This is genuinely the noisiest most abrasive game I’ve ever played. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as overwhelmed playing a game as I did with this one. Started my playthrough using headphones and halfway through the first level after trudging through room after room of several different monsters making their varied wailing, grunting, and screaming sounds while accompanied by the blaring harsh noise of the radio I legitimately thought I was going to have a panic attack and had to turn the game off. Ended up continuing my playthrough just using my computer speakers.
The visual design creates a similar experience with some areas bathing you in darkness and layering on so many visual effects that it’s almost impossible to see what’s going on. Imagine this with the soundscape I mentioned and then imagine fumbling around in the dark looking for a barely perceptible door while monsters with giant knives for hands stun lock you and repeatedly stab you in the face.
The gameplay in SH3 is adjusted from the other games in line with this abrasiveness. Resources in this game as significantly more scarce than they are in other SH games, which forces you to run away from the vast majority of encounters. My strategy for the previous two games was to avoid enemies outdoors where it’s easy to do so and then kill them indoors where there’s not enough space to avoid them. This is no longer possible in SH3 and it adds to how oppressive and overwhelming this game can feel. One of the benefits of killing enemies in any of the Silent Hill games is simply being able to shut them up and have a brief moment of relative silence to explore. You generally don’t have this luxury in this game, so it ends up being an almost non stop sensory nightmare.
SH3 is a very unique game for all of these reasons and one that I was glad to play through despite being quite agitated while doing so. Fulfills my ocasional perverse desire to experience this sort of state through media. Normally can only do that by listening to super abrasive music. Cool there’s actually a video game out there that can legitimately do the same thing.
This game does have quite a bit of bullshit in it like the subway level and a couple puzzles that feel genuinely poorly designed as opposed to just difficult, which wasn’t the case for the previous two games IMO. Normally would rate this an 8/10 but bumping up the score for how unique this game is.
The visual design creates a similar experience with some areas bathing you in darkness and layering on so many visual effects that it’s almost impossible to see what’s going on. Imagine this with the soundscape I mentioned and then imagine fumbling around in the dark looking for a barely perceptible door while monsters with giant knives for hands stun lock you and repeatedly stab you in the face.
The gameplay in SH3 is adjusted from the other games in line with this abrasiveness. Resources in this game as significantly more scarce than they are in other SH games, which forces you to run away from the vast majority of encounters. My strategy for the previous two games was to avoid enemies outdoors where it’s easy to do so and then kill them indoors where there’s not enough space to avoid them. This is no longer possible in SH3 and it adds to how oppressive and overwhelming this game can feel. One of the benefits of killing enemies in any of the Silent Hill games is simply being able to shut them up and have a brief moment of relative silence to explore. You generally don’t have this luxury in this game, so it ends up being an almost non stop sensory nightmare.
SH3 is a very unique game for all of these reasons and one that I was glad to play through despite being quite agitated while doing so. Fulfills my ocasional perverse desire to experience this sort of state through media. Normally can only do that by listening to super abrasive music. Cool there’s actually a video game out there that can legitimately do the same thing.
This game does have quite a bit of bullshit in it like the subway level and a couple puzzles that feel genuinely poorly designed as opposed to just difficult, which wasn’t the case for the previous two games IMO. Normally would rate this an 8/10 but bumping up the score for how unique this game is.