Welcome to the Attic, Happy Birthday to you!

Every gamer has played one survival horror game or another. Some are good, most aren’t. But my first experience with horror on a gaming console was Silent Hill 3 on the Playstation 2. I made it a point to play at night, with the lights off. It was incredibly engaging. I LOVED the setting from the very beginning. It reminded me a lot of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, in the sense that you are in a deserted shopping mall. But that’s where the similarities end.

In Silent Hill 3 you are alone, armed with VERY little to defend yourself, and instead of a mass of zombies, you are fighting off some seriously disturbing, disfigured monsters. There are so many scenes in this game that made me jump. To be honest it takes quite a bit to make me jump when I’m watching a horror movie or playing a survival horror video game.

There are quite a few little quotes that are throwbacks to Silent Hill 2. I, sadly, have not played 1 or 2. I’d love to play them one day, but I’m told the Silent Hill HD collection (SH 2 & 3 “remastered”) isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. A fantastic article over on Eurogamer really spells out where they went wrong. There is even a video comparing the PS2 and Xbox 360 side-by-side. While the 360 HD release is clearer, in many scenes it lacks the “moodiness” of things, such as fog drifting by. If you’re going to re-release classics in HD, DO NOT take out some important aspects that set the scene. When you think of Silent Hill, you think of fog. It’s best to leave it in place. But back to the game itself…

You make your way through the shopping mall, the classic deserted, foggy Silent Hill town, a hospital, an amusement park, and finally into a church. While the settings vary this game really held my attention from beginning to end. Every day I couldn’t wait until the sun would set so I could turn that console on and venture back into that world yet again. For any fan of the horror genre, and gaming in general, this game is not one to be missed. I was quite disappointed with Silent Hill Homecoming, as I never even finished it, and it makes me wistfully look back on better Silent Hill days.

There are a few different endings: one that you can only get after already having completed the game, and the other requires certain tasks to be done leading up to the ending. It’s a nice change of pace for a horror game to give you replay-ability, as so many lack that. This is one world you’ll want to step into and never leave.

Interested in the game but don’t want to buy it? Here is an awesome video on YouTube. It’s every cutscene compiled, in order. Enjoy!

Be sure and stop by for next week’s edition of The Attic, where I’ll be talking about the latest news on the upcoming release, Silent Hills.
Stay scared,
Dark Princess