easily the best in the series, like the other games, this also has absolutely miserable boss fights, and some great level design. The atmosphere in this entry is simply leaps and bounds above the rest of the entire series, and the sound design really sets just how uncomfortable every part of this game is to experience, i love it. This is probably the best the voice acting has been in the series too, with only a few odd lines of off delivery compared to something like almost all of sh2s delivery, and cheryls performance is fantastic.

I really liked my time with this game for the most part, I think it actually aged much better than silent hill 2 in a lot of ways, and had a lot more interesting and less vague puzzles in general compared to later entries, there was a good amount of clear direction most of the time. The story was, well, interesting conceptually but it didn't go much of anywhere in a lot of endings, but the atmosphere is fantastic, and definitely one of the best in this era of horror, and much preferred to 2's tendency to fog spam.

Played the enhanced edition, and man i feel so mixed on this game, as a massive fan of old survival horror the level design is generally pretty great, although the combat is pathetically easy and they shower you with so many heals and ammo that it makes saving anything useless. The main issues i have with this game come in the formatting of the story, i truly do not understand the massive praise this game has for tackling emotional issues, it seems like it correlates vagueness with any amount of depth or maturity, and it especially felt insulting towards the arc with angela and the abstract daddy, the voice acting was especially abysmal and not even for the time, the original silent hill had better voice acting than this.

I feel very mixed about this game, i really enjoyed it mechanically and thematically and found that it portrayed such a respectful and interesting view on mental illness, nothing groundbreaking but definitely empathetic and understanding, as opposed to demonizing which is ever too common in terms of mental illness in horror, but mechanically it feels extremely similar to a fault to resident evil 7, albeit with much worse combat and hitboxes. While i did praise it for its mental illness portrayal, it has a "twist" later on that kind of deflates a lot of the internal issues it was building up that really sours some of the plot for me.

PS:living tombstone's work on this is absolute ass