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Silent Hill 3 is the third game in the survival horror series. The game was released on August 6, 2003 in North America. The game was only released onto the Playstation 2 and PC consoles.

Story

Seventeen years have passed since the events of the Silent Hill. Heather Morris is a normal teenage girl who loves to shop and has a sharp attitude about almost everything, until one Sunday the past catches up with her.

Douglas Cartland, a detective, approaches Heather at the mall. Heather eludes the detective but suddenly finds the environment transformed into a strange decaying landscape. She attempts to escape the horror to her home and her father, yet on the way she faces a mysterious and forgotten secret.

The plot and locales of the third game are directly tied to the first Silent Hill game.

Sequels

As of 2006 one sequel title exists. Another is planned for the next generation Playstation 3 console.

• Silent Hill 4: The Room (2004)
• Silent Hill 5 (TBA)

Influences and Trivia

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• All four Silent Hill titles contain references to the movie Jacob's Ladder. Silent Hill's gradual decline from perceived normalcy to stylized decay bears a close resemblance to the film's visual aesthetic, and Silent Hill's monsters are often seen shaking their heads rapidly from side to side in unnatural and jerky motions, a direct lift of Jacob's Ladder's visual style. Silent Hill 2 implies the notion of the town being akin to a personal purgatory, another similar theme from the film. Another strong reference is the use of the name Bergen Street for the subway platform to which Heather (protagonist of Silent Hill 3's plot) encounters in Silent Hill 3. Bergen Street station played a significant part in Jacob's Ladder and the setting looks very much alike. Similarly, the "Subway World" in Silent Hill 4, with its surreal decay and blocked exits, echoes scenes from the film as well.
• The novel House of Leaves and its use of impossible physical spaces may have been an influence on the series (especially in Silent Hill 2), with its almost interminable corridors.
• The cult series Twin Peaks is said to have had an influence on many aspects of the games. Both the game and the TV series takes place in a resort town. David Lynch's often dream-like sequences in the series are also very much alike to the surrealist occurrences throughout the games.
• A song in Silent Hill 3 is titled "Sickness Unto Foolish Death." This might be a reference to the existential philosopher Søren Kierkegaard's theory on despair, which he detailed in his Sickness Unto Death, an existential concept to describe the state we're in when we have to make choices in a world of uncertainty. This state is the described as a "loss of self." Looking at the third installment of the series with this theme in context, it could be seen as Heather's difficult choice of vengeance vs. submission to the Otherworld of Silent Hill, and how she loses her self-awareness in the pursuit of vengeance.
• Silent Hill's Incubus (known as Samael), at the end of Silent Hill , is visually based on Baphomet. Silent Hill 3 also contains references to Sandalphon and his twin brother Metatron, an angel detailed in the Kabbalah.
• Wheelchairs are recurring features in the series. In Silent Hill a boss, Cybil, is found lying in a wheelchair. At one point in Silent Hill 3, Heather passes a glass wall. On the other side is an empty wheelchair outside of a room in what appears to be a mental institute. This strongly resembles a prominent image in the movie Session 9. Another wheelchair can be found lying on the floor, its wheel still spinning, resembling a shot in Jacob's Ladder. In Silent Hill 4, the player is attacked by packs of wheelchairs which cannot be defeated. An empty wheelchair is also a recurring image in the film The Changeling.
• Throughout the series, it becomes clearer that there may be three levels of reality in Silent Hill. The 'top level' is where people live out their lives as normal, bearing hardly any difference to any other town of its kind. The next level could be called 'Foggy' Silent Hill (or the 'Alternate' Silent Hill), where an all-pervading fog obscures visibility to a matter of feet, similar to Stephen King's The Mist (a favorite story of one of the series' developers). Some monsters are apparent at this point, but the town environs are practically unchanged. The third layer down, where the real corruption of the reality lies, can be called Otherworld. This darkness is not just a physical darkness, which is used to put the player on edge, but also corresponds to the kinds of monsters found here. This Otherworld is the rotten core of the town. However, the recent comic book adaptations only have two layers, with Silent Hill being in fact an abandoned and monster-infested ghost town. Paint It Black points out that cable, power, and phones all work within the city limits, and the stores are refreshed with food.
• A puzzle in Silent Hill 3, in the crematorium of the "Nightmare" Brookhaven Hospital, in the hard difficulty setting, refers to "Who Killed Cock Robin," a poem.
• Though the town of Silent Hill is officially located somewhere in New England, there is a body of water in the town named Toluca Lake, named after the real Toluca Lake in Southern California, near Burbank, North Hollywood, and Studio City. Director David Lynch is legendary for having eaten lunch at Bob's Big Boy restaurant every day for approximately seven years straight. That particular Bob's Big Boy is located in Toluca Lake, CA on Riverside Drive, just down the road from Warner Bros. Studios and Universal Studios.
• In Silent Hill 3, at the construction site, there is a wall that can be knocked through. Behind the wall there is a corpse, rumoured to be President Baker, a character from the Metal Gear Solid series, another Konami game.

See Also

• Silent Hill
• Silent Hill (video game)
• Silent Hill 2
• Silent Hill 4: The Room
• Silent Hill (film)

External Links

• Official Silent Hill 3 site (Konami Europe)
• Silent Hill series (Konami Japan)
• Gamespot

• 2003 computer and video games
• PlayStation 2 games
• PC games
• Silent Hill
• Survival horror games