Silent Hill 3 art director praises fan for spotting horrifying detail that's been hidden for 20 years

(Image credit: Konami)

Silent Hill 3 might be 20 years old, but some terrifying environmental secrets are still being unearthed by players for the first time.

Arguably one of the best horror games of all time, Silent Hill 3 pushed the PS2 to its limits back in 2003, sporting a level of visual fidelity and attention to detail that was seldom seen on the sixth-gen console. Now, one particularly sneaky - and utterly creepy - detail has been brought to light by Silent Hill Fact Hub on Twitter.

In the Hilltop Center office building level, protagonist Heather needs to interact with a bath to shift into the blood-soaked Otherworld, allowing her to progress. Interacting with the bath causes blood to spill from the faucet.

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As it turns out, the bath has a set of flesh-like cords that are wired up to a strung-up corpse you see as you enter the room. If that wasn't bad enough, another set of cords connect the corpse to the shower heads in the same room.

SH3 - The bathtub that triggers the shift to the Otherworld at Hilltop Center is connected by a cord to the body seen by the door. This body also feeds showers in the same room through another cord. pic.twitter.com/NnWWcpd4rHSeptember 30, 2023

Silent Hill 3's art director, Masahiro Ito, praised the find in the replies, stating: "Thanks so much for noticing the cords!" In an additional quote tweet, Ito confirms that he built the room and he's happy this grisly little detail with the cords was finally discovered.

It gets better, though, as Ito also confirms that there are "still more unrecognized details" in Silent Hill 3, so it seems that fans will have their work cut out for them for some time to come.

A strength of Silent Hill's environments - especially with the Otherworld - is that they're often deliberately macabre and disorienting. So it's very cool to see small details like this that offer a level of thought and care to environments that are designed to defy all sense of logic. And really, I can't think of a better way to kick off the month of Halloween than with a decades-old secret being found in such an iconic horror game.

There's plenty more horror experiences to be had among the best PS5 games and best Xbox Game Pass games if you're after a particularly spooky start to October.

Rhys is TRG's Hardware Editor, and has been part of the TechRadar team for more than two years. Particularly passionate about high-quality third-party controllers and headsets, as well as the latest and greatest in fight sticks and VR, Rhys strives to provide easy-to-read, informative coverage on gaming hardware of all kinds. As for the games themselves, Rhys is especially keen on fighting and racing games, as well as soulslikes and RPGs.