Silent Hill 3 (2003)

I think I'm nearing the end of the game now. I'm feeling very mixed and kind of disappointed to be honest.

There's a bunch to love here. This game has some of the best moments I think out of all the entries in this series I've played. I love the rust-and-blood aesthetic of the game in general, they clearly went all out with this aspect and it shows. Hell, many of the environments hold up today imo, despite some pixelation.

But there's also a lot of missteps. The puzzles kind of suck. A couple have been creative but the majority have made zero sense and felt frustrating to solve as a result. There are also too many annoying enemies, to the point where I stopped really fighting them at all except when I'm absolutely forced to. And despite how much I want to like Heather, she really is super irritating. So much of the flavor text in this game is her going "I don't like how this looks" or "I don't want to touch that, it's gross!" Like yeah I know the bloody body under a sheet is gross, Heather, I never asked you to give it a big ol' hug, just look at it in case there's something useful on it. It's a shame because I think otherwise she's one of the better characters in the series, but they went too far with her being moody and making sure everyone knows it, even given the circumstances she's in.

I started another playthrough of this (the first try years ago I ran into a softlock in the sewers that ruined my save file) and I just hit the subway train area. It's all coming back to me how absolutely awful this segment of the game is. Everything looks the damn same and the map kinda sucks too.

Really hoping I can actually finish the game this time and it can redeem itself.

So eight years ago my playthrough of Silent Hill 3 on PS2 was stopped in its tracks when I ran into a black infinite loading screen in the sewer area. Restarting the game did nothing, and this room was required for progression so I had to stop. I assumed it was a bad scratch on the disc or something because it did look a bit scratched up and cleaning it didn't help. I didn't have the money to just go get another copy so I gave up.

Fast forward to today and I spotted a copy in my local game store. Jumped on it instantly, even though it didn't have the manual, which makes me a bit sad (my old copy came in a thin sleeve). I went home and fired it up to test but while it ran perfectly fine, it seems like it still freezes on that same load screen. Kind of uncanny. So not a huge loss, it means my old copy is probably perfectly fine and I got the game's case out of the situation.

So that brings me here. Has anyone here who has played this game run into this? I was able to find a couple threads on Reddit and Gamefaqs describing the same problem, but there were no definitive answers on a cause or workaround there. It seems like too much of a coincidence for multiple people to have this issue on the same room, but it's also clearly not a widespread issue, so I assume it's a glitch that isn't simple to reproduce. It sounds like you need to have picked up the required hair dryer item (before doing so the room loads fine). The threads suggest that killing the enemies in the previous room may cause it, but it's definitely not all the enemies since when I checked today I had 1 of the 3 enemies left alive in my file and still hit the black screen freeze. Killing the last one and retrying didn't change anything, so maybe it's one of the other two enemies that has to stay alive.

Sorry about the long post, I'm just wondering if I and some others stumbled onto a little known glitch. I'm gonna start a new playthrough anyway since it's been eight years and I want to finish the game, so I'm hoping to test whether killing specific enemies in that prior room allows me to reproduce the issue.

I recently finished Silent Hill 2. And since 3 is on the same hd disc, I decided to play it through again as well.

Now its not quite as amazing as the second game but certainly is no slouch. Its still got that atmosphere of dread and Otherworldy charm (see what I did there? Lol.) And its still fun to figure out a puzzle without any help. Although I think the side characters are not nearly as compelling as 2 but Heather herself is quite intriguing, at least I thought so. Also there were a few more unnerving areas for me like the mirror room and a certain bloody mannequin.

Overall still pretty good.