...::: Silent Hill Heaven v2.1~php :::...

..::Sept 22nd 2002

Silent Hill 3 (PS2)

Silent Hill 3 is coming. If the second game gave you restless dreams, you'd best close your browser right now.
By Benjamin Turner | Sept. 22, 2002

There are scary games, and then there are scary games. Konami's Silent Hill series has traditionally fallen into the latter category, earning its italics by freaking out gamers with its trademark blend of desolate locales and utterly disturbing monsters. While Silent Hill 2 just came out last year, the development team at KCE Tokyo is already well into production of the next chapter in the series. Currently known only as Silent Hill 3, it's already looking wretched, scary, and just plain disturbing -- par for the course for Silent Hill. I caught up with some of the dev team at TGS this week, and they shared their thoughts on the direction they're taking the series.

We started the session by viewing the new game's TGS trailer, which introduced us to the new heroine, Heather. It showed gameplay equences from different parts of the game, and these looked very similar in style to Silent Hill 2. Heather had a small flashlight affixed to her shirt that often served as the only illumination in the game's dark environments. There were also a handful of cinema scenes, which featured the same high quality character models and slightly questionable voice acting that we enjoyed in Silent Hill 2. After viewing the trailer, Silent Hill 3 director Kazuhide Nakazawa booted the game and took us on a tour of the opening area.

As the game begins, Heather finds herself stranded and alone in an amazingly (and I do mean amazingly) decrepit amusement park. Dog-like monsters, giant insects, and huge-limbed, lumbering monstrosities wander about, waiting to get a taste of her. The TGS demo gives players weapons far beyond the meager knife you'd normally start the game with, so Nakazawa kept the creatures at bay with both a handgun and a high-powered assault rifle. The opening area was absolutely packed with nasty creatures, but this was only for the purposes of the TGS demo. The real game will have more reasonable pacing, with fewer monsters and less carnage in the early going. In terms of gameplay, the game looked very much like Silent Hill 2.

After seeing the demo through to the finish, one of my first questions was why they were doing a new Silent Hill so soon after the second one, especially since there was a considerable gap between the first and the second. Nakazawa responded. "We began development at the end of Silent Hill 2. The development of Silent Hill 2 took place during the transition from PSOne to PlayStation 2, so during the early phase of Silent Hill 2 development we had to spend a lot of time coming to terms with the PlayStation 2 hardware. So, this time we have a lot more experience developing on the hardware."

Nakazawa noted that one of the main improvements is a new graphics engine. "There was a scene in the trailer you just saw.. you may recall in the trailer there was a bloody background that was moving in an organic way? We're trying to use more organic-looking objects to increase the feeling of horror. One other example is that scene where Heather is driving the car with her father. You may recall there were raindrops flowing on the windshield. That was something we could not really achieve in Silent Hill 2, which was one of our regrets. As you could see in the trailer, when the windshield wipers wipe the rain, they're really wiping the water." Now that's attention to detail!

Changing the subject a bit, I asked Chief Designer Masahiro Ito where he came up with his insane monster designs. The Silent Hill 3 demo showed off one particularly disturbed creature. Called a "closer", it was an eight-foot-tall monstrosity that seemed to have fleshy punching bags for limbs. Ito smiled, saying "Things you can't imagine." After prompting, he elaborated. "I think I watch too many movies. I'm a person who's rather easily influenced, so I try not to get too much influence from movies. Also, I get inspiration from the package art of DVD software... I get inspiration from those images."

The follow-up question was obvious. Who would win in a fight: a closer or a random Pokémon? "I've never had a chance to play Pokémon," Ito confessed. "We hear it's quite popular... we're hoping Silent Hill 3 will be more popular." I'm not sure Silent Hill 3 has what it takes to break into that all-important children's demographic... I'm thinking it needs less dismemberment and more cute fuzzy things. Regardless, it looks like it will appeal to its true target audience quite a bit, and I have little doubt that fans of Silent Hill 2 will be in for a treat upon the release of this third installment.