Given the season and ongoing LPs elsewhere, it's time to link to this post on my old Tumblr regarding the Silent Hill 3 Hard mode puzzles and how alleged staff miscommunications led to them being functionally broken. Not difficult; nonfunctional. Configurations for keypads were changed around between design and production without the writers being notified; crucial lines instructing players to reorder numbers for codes were omitted. The resultant mismatch between clues and answers for one bird-based puzzle in particular led to Silent Hill fans quizzically debating a number of ornithological quandaries, including...well, the famous query above.
You'd think this would be a big scandal (relatively speaking; within the video game horror fandom), but everyone turns a blind eye; it's one of those situations - like Ghaleon's motivations in TSS or the fact that Silent Hill 4 was, in fact, planned as part the series all along instead of being retrofitted as an SH game - where conventional wisdom just actively resists the correct information being injected into the mainstream. While she did a great job making Heather's dialogue sound memorably natural, I've always found the translator's attitude in the linked posts irresponsible; she's weirdly proud that the puzzles don't work, because that makes them harder! (Yeah, it wasn't strictly her job, but you do need to notify somebody when you see part of the game on which you're working break down like that.)
While I'm linking old Silent Hill 3 Tumblr stuff, I always found this animated poster just fucking awesome.
