Central Square Shopping Center

"I have never been to a shopping mall that I've wanted to leave so quickly.
 * —Tina to Eric"

The Central Square Shopping Center is, in reality, the first area explored in Silent Hill 3. It also appears in Silent Hill: Revelation and Silent Hill: The Arcade.

The mall is composed of mainly three floors, with five department stores and various other outlets. It is directly connected to a subway station beneath the bottom floor.

It isn't made clear in the game as to where the mall is located; however, it is suggested that the town the mall is located in is only a few hours' drive away from Silent Hill. It's also possible that Central Square is just a few miles away from Heather's apartment building, since there is only one single road leading to her home and the exit of the construction site. However, it's unknown how far the construction site is from Central Square.

Silent Hill 3
The protagonist, Heather Mason, wakes within the shopping mall from a bad dream and the player is "formally" introduced to the game and characters. It is here that Heather first meets the detective Douglas Cartland and Claudia Wolf, as well as experiences first-hand the effects of the Otherworld and defeats the game's first boss.

Heather first enters into the Otherworld after meeting Claudia. After a short conversation about the birth of Paradise and God, Heather falls to her knees, in pain, and Claudia leaves. Afterwards she is left alone to find a way to escape the now hostile mall. Through exploration, subtle clues are left for Heather to remember her past and true self, including a static-ridden message heard in the first game and various Halos of the Sun scattered throughout. Heather also comes upon the trademark items of the series; the flashlight and the radio. She discovers many strange oddities such as a barbecued dog, hospital gurneys everywhere (due to Heather subconsciously remembering Alessa's hospitalization), a moonstone inside a walnut, and even a room resembling a torture chamber.

In the end, Heather climbs down a ladder to the ground floor and faces the Split Worm, the first boss of the game. Upon its defeat, she returns to the Real World and wonders if she was daydreaming. She then heads to the Hazel Street Station in order to get home. It is also implied that the events described were witnessed by the other major character shown, Douglas Cartland.

Silent Hill: The Arcade
Eric and Tina visit the mall inside the Little Baroness and make their way to the subway.

Silent Hill: Revelation
In Silent Hill: Revelation, Central Square Shopping Center is seen both in the Real World and affected by the Darkness. Heather waits for her father in the Central Square Shopping Center, but he never arrives.

The mall then shifts into the hellish Otherworld, and Heather starts to see visions of children eating bloody flesh burgers, an evil clown, a security officer with a stitched face, and living people being skinned alive and having body parts cooked in Happy Burger's kitchen.

Douglas Cartland follows Heather, but is killed by the Missionary after the creature chops his fingers off. Heather is then able to flee the mall, however, detectives find her jacket and declare her a suspect in Douglas's murder.

Stores

 * Allie's Ice Cream
 * Bert's Hat
 * Blue Bell (a store named "Blue Belle" appears in Silent Hill)
 * Blue Marine Surf Shop
 * Boutique Marguerite
 * Cafe Paradise Noon
 * Chinese Restaurant
 * Cosmetic Angel
 * Fancy Goods
 * Gate Keeper (A possible reference to Ghostbusters)
 * Happy Burger
 * Helen's Bakery
 * Key of Beauty
 * Lila's Accessories
 * My Bestsellers
 * Natalie Shoes
 * Natural Shop
 * News Boy
 * Orangefield
 * Purple Side
 * Royal Grill
 * Ruby Coffee Company
 * Silver Ring House
 * Sunshine Princess
 * Watch Christopher
 * White Town

Symbolism
Like many things in the Silent Hill series, locations can carry symbolism. In this case, the player is an American teenage girl trapped in a hellish shopping mall filled with horror and monsters. Many of the stores are completely boarded up and empty, former shells of themselves.

To Heather, a shopping mall, more than anything else, represents her everyday life as it was before her true past was revealed to her by Claudia. She is surrounded by everything she once knew and was certain of, as well as all the material aspects of life that were once important to her. Yet the irony is that these things are no longer of any significance to her although they are still present alongside her journey, nor are they essential to understand or to pay attention to for socialization survival skills.



Some ideas are inverted, for example:


 * Finding a Bulletproof Vest in a fashion boutique store
 * Finding torture devices, which are meant to cause pain to the physical bodies of humans, in a sports store which is meant to express the physical side of humanity
 * Finding a dead dog in a restaurant served as food (a probable parody of the urban myth about Chinese restaurants using dog meat in their meals)
 * Finding an extremely useful Moonstone in an ordinary-looking walnut

The tragedy of the setting is the passive memory of what the mall was, a thriving and bustling complex which more than anything was representative of the needs of humanity. Yet in the Otherworld, humanity is very much absent, significantly perhaps as it is not in God's plans for the blueprint of "Paradise". This in turn makes the "grey setting" far more depressive and frightening to the player, because the player is very much a part of that pre-existing reality and are imbued with the same social values.

The mall is an empty shell, whose purpose and origin was to be built by mankind, and effectively "brought alive" by fulfilling its purpose (to provide for the physical needs of mankind). The presence of the monsters only emphasizes the absence of humanity, purpose, hope and the future.

The Closers could be a distorted interpretation of real people: mall shoppers. It is reminiscent of a figure holding a shopping bag in each hand. This is supported by the fact that it first appears in the Central Square Shopping Center.

Trivia

 * Heather wakes up from her dream in Happy Burger, a restaurant first seen in Silent Hill 2.


 * The words "Tirn Aill", which in Welsh mythology means "Other World", appear twice in the normal shopping center, once on a poster entitled "The Revolt of Tirn Aill" and again on a door saying "Cafe Tirn Aill". The door which says "Cafe Tirn Aill" is actually the same one used to enter Cafe Paradise Noon, which is only entered after the Otherworld transition.


 * Some of the doors in the employee hallways change to say "Nornen" and "Yggrdrasil" right before the shift to the Otherworld version of the shopping center. These are both names from Norse mythology. "Nornen" presumably refers to the three Norns who control the past, the present and the destinies of every being and object, and "Yggrdrasil" presumably refers to Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life in Norse mythology, which was believed to connect all nine worlds in Norse cosmology. "Nornen" is also a class of patrol ship.


 * There are posters that say "Silent Hill 2" in the employee hallways.




 * During transition to the Otherworld, Heather enters the second elevator, where she briefly sees an unidentified creature with Valtiel.


 * After receiving the radio inside of the elevator, Heather steps into another elevator. The elevator closes behind her and the back of the elevator looks very similar to the stitched framed corpses that Angela Orosco was staring at near the end of Silent Hill 2. It also seems to have a faint Seal of Metatron imprint.




 * When Heather enters the Otherworld version of the mall, various strange noises can be heard by the player, such as groans unmatched by any monster found in the game. In one area, Heather can even hear babies or children crying, possibly referencing her pregnancy.




 * Examining the third toilet in the 1F Women's Washroom activates an optional scene if the player has a Silent Hill 2 save file on the same memory card. This is a reference to James Sunderland reaching into a filthy toilet in the Blue Creek Apartments.


 * The images seen through the static on a television in the Otherworld mall comes from a scene in the first game.


 * The design of the fountain on the first floor is similar to the shape of the Split Worm's mouth.

Other media
Central Square Shopping Center Торговый центр «Централ-Сквер» Centro Commerciale Central Square