Out of the original trilogy this is the only one I've never done a full playthrough of. I was fully aware of this game's legacy in regards to the original Team Silent games and it's reputation has often left me questioning what I'd even think of it by the time I got around to it.
I know this game was cobbled together in barely ten months after a bunch of false starts, I know that the original vision was something along the lines of Silent Hill 2's more personal narrative and I know how polarising many of it's creative decisions are.
SH3 is a tremendous closer to a trilogy that may not seem thematically consistent at first but only becomes more and more interesting the deeper you look into it's mechanics and creative choices, a swan song for the Silent Hill series that makes you wonder why they even bothered after this.
Taking SH1's batshit occult lore and imbuing it with SH2's more sorrowful and introspective tone you get here a game that might be Team Silent at the height of their powers. A technical powerhouse with the scariest art direction the series has ever reached. What Silent Hill 3 is doing is on another level and I'm just kind of in awe at how much I really dug this black sheep of the series.
I think the best place of summation for what this game is going for is when the game returns to Silent Hill proper. When you see that you're going to the same hospital that James Sunderland sexually repressed his way through you think that maybe Team Silent lost their edge, that maybe the tumultuous production pipeline had forced them to reuse a bunch of assets. Then Silent Hill 3 shifts you to it's version of the Hospital and you realise that you couldn't be in better hands. The level at which this game unnerves you can't be properly described, it is downright the scariest game I've ever played and I really do mean it.
I just can't stop thinking about this game, how it's protagonist feels like the perfect evolution of what came before. How it's cult narrative is imbued with a sense of genuine loneliness and parental longing and how it's music and sound design elicit something indecipherable. It's messy and it's clear that the game's vision was severely cut down due to meddling but it's rebellious nature still shines through despite all of it.
It's a game about being confronted by God and laughing in her face (and shooting them dead with a gun)

Not very good. This game tries to dip its fingers into too many features and systems at once, and none of them end up feeling very consequential as a result. There are a lot of cool ideas (like the friend for life/vendetta system where people you help/harm can come back later to intervene in combat), but for the most part these things have very little impact on playing the game.

The twin-stick combat is okay (except for the melee weapons) but the skill trees are a spectrum between meh, useless, and decent but unable to be used often because of Action Point limitations. Unfortunately you end up doing a LOT of combat between quests and random overworld encounters, and it doesn't feel good for long.

The level design, coming from former Arkane devs (and even specifically former lead level designers!), is the most disappointing part. Between the towns and the caves and the open fields, the levels felt samey, boring, and lacked any sort of intention that would make me think they were trying to give the player multiple ways to tackle problems.

The art design is solid but the repetition of assets and the pseudo-isometric perspective means that you aren't seeing much and when you get a chance to it can be hard to enjoy it. The dialogue and story weren't terrible but weren't super compelling (and the ending is lifted straight out of Prey 2017).

This game almost convinced me to not play any other FromSoft games because of how shit the balance is -- every boss is either trivial or an un-fun pain in the ass, and the optimal way of engaging with the world is to not. Just run past everything to the bosses. Great game design! Pretty much the only boss I enjoyed was the final boss, and even that was offset by the fact that in the like 9-10 attempts it took to beat him I had to either fully reset the game or sludge through an incredibly annoying sequence of enemies on the way back.

Thankfully, this game didn't convince me to not play any further, because Sekiro is incredible and I'm glad I didn't miss out on an actual good game because of this one.

an improvement over the original just because it's no longer ugly as sin and operates somewhat better, just still far too much the same awkward and uneven experience at its core. mechanics that just inherently don't feel right. none of the areas are especially GREAT (though boletaria palace is the most classically fromsoft and works in that way) but plenty suck; tower of latria and valley of defilement being the worst offenders. they're often mercifully short and I'd imagine the linear design benefits very fast playthroughs but this isn't something i'm especially motivated to ever revisit in too great a capacity.