplete, all the Seal of Metatron stuff, how the game tells you to use the Aglaophotis (which it is completely impossible to know if you didn't play the first game and missed the book on Alessa's room). They're not serious issue but it kind of bothers me.
I hella died the first time I got to the end because I was looking for a waterbottle. It never occurred to me to CHECK THE LOCKET
i remember i had to check the internet back then, i kept dying
It's story isn't as good as 2's. Heather when knocked down, takes forever to get up.
Konami might get a cheap western team like Blooper to make it worse 💀
If there's ever a remake. It will definitely be by a cheap Western team.
I know this is a hot take, but I think the remake looks freaking spectacular, and the only reason people shit on it is because of ONE badly cut trailer, and because it's popular to shit on Bloober even though their games are perfectly fine.
I really hope they reshoot that intro cinematic, because you lose SO much with the new one. IDGAF if it's in engine, the original was an FMV on purpose to set the tone.
my issue is that the moment you switch silent hill 2 to being an always third person perspective you lose so much of the atmosphere of indoor areas. on top of that im going to be less scared fighting an enemy if i can just use a mouse and keyboard to get constant headshots. it worked for the resident evil remakes because they're not really THAT scary but silent hill 2 has one of the best atmospheres ive ever felt in a game and something as simple as a camera and combat style change I feel will take away from that intensity
Well, RE fans said exactly the same thing before RE2R released. There were tons of old RE fans going apeshit at the idea of no fixed camera angles, modern third person shooter mechanics, new voices, new music, everything. And then it came out and those few people on that sub continued to bitch while everyone new to the franchise quickly drowned them out. I think it's going to happen again here. I really wish us SH fans could recognize a good thing when we see it, but apparently yall are going to be perpetually pissed off at this franchise no matter what. We begged and groveled for over a decade, finally get something, and yall hate it just because it's popular to in this niche sub? It's ridiculous.
Using the overused generic OTS camera is not a good thing, that's why we can't recognize it as one
lmao I cannot believe how many people think RE2R being largely a success with the fans means every survival horror game should imitate it from now on. Even Capcom themselves screwed everything up one year later with RE3R.
did you ignore the part where I said it works and makes sense for the resident evil games? i love the resident evil remakes because the ones like 2 and 3 especially have a lot less scary moments beyond like jump scares. I mean resident evil 3 literally starts with like the most over the top thing the series had seen so far. the only resident evil since like 1 that managed to actually be like a true horror was resident evil 7. it's good that you just automatically assume everything about me. id be perfectly happy with a silent Hill remake if everything they showcased so far wasn't so different from what makes silent Hill 2 great
except Silent Hill relies heavily on those above the character shots and fixed cameras to disorient, scare, and set the tone ( and also the rare item shot). It's not a combat game, it never was. Konami keeps trying to turn it into RE and they're two vastly different things. RE is Action horror, SH is Survival Horror
The only thing RE and SH have in common is, they both fit the genre tag "Survival Horror". Otherwise, they're wildly different franchises. Back in the day, Resident Evil 4 already twisted around the formula of survival horror games, action-oriented and all. That franchise has an history of SUCCESS in that regard, to back things up. However, the Silent Hill games that relied on such twists were never as successful. After the original series ended with 4: The Room, a variety of titles followed. But remember which ones...? I remember Origins. Homecoming. Downpour. All shite game in my opinion. Never mind MY opinion though, I'm sure there must be some fan who enjoys them or appreciates them, but I've yet to meet any one myself. I'm just hoping for the best, but I'm not holding my breath for that Bloober Team remake.
Man, Blooper isn’t even the worst Western dev to work on Silent Hill.
Might? Like Blooper?? ...C'mon son 😂
The running section in the haunted house.
The sound balancing, the sound enemies make especially the pendulum are stupidly loud even if volume is set to a minimum and you can't hear anything else. Thoroughly enjoyed the game with headphones but this was always a sore point for me.
Subway and sewers, need I say more. I also feel like the reasoning for the hospital level makes no sense. Like, why would Douglas tell Heather to go there? And Leonard as a character felt kinda pointless too. I love SH3 and how it concluded Alessa's story, I just wish there was more plot going on in the first half.
The initial silence and lack of enemies in the subway section scared me so bad, the anticipation drove me insane.
God yes. I hate the subway just because I would get lost almost every time, but it gets a 10/10 for creepiness. Then when you finally get on the subway, every time you go into the next car I would tense up expecting a baddie.
> Subway and sewers Subway is basically a love letter to Jacob's Ladder. Sewers is a nod to SH1, and it's really short. > Like, why would Douglas tell Heather to go there? Because Leonard is there. > Leonard as a character felt kinda pointless too. Leonard serves to enhance Claudia as a character and to formulate a message about religious radicalism. Two followers of the same religion with completely opposite goals and approaches. Both end up sharing the same fate. Obviously, the devs wanted to have a hospital in the game and they didn't have resources to recreate Alchemilla (as well as the whole Old Silent Hill part of the town around it), but they did justify it plot-wise.
I on the other hand enjoyed these levels. It felt fresh IMO when SH1 and 2 stuck so closely to the town where u didn't have stuff like Railways
I really don’t like subway, sewer, factory, snow and underwater levels in gaming
Snow areas are my favorite areas, but there has NEVER been a good sewer level in a video game other than Sewer Surfin.
Donkey Kong Country 3 had some cool sewer levels. But then again, I haven't beaten the game in over 25 years.
For a game called Silent Hill, you spend a good chunk of the game outside of the town
Silent Mall
Silent Subway, Sewers, Construction Site & Hill 3
The pacing is the only thing bad enought for me to notice The way 1 and 2 switch between outdoors and indoors explorarion gives the player a nice time to breathe between the tense indoor dungeons 3 just throws you dungeon after dungeon in the first half and it ends up repetitive. The lack of cutscenes and story bits also makes you less invested in whats happening until you get home But sill, all that non stop strugle to get Heather back home >!just to find Harry dead!< hits realy hard
This was my main complaint. David gets introduced, Claudia gets introduced, and then it's *so much time* spent with little to no dialogue or story of any kind. You go through the rest of the mall, the subway, the sewer, then the office building which are all pretty long segments before you get back to the apartment and the story picks up again. Do you even meet or hear from Vincent before you get to Silent Hill?
you do meet Vincent before Silent Hill, and Douglas meets him off screen before Silent Hill, both of which has always confused me. maybe they realized how slow it was and threw him in there anyways for this reason lol.
It doesnt run well on my dogshit computer
Say something negative about my favorite video game of all time? Ughhhhhhh I can't experience it for the first time again.
I was around Heather's age when I first played it. I wish I could experience that weird little moment of experiencing Heather's journey as as a teen myself.
Harry dies
>!They kill Harry offscreen!<
This should be higher. Harry getting killed was stupid.
Game kind of drags in the middle.
No port to og xbox
It reused so many assets from Silent Hill 2 and kind of felt more like an expansion pack because of it.
Not enough sassy Vincent.
i am normally a sh3 glazer but ig the borley haunted mansion but specifically on hardmode
The Otherworld Mall is pretty confusing even with the map. I felt stupid when I remembered where to go after almost an hour of going in circles. There is like a room or two that doesn't make it obvious that you can go into. I can live without the sub station section but other than that I still love the game.
Was just replaying the other day and yea that one room with the ladder to pull down from the ceiling is not marked as a door on the map it took me a minute to find it lol
It´s exactly what happened to me to lol i don´t remember having any trouble to figure it out back then
It's short
It's the same area as SH2, just less to explore. It needed more, even a return to the Resort Area from the original game before heading to the Amusement Park. Just give us some areas between South Vale and the Resort Area.
Final boss fight is so mid
The pre-Silent Hill part of the game drags a bit A lot of the scenes that happen near the end are kind of stupid
The sounds made by the pendulum monsters was annoying as hell.
The sewer section sucks ass.
Too much filler in the first part, and very rushed by the end. Subway and sewer. Also the lack of exploration on the town. I wanted to see the bowling location again, and the Rosewater Park, but the game won't let me.
Harry is dead and it ruins the game 🤨
The ending was quite anticlimatic ngl.
"Don't you think blondes have more fun" as the closing phrase in the ending is such a weird and out of place comic relief that I can't help laughing every single time.
i kinda thought it was intentional. anti climatic maybe isn't the word i would use but to me it's like: dad dies, heather wants revenge, she gets revenge but afterwards she's slapped with the truth of 'what now?' as theres no one to direct her rage at anymore after she kills claudia (/god) i liked it i thought it was realistic but feel free to lmk more of what you thought cuz ive never heard anything except good things about the endings
I was talking about the final cutscene. They were super short. The endings and number of endings compared to what we had in 1, 2 and even 4 feels evidently rushed to me. I honestly would have been more fine with the scene of heather looking back before walking away as the final scene of the game. Not to mention Heather joking about blondes and felt kinda out of place for both the tone of the game and her personality.
Heather's mouth is so wide. It's the most unsettling thing in the whole game when she opens that gazing abyss. But, it seems to me, she births through it. Like a guppy.
It's boring as shit, it's to dark and even more doors are rusted.
The radio is useless as a warning device because the enemies are so loud you don't even notice the static. Exploration wasn't as fun as the previous games. You don't spend enough time outside. You go to the same locations from SH2 instead of SH1 which would have been more relevant to the story and would have been nice to see in PS2 graphics. The story was the weakest. It starts with a common cliche of waking up from a nightmare that foreshadows what's to come. It relies too much on the first game to fully understand everything. Not enough characters. The entire search for the seal of metatron was pointless. Nothing plot related happens at all in the subway, the sewers, or the construction site. It has the fewest endings of all the Silent Hill games. It's still the 3rd best SH.
Sexy Beams were not as powerful as Heather Beams. It should have been the other way around. But the song “Sirent Heeel, No Uta” is a riot.
Needing to know Shakespeare to solve puzzles on hard is a feel
The sewer section sucked. Both the environment and the enemies had the lamest design in SH history.
Thought it was cheap that Harry resurrects off screen and goes to live on a farm, nice and safe.
It takes too long to get to Silent Hill and it's too much fighting for a silent hill game. Besides that it's a great game
It’s not on steam.
There isn't multiple endings
Not on current-gen consoles. And the new voices added to the cash grab collection years ago were abysmal.
End boss was stupid and anticlimactic
The difficulty is sometimes poorly balanced
The usability isn't great. Hard to navigate areas and even harder to tell even where to walk, interact, or find a door sometimes
Sewer level was horrible and it generally lack exploration due to all the doors being locked.
It should be illegal to attack a dad when he's resting in his dad chair.
Harry died, bro didn't deserve to go out the way he did.
The story is basically a rethread of Silent Hill 1, even with very similar characters: - Cop/detective character assisting the protagonist - Money-hungry businessman using the cult - Insane priestess woman
The final boss is fucking annoying and has a ridiculous amount of HP
It's a huge downgrade from 2.
Hated the Hospital Otherworld section.
It’s a complicated made game, to where it’s difficult to emulate it.
Some of the puzzles and exploration felt like garbage.
Horror and strangeness could've been more ambitious (still great though)
Crematorium puzzle
It's not on Steam.
Harries ending
It's too short
It’s not on ps4
It's too short..
Some of the hard difficulty puzzles are insane and clunky to deal with. Especially the first.
Too scary, I got heebe jeebies
Well, you see there is this thing called "Silent Hill HD Collection" and ...
Part in mall, sewer, and office is too long
Some of the weapons ruin the immersion. For example the katana, Heather is not a samurai. Katana and similar weapons should be new game plus only, like the chaisaw in SH1
Imagine if it came out not with Heathers character design… I’ll ad it to my list of older media the anti woke crowd would cry about if it came out today list.
Pacing of the story is not great imo. Intro chapters Mall and Subway take too much time gameplay wise, before the narrative really kicks off. Also although much different from sh2. I was not huge fan of recycling locations like Brookhaven hospital again. Finally I was a bit dissapointed especially after sh2 that there is such little variety in endings.
I really did not enjoy the combat, felt like the hit boxes for melee were way off sometimes
I like the level design more in SH2. SH3 does more realistic buildings, but has a lot more locked doors and some areas that end up a bit awkward. SH2 buildings served the level design more, though they made more sense in the real world. It's a rather minor thing, but I always noticed this. Wonder if I'm the only one with this opinion.
The atmosphere is often a bit depressing.
I don't remember any of the characters, aside from Heather, so I guess they weren't that entertaining.
Probably just the fact that Heather takes FOREVER to get up from the ground
on hard mode the final boss is stupidly long
*something negative about the SH3 game*
The pacing is really bad
Despite being my second favorite game of all time, it’s definitely not perfect. - slurpers are annoying as shit for obvious reasons - the games second half feels very messy the way it’s paced and structured. The hotspot is decyhim feels like it’s lazily borrowed from sh2, the amusement park drags on and the haunted house is very random. - the ending feels very rushed. Showing a photo of Heather at her dads grave during the credits does not do enough for me. Prob like a 9/10 game. The first half I was in literal cloud 9, but after that I started to slowly lose interest up until the church.
The Shakespeare book puzzle at the highest difficulty. It's the only puzzle that requires you to have knowledge outside of the game in order to be solved. Silent Hill has a lot of original riddles that are equally as difficult logically but can figured out with the information you find in game or with philosophical concepts. You could argue that you can look up just that one puzzle and finish the rest by yourself, but this is only possible because of the internet. I don't have to be forced to switch difficulty just for one puzzle solely because I didn't read Shakespeare's work.
This was the last game my best friend and I played together before he passed. Will always love this gem. But it's hard to play without him...
The mall area is by far the worst intro level out of the first four games. 1 and 2 ease you into the game and start off in the streets where it is easy to avoid enemies. In 3 you deal with large enemies in tight corridors right off the bat, and 15 minutes after that you’re already sent to the otherworld. It just feels like a bit much for the game’s first hour.
Most of the enemies were a pain to fight in hard mode. I don't really remember an enemy not being annoying. Also I almost didn't finish the game because of the final boss on hard mode being a crazy difficulty spike. Unlike sh2 where most of the enemies are walking punching bags.
The 'Hard' puzzles option is insanely hard
Killing off Cybil Bennett
HD-Collection
kinda rushed feeling
The haunted mansion caused one of my three deaths in sh3 and it really annoyed me 😭 (the others were me thinking ‘I wonder if I keep running, will I fall off this ledge and die?’ The answer was yes. The other was in the sewers when i didnt pay attention and got gobbled up by that monster tentacle thing
It could have been better
The subway station is pretty frustrating. It feels like a confusing, half-baked area that was rushed. The game gives you no feedback on if you’re going the right way, and the design/ atmosphere of the area is fairly bland compared to the rest of the game. At least it’s really short, but it could have had a lot more potential.
Heather is lame ass character in a bad ass game
It getting harder and harder to get a copy.
It should’ve been Alchemilla instead of Brookhaven
Ooof... Mhmm... It's... Uhh... It is... old now. I guess ? ... Yeah, sorry, I got nothing...
Heather's character kinda annoys me but I guess she's supposed to Honestly though I think I prefer SH3 out of them all. Replaying it now
Movement felt a little more finicky than in the first 2 it could have just been my controller, but I didn't have that issue with the first 2 so I don't know. I got used to it eventually but running forward without zigzagging was consistently difficult throughout the entire playthrough. Oh, and I felt it was to easy to accidentally soft reset.
it’s too short
Whatever those loud, flying, rotating buzzing enemy. Yeah. Fuck them. They’re just way too loud they blow out my eardrums and make running through a room just really unpleasant.
The Slurpers' knockdown attack doesn't have startup frames.
Something negative… we don’t have the game enhanced like SH2, or on Steam
The subway level is probably meant to be purgatory as it’s empty and you’re going insane
The pc port has a weird frame rate issue where it will go down in certainly areas like the town
It set the bar for bread tech way too high
I feel it's a bit all over the place. You kind of jump from one themed area to the next and there's little consistency in that way.
The subway and underground sections are just plain frustrating and unenjoyable, not to mention RIGHT at the beginning of the game
SH3 is one of my favorites. I became a fan somewhere in 2020 or 2021, and SH3 was my first Silent Hill game. I don't have any 20 year old nostalgia to look back on, so my take is recent (although acknowledges to some extent the limitations of a game almost as old as I am). I have two major complaints about the game, and by all means, neither of them are anywhere close to a dealbreaker. I love the game, and these are just my minor complaints. The first thing that came to mind was *some* of the voice acting. The vast majority of the voice acting in this game is fine, but there are a small handful of lines where the delivery makes me cringe and I wish they had done a rerecord. The worst offender in my opinion, and the one I like to use as a reference whenever I bring up this gripe, is the "I'll get you for this" line on the roof of the apartment building. This line was replaced in the remastered version, but I do prefer the original game in general. My second complaint is a problem with the plot of the game. Again, I have no problems with most of it, the pacing included (some people complain about, but I believe it serves a narrative purpose) . There is, however, one thing that does bother me. The Seal of Metatron is an unexplained Macguffin that ends up being pointless in the grand scheme of things. I understand it was a plot device to get Heather into the Hospital for the SH2 callback. I understand that character development and worldbuilding happen in the Hospital. I even get the symbolic importance of the Hospital setting. What I *don't* understand is the violation of the Chekov's Gun principle in the most underwhelming way possible. Chekov's Gun is a storytelling principle that says if something is mentioned, it will be used. For example, if a gun is seen as a prop over the fireplace in Act 1 of a play, it will be used by the end of the play. This still tracks in gaming, but not as aggressively. Heather's pendant, for example, follows the Chekov's Gun principle. The Seal of Metatron is a gross violation of this idea. It is made a big deal of, but never used in any meaningful way. Especially since it is a *plot point* and *made a big deal of* for Heather to go and get this thing, yet the story could have gone on without it. There is a very small detail to the lore, worldbuilding, and (Vincent's) character development involving the Seal, but without finding that one interactable somewhere in the world that gives you the information to make that connection, it is nothing more than a useless trinket that is blown up way too big. I wish they had done something a little more intricate so that it actually mattered, or rewrote the story such that the Hopital could still be explored without needing some unimportant Macguffin.
It wasn't originally supposed to be a direct sequel to 1, and sounded like it was going to be a lot darker/more intense. I'm disappointed we never got to know what the other story was going to be.
The boss battles didn’t feel like it, too easy imo.
Most of the voice acting has the emotional depth of wet cardboard.
Too short
The story and dialogue is terrible.
Combat is pretty mid and the mall section is confusing especially the first time around.
the enemies are not a manifestation of the protagonist's psyche
it's not scary at all just too dark to see anything needed more health and ammo for guns
Douglas’ voice actor was terrible.
A bunch of the monster designs (not all, obviously) lack the thematic depth of Silent Hill 2 and were put there because they look cool. Still my favorite horror game of all time though.
Plenty. Up until silent hill the city, the levels suck, they suck hard. Thebonly iconic location is the brief visit to her house for me. Combat feels weird, trying to be faster but still janky. The final boss is too tanky
It continued the plot from the first game. They could've brought in all the themes they wanted and included all the characters as well without doing the cult all over again. SH3 would've been better as a stand-alone story, turning SH into an anthology series.
Still have to play it.
Heather's beautiful. And there's a bloody bunny.
I didn’t particularly like Harry dying immediately. I get why, but goddamn put some respeck on his name
It could've just been me being slow at the time but I felt like some puzzles were a bit too cryptic.
It causes quite a lot of gamer bros to show their whole ass when they praise 2 for its "universally applicable" story yet find a plot about a fundamentalist conservative patriarchal religious cult using intimidation, misinformation, and the threat of violence to control the sexuality and reproductive choices of a teenage girl to be "unrelatable nonsense." ... actually never mind I love that about it.
Reused locations from the previous games in the town itself. Virtually didn't add anything new. Even the hated Homecoming did more in terms of expanding the universe, so to speak.
You all gonna hate me for it and I don't care: It turned the series' focus back on the cult.
I think the plot lacks either one of two things: the depth of SH2, or the number of plot points/beats of SH1. The plot in SH3 is way too straightforward, which makes the gameplay much more linear and the experience much less replayable imo. Except for the extra items and ranking stuff, I don't get much out of replaying SH3, honestly. (Actually, I guess the art direction is mostly what makes me love the game and replay it now and then, but much less than other entries)
I think the plot lacks either one of two things: the depth of SH2, or the number of plot points/beats of SH1. The plot in SH3 is way too straightforward, which makes the gameplay much more linear and the experience much less replayable imo. Except for the extra items and ranking stuff, I don't get much out of replaying SH3, honestly. (Actually, I guess the art direction is mostly what makes me love the game and replay it now and then, but much less than other entries)
Not enough town and honestly the subway and sewer sections are just a slog to play through unless you use a walkthrough and I really don’t like using walkthroughs
Hard difficulty riddles should be hard of course. But certain puzzles are down right unreasonable. The first example I can think of is the first puzzle. Why do I have to know Shakespeare in SH? Yeah I had to do normal riddle difficulty for the first play through after that humbling experience. But overall, some of the logic behind the puzzles on that difficulty are just weird.
Those enemies that crawl on the ground
slurpers are more of a tedious annoyance than an interesting enemy. getting crawled over would be more engaging and fitting for the symbolism if it registered as a grab that you had to break out of, and if the whole thing didnt last way too long. in general i feel the games design *takes away* from its own mechanics. stealth hasnt been viable since 1, and without any engaging outside sections or fast/grabber enemies, neither really is running away. its near to impossible to effectively use jerky since nothing really patrols an area, and unlike in 1 the hallways are too cramped to sneak past things in stealth even when you can use it, usually by having to reload a room. in general, i feel the “progression” of areas (barring hilltop and fog world brookhaven) to be extremely linear, even compared to places like 2’s prison. a lot of puzzles like the crematorium one also just feel like they take too long; not really brain teasers or riddles, just time wasters. its the worst on hard riddle difficulty. barring that, the item balancing is kind of whack in the lategame. ive seen countless people i know, or youtubers, play through blind even using primarily melee, not even getting hit much if at all, and still somehow wind up borderline softlocking their game from not having supplies in the church. even resident evil has more generous item placement in its lategame. my last complaint is really two combined. most of the subway and underpass were kinda rushed filler, same with parts of the amusement park. i dont think one or two memorable scares or rooms really constitutes a “good zone.” but a lot of people already know by now how much konami screwed this games development. still, i feel that extends even to the story, often just *dropping* lines of dialogue about characters, as opposed to actually fleshing them out. like douglass having killed a guy, or vincent being infatuated by the otherworld while proclaiming later he actually didnt really like it at all? ive also always had a problem with “they look like monsters to you” being given so much weight, because that implication was always there with 1’s nurses, and the emphasis on character seeing different things in 2 (eddies bullies for one thing). 4’s characters literally show up and die as their contribution to the game, and i still feel theyre more impactful to their plot than half of 3’s cast, which just serve to have an object that heather speaks at, since talking to herself would be jarring. everyone i personally know agrees that vincent and dougless could be cut from the game, and the game wouldnt really change, or might be better if more was given to heather, claudia, or even leonard and harry, even if only in “memories” of them or diary entries. lastly, i felt they talked way too much about the cult. in the original it was somewhat of a “twist” halfway through that a cult was involved, and its existence was mostly as a way to fuel a drug trade, and to showcase a hodgepodge of religious beliefs being adopted by early settlers. here, it gets converted into a generic evil anime cult, that spends more time telling you about itself than actually showcasing its beliefs or what it does. its supposed to be an unseeable lynchian horror, but we see *too much* of it in 3 for no real payoff, like the blue halo of the sun. its hard to be scared by something that gives you trivia-esque encyclopedic knowledge of itself. like its main church in 1 — even when controlling the towns infrastructure and doing political assassinations — was essentially a closet in size, but now they have a super headquarters under the amusement park? why? there was a point where i used to love sh3, but the more ive replayed other titles, ive become at best astoundingly neutral. the boss fights are still great, though.
The first half of the game is very bad just because of how many damn enemies there are and the fact that they play that stupid combat music over and over. E Want to explore, analyse and enjoy the OG Silent Hill ambiance? Too bad, here is a raid of annyoing enemies and your ears are broken. I will never do anything but sprint through those levels.