Monday, October 30, 2017

Silent Hill (Video Game) and Silent Hill 3

 


Silent Hill is a survival horror video game for the PlayStation published by Konami and developed by Team Silent, a Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo group. The first installment in the Silent Hill series, the game was released in North America in January 1999, and in Japan and Europe later that year. Silent Hill uses a third-person view, with real-time 3D environments. To mitigate limitations of the hardware, developers liberally used fog and darkness to muddle the graphics. Unlike earlier survival horror games that focused on protagonists with combat training, the player character of Silent Hill is an "everyman".

The game follows Harry Mason as he searches for his missing adopted daughter in the eponymous fictional American town of Silent Hill; stumbling upon a cult conducting a ritual to revive a deity it worships, he discovers her true origin. Five game endings are possible, depending on actions taken by the player, including one joke ending.

Plot

Harry Mason is driving through Silent Hill with his daughter Cheryl for a vacation. At the town's edge, he swerves his car to avoid hitting a girl in the road; as a result, he crashes the vehicle and loses consciousness. Waking up in town, he realizes that his daughter is missing, so he sets out to look for her. He meets police officer Cybil Bennett, who works in the nearby town of Brahms.  Finding that the town is deserted and foggy, with snow falling out of season, Harry meets several other people in the monster-filled town: Dahlia Gillespie, who gives him a charm, the "Flauros"; Doctor Michael Kaufmann, director of Silent Hill's Alchemilla Hospital; and nurse Lisa Garland, who worked at Alchemilla. He also encounters a symbol throughout the town, which Dahlia claims will allow darkness to take over the town if it continues to multiply. Eventually, this darkness begins taking over the town. According to Dahlia, the girl from the road is a demon responsible for the symbol's duplication. She urges him to stop the demon, because if he does not, Cheryl will die. Harry soon finds himself attacked by Cybil, who is parasitized by a creature; the player must choose whether to save her or not.

When the girl appears again, she is trapped by the Flauros. Dahlia reveals that she manipulated Harry into trapping it, since only he could approach it. It is a phantasm of her daughter Alessa, who possesses vast supernatural powers. Harry awakens in a logicless void known officially only as "nowhere" and encounters Lisa again, who realizes she is "the same as them" and begins transforming; he flees, horrified. Her diary reveals that she nursed Alessa during a secret, forced hospitalization. Harry soon finds Dahlia along with the apparition of Cheryl and Alessa, charred. Seven years earlier, Dahlia had conducted a ritual that impregnated Alessa with the cult's deity through immolation; Alessa survived because her status as the deity's "vessel" rendered her immortal. Alessa's resistance to the ritual caused her soul to be bisected, preventing the birth. One half of her soul went to baby Cheryl, whom Harry and his wife had adopted. Dahlia then cast a spell that would draw it back to Alessa.Sensing Cheryl's return, Alessa manifested the symbols in the town to prevent the birth. During the endings in which Cybil survives, Dahlia reveals these symbols to be repellent.With Alessa's plan thwarted and her soul rejoined, the deity is revived and possesses her.

Four different endings are available depending on whether Harry saves Cybil or discovers a bottle of Aglaophotis at Kaufmann's apartment, or both. Aglaophotis is a red liquid that is obtained from the refinement of a plant of the same name; it can dispel demonic forces and grant protection against such forces to those who use the item. The "bad" ending occurs if neither is done; Alessa electrocutes Dahlia and then attacks Harry, who ultimately defeats her. Cheryl's voice thanks Harry for freeing her and Alessa vanishes. Harry collapses, and the game cuts to his corpse in the crashed car - suggesting that all that happened in the game was a delusion of Harry's dying mind. The "bad +" ending finds Cybil alive and Kaufmann missing; after the echoing of Cheryl's voice and Alessa's disappearance, Cybil walks to Harry and convinces him to flee. The "good" ending finds Cybil dead, and Kaufmann shows up with the bottle of Aglaophotis which he then uses to force the deity out of Alessa; Kaufmann is revealed to have secretly allied with Dahlia and enabled Alessa's hospitalization. Feeling betrayed, he forces the deity out of Alessa, also causing her to vanish. After Harry defeats it, the deity disappears, and Alessa appears, who manifests a baby reincarnation of herself and Cheryl, gives it to Harry, enables their escape from the depths of "nowhere" and her nightmare, and then dies. In the "good +" ending, Harry escapes with Cybil and the baby. In both "good" endings, a transformed Lisa prevents Kaufmann from leaving and throws him into a pit. The joke ending sees an abduction of Harry by extraterrestrials.






Silent Hill 3 is a survival horror video game published by Konami for the PlayStation 2 and developed by Team Silent, a production group within Konami Computer Entertainment Tokyo. It is the third installment in the Silent Hill series and a direct sequel to the first Silent Hill game. It was released in May 2003, with a port to Microsoft Windows released in October of the same year. A remastered high-definition version was released as part of the Silent Hill HD Collection, for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 on March 20, 2012.

Set seventeen years after the events of Silent Hillin which Harry Mason defeats the god of the town cult and is given a baby girl to care for, Silent Hill 3 focuses on Heather Mason, a teenage girl raised by Harry in Portland. She discovers that the cult plans to use her to birth their god, and becomes caught in a conflict within the cult.

Plot

Setting and Characters


Silent Hill 3 is set in the fictional universe of the Silent Hill series. Seventeen years before the start of Silent Hill 3, in the year 1983, Harry Mason defeated a god brought forth by the resident cult of Silent Hill and at the ending, was given a baby girl to care for.The protagonist and player character of Silent Hill 3 is Heather, the teenaged adopted daughter of Harry. Claudia Wolf, the cult's priestess who plans to bring about a paradise on Earth, serves as the game's antagonist. As Heather attempts to unravel the reasons why the cult of Silent Hill is pursuing her, she encounters a private investigator named Douglas Cartland; Vincent, a member of the cult who detests Claudia; and Leonard Wolf, Claudia's abusive father.
Story

At the beginning of the game, Heather awakens at a shopping mall, having fallen asleep while dining at a burger joint; she had been dreaming of being trapped in a demented amusement park, forced to follow roller coaster tracks in her flight from monstrous creatures and subsequently being run down by the roller coaster. Before she can leave the mall, a private detective called Douglas Cartland confronts her, claiming to have information about her birth. Heather evades him and discovers that the mall is mostly abandoned except for monsters. She encounters Claudia, who hints about Heather's fate. Heather finds herself in the Otherworld version of the mall — monster-filled and decaying — and is eventually restored back to the original shopping mall where she encounters Douglas, who confesses that Claudia had hired him to find her. Heather leaves the mall and resolves to take the subway home.Having arrived at her residence, Heather discovers that her father has been killed by a monster under the orders of Claudia, who tells her that she will be waiting for her in Silent Hilland leaves.

Heather resolves to go to Silent Hill, intent on killing Claudia. She meets with Douglas in her apartment and accepts his offer to drive her there. On the journey there, Douglas explains that Vincent left him a message, telling them to look for a man named Leonard, while Heather reads a memo left by her father before his death, which reveals that she is the baby girl that was left to her adoptive father, Harry Mason, at the conclusion of the first game, after he defeated the god birthed by Alessa Gillespie.Claudia seeks Heather to birth the cult's god, since Heather is Alessa's reincarnation.

Upon arriving in Silent Hill, which is abandoned and fog-shrouded, Heather checks Brookhaven Hospital for Leonard. After discovering that Leonard is Claudia's father, Heather meets a transfigured Leonard, who attacks her after discovering that she is not a cult member; Heather defeats him. She eventually meets Vincent, who directs her to a church via a local amusement park, purportedly at Douglas' request.Heather arrives at the amusement park, where she finds Douglas wounded. She reaches the church and confronts Claudia, who kills Vincent. After swallowing a substance within a pendant that her father had given her, Heather vomits out the deity in fetus form. Claudia swallows the fetus and dies after birthing the deity; Heather then fights and defeats the god.

Three endings appear in the game. The "Normal" ending, which is the only ending available on the first play-through of the game, sees Heather and Douglas survive. The "Possessed" ending sees Douglas having been killed by Heather. The "Revenge" ending, which is a joke ending accessible by performing certain in-game actions, sees Heather talking with Harry, and UFOs blow up Silent Hill. According to Silent Hill: Homecoming, the "Normal" ending is the canon one as one of Douglas' files can be found in the game.
Tarot Card Puzzle

The player is supposed to find five Tarot cards in the game in order to solve a crucial puzzle. Each card triggers a cut-scene. When collected, they are arranged in a nine-pane grid to solve the puzzle. The difficulty level determines what clues are given and what order the cards need to be laid out.

The cards are Marseilles Tarot-style depictions of O. The Fool, II. The High Priestess, XII. The Hanged Man, XVIII. The Moon, and XXII. The Eye of Night. The latter card is fictional, as there are only twenty-two cards in the Major Arcana of the Tarot Deck (including The Fool, the "zero card").

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