silent hill 3 mobile (java)

Get ready to plunge again into the dark world, and subjected to torture Silent Hill.
Play for Emily and Vincent to this horrible adventure, which began in the orphanage of Silent Hill.
Solve puzzles that await you on the road and try to survive the alternate world of horrors?
The truth where it close ... download

Mobile game developers Connect2Media have released the third installment of the Konami point and click horror series franchise, Silent Hill. Silent Hill Mobile 3, which is to be the last in the series, sees you alternating between standard point-and-click and first person shooter game mechanics as you battle to unravel the mysteries of the town of Silent Hill – a place in which H P Lovecraft would have felt right at home. We took the game for a spin.

The official description from the Android market reads-

“Silent Hill Mobile 3 is the worthy finale of the Silent Hill series which has been acclaimed by critics and fans alike. Reveal the dark secrets of this mysterious town and defeat the horror you are confronted with for the last time.”

The game, is, in essence, an escape-the-room game. It’s controls involve you ‘clicking’ on the screen to interact with various parts of the 2D background image you are presented with for each room. Tapping on the screen brings up a menu which allows you to interact with or examine, an object, or combine it with an item from your inventory. I found these controls were frequently frustrating: I lost count of the amount of times I found myself accidentally leaving a room when I was actually trying to interact with something that may, or may not, have been an object. The fact that you can never be quite certain whether you’ve merely ham-fistedly mis-tapped the screen just a little too far from an object or whether the object can even be interacted with at all just adds to the irritation.

Graphically, the artwork for the 2D rooms, whilst nothing spectacular, looks decent enough: just the sort of quality we’d expect from a major developer I suppose. The rooms are gloomy and dingy, and they give off a suitably spooky vibe as you wander around. The in-game narrative text however seems to have been badly translated from some other language as it is riddled with typos and unusual syntax, but it was always easy enough to get the gist.

The gameplay itself was also susceptible to the odd bug. I found a number of doors where I seemed to get no feedback whatsoever when I tried to use them, other than a “This is just a door” message when I examined them, whereas other doors would either open or tell you they were locked. I still have no idea whether I was meant to just ignore these doors or not. It was also difficult at times to know whether you’d tapped the right selection from the menu which pops up when you click on an object, and I found myself re-doing clicks just to double check.

Overall, I’m not hugely impressed with this title. I can’t help but compare it to Bendroid’s Mystique series, an ironic situation, as Mystique was at least partly inspired by the Silent Hill series of games. In this case, I’d have to say that the imitator is easily the better of the two to my mind. Mystique’s 3D world is far more atmospheric, engaging and genuinely nervy than Silent Hill Mobile 3′s interactive images. If you are a fan of the Silent Hill saga as a whole, then you’ll probably get a kick out of this game, but if you’re not, I’d give this one a miss.