In Silent Hill 3, you assume the role of a teenage mall rat reluctantly exploring a town with a bad habit of phase-shifting from spooky nightmare to categorically psychotic nightmare on a dime.

Gameplay is a deft balance of lurking shadows and in-your-face horror with monsters of psychotic perversion aplenty. The game uses silence as well as it uses sound, where far off screeching and up close scraping offers counterpoint to the absolute tension of no sound at all.

Though perhaps more briskly paced than the others, Silent Hill 3 is as unfathomably freaky as its pedigree demands, which is very--wonderfully--freaky.