It's Scary . . . Right? - The Games I've Played

So remember how much I loved Silent Hill 2? As part of the HD collection I also got access to Silent Hill 3. The only down side to that deal is that pairing up an amazing game like SH2 is that you'll always make the other game paired with it look down right horrible.

Silent Hill 3 is what you would expect out of a survival horror, and it's scary at points, but the problem comes with the fact that Silent Hill 3 doesn't really get in your head and play with your subconscious and really just mess you up.

The story, like I said with 2, skips 2 and goes from SH1. This is when it is bad that I haven't played previous games within the series (which would traditionally be a negative point for the game but thanks to the movie that came out, it sticks pretty close to what the story of the game is so I knew roughly what it involved). All you need to know from #1 to play #3 is that the girl is screwed up and comes from Silent Hill from a crazy cult thing. Anyways, she got back to the real world, and now that she's a big girl, the Silent Hill crazy side of her is starting to push out and weird things are starting to happen.

The story is sort of interesting, but compared to #2 that it's boxed with, I can't really remember much of what happened. I remember weird things about it, like being stuck in the shopping mall at the start, a bit about trying to hunt around my way around in a subway, and ultimately running into the carnival, but I can't really tell you what actually happened, and I played it MULTIPLE times to 100% the game.

The other problem with Silent Hill 3 is that there was never a point in it that I was in the true survival horror feel. I guess what I"m trying to say, there was never a point in the game that I was afraid for my life, that I was clinging on to a flashing red health bar and trying to dodge around to keep my life as a monster from the depths of an insane mind chased after me while making a noise that would haunt me for at least a few minutes. Other survival horror games that stick with the idea of survival horror (Deadspace, Silent Hill 2) are scary not because things jump out and scare me, or because they're bloody and dark, but because you're trying to survive and that thread of a life that you have is horrifying. But instead of trying to make the game survival horror, it just goes into bad horror movie tactics and says, 'you know what's scary? lots of blood.'

Let me make this perfectly clear, I think that a good survival horror game could be set in a normally lit, close to reality world. If done properly, and actually given attention to the tension of trying to stay alive and the threat of what is lurking around the corner, you can have that feeling in a normal world. Putting a survival horror in a scary setting to start off with means that you should be able to blow the tension out of the water and really make the game/story jump through the roof with tension. Sadly, Silent Hill 3 sets it in the most typical of typical settings, like a haunted carnival, turns the gore up to 11, and then just sits back and hopes that the stereotypes of the genre can carry the story without putting any work into what is actually happening.

The only reason that I played through this game multiple times was because it was easy. After the first go around I knew exactly where everything was, I wasn't scared any more, and there was no sense of me trying to survive, but I wanted to get that 100% and get some of the different endings because they didn't seem that hard, and they weren't. One of the trophies is to beat the game in under two saves, by the time I was done with the game, I was beating the entire game in no saves. I could sit down and three hours later be finished with the game. I was using a few things like guns with unlimited ammo, but the paters of everything was the same, and so it became a running around halls simulator that I could do before going to sleep to help me doze off before going to sleep, instead of being a sit on the edge of your seat terrifying experience. By the way, for anyone trying to understand how to do this, just remember that there is a short list of monsters in this game that MUST be killed, everything else is slow enough to run around or locked in rooms that you can completely avoid them. 

Side note on a sad point - no pyramid heads in Silent Hill 3, they were replaced by these funky things that had nothing to really do with a subplot of guilt or insanity.