Silent Hill 3

Do dead gods stink? Imagine if you can Throbbing Gristle’s 1978 song “Hamburger Lady” reincarnated in 2003 as a Playstation 2 video game. Picture that and you begin to step into the unrelentingly grim world of Silent Hill 3.

God is slowly dying in the womb and desperately wants to be born into the world. A debased pagan cult dreams of midwifing this profane birth and has selected Heather Mason to be the sacrificial vessel. Although Heather is a normal teenager, there are hints that her childhood may be darker than she remembers. Playing Silent Hill 3 casts you in the role of Heather as she struggles to discover the truth about her past and prevent the apocalyptic “rebirth of Paradise.”

Along the way you will explore the multilayered Bardo that is Silent Hill 3. Demoniac entities press close and the few people that you encounter may be devils with human masks. It is a lonely and menacing landscape that follows the confusing logic of nightmare. Maze-like halls shift and decay. A sepulchral air of terminal illness and charnel house gloom clings to everything. The visuals of Silent Hill 3 are an uneasy pairing of occult symbolism with the Lustmord fantasies of the criminally insane. Dried blood lit by sodium vapor is the dominate color palette. A subtle wash of digital noise gives images the grainy appearance of 16 mm atrocity footage.

The soundtrack by composer and sound designer Akira Yamaoka is alternately bracing and lush. Yamaoka uses guitar and electronics to create a sound that seems to crossbreed Glenn Branca with Angelo Badalamente. He eschews the usual creaking and groaning of spook houses and instead fills Silent Hill 3 with vast sheets of sound that suggest air raid sirens, background radiation, or the quiet hum of a dialysis machine. As a special treat, Konami has included a soundtrack CD with the game.

Isolation, madness, and disease. The loss of everything we love in an aneurysm of violence. For some it may be surprising to see these anxieties portrayed in a video game. However, Silent Hill 3 shows that game designers have the vocabulary and the technology to simulate the darkest rivers of our souls.

Sony Playstation 2
Konami
2003

game review by J.B. Fleming, 2003
Previously published in Cemetery Dance magazine, issue # 47, 2003. An extended version of this review can be found here.