22 years on, the designer behind Silent Hill 3's "cute but scary" Robbie the Rabbit mascot is still obsessed with the "tiny but grotesque" – and so am I

Silent Hill 3.

You arrive at the abandoned Lakeside Amusement Park, with a switchblade stretching out from your hand and no memory of how it got there. Surrounding you are limp, pink rabbits with blood smeared like lipstick over their carrot-eating grins.

Thank God you're playing Silent Hill 3, and protagonist Heather Mason is simply having a bad dream. Those rabbits weren't as nauseating as the decomposing monsters waiting in the rollercoaster line, but the now infamous Robbie the Rabbit mascots encapsulate what makes Silent Hill 3 an unparalleled survival horror experience even 22 years after its release date: it's "cute but scary," as Robbie's designer Takayoshi "Usagi" Tanaka tells me in an interview translated by Junko Okada.