Silent Hill 3 HD: The Return Home

Heather returns home to discover the unfortunate fate of her father, Harry Mason.

Silent Hill 3 HD is a series that relives the memorable moments and classic cut scenes from the game, brought to life in beautifully remastered, fully re-rendered 1080p. Although this game was not originally designed with high definition in mind, it still manages to look incredible and is something that every fan of the series should be able to enjoy and appreciate.

Youtube compresses 1080p videos quite heavily, so unfortunately most of the higher texture detail is lost in the Youtube version.

The Setup

All sequences were captured from the PC version of Silent Hill 3. The resolution was set to 1920x1080 with 16x anisotropic filtering and 16x AA (forced through elaborate means, as anti aliasing was tough to get working for some reason). The “rendering resolution” setting was also manually set to 1920x1080 through the .INI file; having this option set to any of the default settings (1024x1024, 2048x2048, etc.) caused my method of forced anti aliasing to stop working for some reason.

Field of View

The game does not support resolutions with 16:9 aspect ratios, but through the aid of a FOV hack tool I was able to adjust the game’s FOV (field of view) to compensate. As a result, slightly more of the scenes are visible due to the increased field of view. An example of this is when Heather first finds Harry, and the camera shows his body for the first time. In normal resolutions, the game will only show the lower half of Harry’s face, leaving everyone to wonder about his appearance (obviously intentional by the developers to torture fans of the original Silent Hill game). However, with an increased field of view, his face is now fully visible. The conversion to 16:9 aspect ratio was not perfect, as this scene is an example of how it is unfortunately not a 100% faithful reproduction of the original cinematography and direction of the game. The trade-off for being able to render the game in true 1920x1080 is a slightly wider FOV that shows more of the frame, which is not entirely a bad thing.

Subtitles

The game’s built-in subtitles do not scale very well to 1080p resolution. The alternative was to simply turn them off and re-add them myself. This would work fine for chronological sequences such as this cut scene, however there are other entries in this series that will contain various pieces of gameplay footage cut from different parts of the game. These scenes all involve a variety of on-screen text that cannot be disabled (e.g. “The lock is broken, the door won’t open”), and thus would become inconsistent if other subtitles were re-rendered to a higher quality resolution. It’s for this reason that I decided to leave in the noticeably lower-quality subtitles for this particular sequence of the game, but overall it’s not a huge loss.

Noise Filter

The noise filter (the thing that makes the game look “fuzzy” and “distorted”) was another option that I weighed carefully when making these episodes. When turned off, the game looks much sharper and more crisp, and the contrast levels really make the colors pop and stand out. From a purely visual standpoint, having the noise filter turned off gives the game a much more impressive presentation. However, I feel that it is, in many ways, the heart and soul behind the game’s visuals. The implementation of the noise filter for the PC version of Silent Hill 2 was abysmal, and as a result looked and “felt” much better without it. In this case, the filter effect is executed properly, so I felt that it should be left on to preserve the nature of the storytelling.

Ultimately, although there were some trade-offs, I feel as though this is the highest-quality presentation of Silent Hill 3 you will find anywhere. I wanted to preserve the integrity of the game’s visuals by not adding any unnecessary filters or effects to “enhance” the quality of the cinematics. The only re-mastering done to the footage was simple brightness/contrast tweaks to highlight some of the more dramatically lit moments. The scene where Heather returns from the roof to find Douglas is a perfect example of a scene with fewer light sources and harder shadows that end up looking fantastic with a simple adjustment in contrast.

Future Silent Hill projects include a “Memorable Moments” series, where I give a detailed breakdown of some of the most subtle, overlooked scenes of the Silent Hill franchise. I’ll analyze the brilliance behind the masterfully-crafted and yet simple moments that truly make these games the most terrifying and nerve-racking experience in any medium of entertainment. As always, if there are any suggestions for future entries, I’d love to hear any ideas. If there is enough demand, I have no trouble making it.