The Best PlayStation Game Every Year 1994 - 2024

Silent Hill 3’s inclusion is proof positive that not every game needs to be a gameplay revolution and truly there is absolutely nothing wrong with it if you enjoy what the previous game provided.

Unfortunately for Konami, the early 2000s were a transformative period in gaming and tastes were changing. Survival horror’s slower pace and often finnicky controls were being left in the dust of the popularity of contemporary action games. As such, Silent Hill 3 is often forgotten amongst a genre that was losing ground.

However, it deserves its flowers for everything it does well… which is everything.

In the same way that Silent Hill 2 was stacked with metaphors and representations of the protagonist’s psyche, Team Silent did so again with Silent Hill 3. With the series’ first female playable character, this opened up a new world of anxieties that could be distorted through Silent Hill’s lens: pregnancy, objectification and the potential for assault.

Heather Mason’s journey to claim her own identity was, on the surface, a follow-up to the story to the original game, but bubbling underneath touched on themes few video games ever had before. Where many games would interchangeably swap protagonists from male to female, Team Silent pulled focus on the very real fears of their teenage girl hero.

This was all delivered via top-of-the-line presentation, with the scariest locations in the series, and some of the most beautifully melancholy music and horrifying ambience.