Silent Hill f
The Silent Hill fan community is currently tearing itself apart over the recent release of Silent Hill f, the first all-original game in the franchise since 2013. Permanent fandom disputes like “is Silent Hill 4 good” and “was the voice acting in Silent Hill 2 bad on purpose” have fallen by the wayside as brother fights brother and families are divided by war. Once again it’s up to me, the world’s number one Silent Hill fan and arbiter of horror media truth, to swoop in and save the masses from themselves.
Having now played through the game twice, taking in both the first-time experience and the (substantial) new game+ offerings, it’s time answer the question: is it Hinakover for Silent Hill, or have we Hinakonly just begun?
And for once, I’m going to summarize my verdict up front rather than wait until the end of the review, partially so people can get my overall take while avoiding the minor spoilers I’ll be going into further below.
How you respond to Silent Hill f is going to depend entirely on what “Silent Hill” as a franchise and a concept means to you. If you have very fixed ideas about what a Silent Hill game should feel like and how it should operate, then playing Silent Hill f is going to be like getting pelted with progressively larger and pointier rocks, and you’re unlikely to have much fun with it at all. It might even become your least-favourite game in the franchise, assuming you deign to recognise it as a Silent Hill game at all.
But if you’re much more flexible about what Silent Hill can be, if you’re willing to stay with the game as it bounces fully off the franchise-rails and careens at reckless speed into bold new territory, then you are in for a wild fucking ride, even if parts of that ride might still disappoint you.
Our plot set-up: it’s the 1960s and Ebisugaoka is a small mountain village in Japan that’s stuck in an earlier time. The older residents still rely on traditional Chinese medicine and the worship of the town’s patron fox deity Inara-sama over modern treatments, and the role of women is still strictly patriarchal, with rigid gender norms enforced via collective social pressure. In this environment our protagonist, a teenage girl named Hinako Shimizu, has always been a bit of an outsider due to her mild tom-boy streak and general refusal to let others make decisions on her behalf. Her father is an abusive drunk, her submissive mother does nothing to protect either of them from his wrath, and her older sister Junko is no longer around to support her after marrying and moving out of the village.
Following yet another screaming match with her father, Hinako storms out of the house in search of her three classmates and friends. She talks to them just long enough to establish that they’re all acting kind of weird and cagey, like there’s some big strain in their friendship that none of them want to address directly, before a sinister presence looms out of the fog and all four of them get Silent Hilled. Soon Hinako is on her own and fighting for survival with whatever makeshift weapons she can get her hands on… and also, whenever she falls asleep or unconscious she has vivid dreams (or are they dreams OH HO HO HO) of a mystical folklore realm called the “Dark Shrine”, where an alluring man in a fox mask guides her through a series of rituals.
What exactly is going on here? Which of these realities, if either, is closer to the truth? And what happened in Hinako’s life to trigger all of this? Silent Hill f gives you the information you need to construct answers to these questions, but only if you pay close attention, scour the environment for notes and documents, and keep playing after the credits roll.
Okay, so, let’s grab the thing by the thing and address the big question: does Silent Hill f “feel like” Silent Hill?
Yes and no.
Yes, there is plenty of game here that undeniably carries the franchise’s DNA, mostly those sections where you’re exploring the foggy streets of Ebisugaoka while hitting monsters with a metal pipe. This is a survival horror game fusing occult religious iconography with psychological metaphor and symbolism, taking place across two settings that lie somewhere between being parallel dimensions and physical manifestations of a person’s psyche. That’s what Silent Hill games are and have always been.
On the other hand, it’s also true that there are parts of this game—substantial parts—which, if you showed them to me out of context and asked me to guess which established franchise they belonged to, I would never in a million years guess Silent Hill. To draw a comparison with another Konami game that recently got remade: you know that weird bit in Metal Gear Solid 3 where Naked Snake falls unconscious and you play through a dream where you’re an anime vampire guy doing Devil May Cry shit? Imagine that, but it’s not a joke and instead you just do that for roughly half of the rest of the game.
I do understand why this particular element of Silent Hill f has been a hard deal-breaker for many people. I get it. It’s a lot.
But the thing is, I care far more about whether something called “Silent Hill” was made by people who seem to understand the franchise’s core than whether it stays within tight stylistic limits. Homecoming and Downpour are both visually, superficially much more similar to the classic games than Shattered Memories is, but I don’t think the people who made the former two really “got” Silent Hill at all, whereas I think the developers of Shattered Memories definitely did, even though that game is pretty much unrecognisable at first glance compared to the previous games.
And I broadly feel the same way about Silent Hill f, excluding one big factor I’ll get to later. This is a game that clearly understands the core concepts that have shaped the franchise and is doing interesting and creative things with them, including during those moments when it seems to be breaking egregiously from the expected style and tone of what came before. Even the really wild stuff turns out to be there to support the central metaphors of the story, rather than simply being jammed into the game to appeal to action fans… but that’s something you’ll only realise if you actually play the game through, instead of just watching out of context scenes on Youtube.
In my Silent Hill 1 review I talked about how the game’s story was delivered in a very cryptic manner, to the point that many who initially played it didn’t really understand much of what had happened in the game. Silent Hill f continues that tradition: the literal real-world events that happened to Hinako are not spelled out directly to the player, especially on a first play-through, and instead have to be inferred via (sometimes hidden) clues and documents, and via decoding the game’s thick tapestry of metaphor and symbolism.
One of the more audacious aspects of the game’s story is that a single play-through will not yeild many concrete answers. Even the first ending you get raises far more questions than it answers and doesn’t come anywhere close to offering narrative fulfillment. Personally, this made me eager to dive straight into a new game+ run (which is more than just a second play-through with your upgrades carried over), but I can see a lot of people getting that first ending, assuming that’s as far as the story goes, and walking away extremely unsatisfied.
The opaque way the game delivers its story makes for a very engaging decoding process, but it does have a catch, which is that the barrage of visual metaphors, cryptic statements delivered via dialogue and notes, and strange off-kilter conversations that don’t answer any questions can get a bit wearisome. The game does start to dish up information on the literal events of Hinako’s backstory, but it’s very much back-loaded into the final few hours. I think it would have been better to sprinkle a bit more of this in earlier, because as it stands you spend a very long time flailing around without much to anchor yourself to and it can start to feel like the story is never going to go anywhere concrete.
One of the things people praise classic Silent Hill for is its subtlety. I’ve said before that this isn’t something I entirely agree with—I don’t think Silent Hill 2, which is the specific entry this label gets applied to most often, is particularly subtle—but it is true that the first four games weren’t in any rush to explain themselves to the player. In this regard, Silent Hill f is strangely inconsistent. While the actual story is heavily left up to the player to interpret for themselves, and there are plenty of metaphors and clues that are presented without any authorial explanation, in other places the game is far too quick to let the player know how clever it’s being, particularly when it comes to the enemy designs. Between her journal and some of her in-game dialogue, Hinako beats the player over the head with symbolism as robustly as she beats monsters with her metal pipe, which is an aspect of the game I found disappointing. A little bit of trimming on the writing here could have worked wonders.
Speaking of beating the player over the head with things, while I’m complaining I might as well get this out of the way: for some reason the game has an objective display in the upper-left corner. Very often this is completely pointless, as it will tell you things like “go through the door you just unlocked” or “kill the monster standing in front of you”, but sometimes it’s worse than pointless, in that it spoils the nature of puzzles for the player, popping up a “solve the thing” direction before you’ve actually had time to find and examine the thing. If Neobards and Konami plan on releasing patches for the game, an option to turn this off would be greatly appreciated.
Before I move away from the game’s story and into its gameplay, I have to address that big caveat I alluded to earlier, the one area where I feel like writer ryukishi07 and the other creative leads badly misunderstood the Silent Hill franchise.
In the twenty four years since Silent Hill 2 came out, we’ve seen a wave of imitators try to copy its approach to psychological horror and symbolism, mostly in the indie space. The vast majority of these games are utterly terrible for a variety of reasons, but the one flaw they all share in common is that they’re way too eager to reveal the magic trick.
One of the reasons Silent Hill 2 hit people so hard (apart from the fact that for many it was Baby’s First Symbolism) is that it takes a long time for the psychological aspect of the game to become apparent. The environments James finds himself in aren’t exactly what you’d call normal, but they behave like an objective reality that follows its own consistent logic. The earliest clue you get that something is up is the mannequin wearing Mary’s clothes in the flashlight room, but that’s a) easy to miss and b) seems consistent with the weird off-kilter nature of Silent Hill (remember, this is the game that has a sealed soup can full of light bulbs). By the time the player fights the Abstract Daddy, they will probably start to realise that there’s some externalisation of psychological issues at play; if not, then the hanging sides of meat wearing aprons in the Eddie boss fight room will likely give the game away. And just in case anyone hasn’t realised what’s going on, you’ve got Angela’s “for me it’s always like this” line.
That means it’s very plausible for a first-time player to get all the way to the end of the game without having the psychological elements ever explicitly drawn to their attention, without realising that James might be an unreliable narrator and that they shouldn’t take everything they’re seeing at face value. Most Silent Hill 2-inspired “psychological horror” games do not operate like this. They can’t wait to shove that shit in the player’s face, casting their protagonists adrift in a subjective psychoscape where symbols, images and buried memories pop in and out of existence like elementary particles. The common template for this kind of game is where you wake up in a constantly-morphing environment that might be purgatory or might be the inside of your own mind while the game goes “WoooOOOoooohhh what if you killed your faaAAAaamilyyyyyy.”
Silent Hill f isn’t nearly that bad… but it does definitely fall into this mode of horror storytelling, especialy towards the end. The fact that something is Up with Hinako, that her perceptions can’t be entirely trusted, is signalled pretty loudly starting from at least the mid-point of the game, and that fact continues to be brought to the player’s attention in increasingly obvious and ham-fisted ways from that point onwards. I think what we’re seeing here is the dovetailing of two separate bad habits: firstly the poor attempts at apeing Silent Hill 2 I already mentioned, but also the tradition of anime-style horror writing (ryukishi07 usually works in visual novels, remember), which in general tend to not be particularly subtle.
Like I said, it’s not nearly as bad as, say, Bloober Team’s pre-Silent Hill 2 remake work. But when the game is loudly, insistently telling you that SOMETHING IS GOING ON WITH HINAKO, while also tossing out a bunch of dispirate and mutually-exclusive explanations for what that something actually is, it can get very frustrating. As much as I greatly enjoyed other parts of the game, including elements of its storytelling, this is an undeniable blemish. The game’s writing across all formats—dialogue, cinematic scenes, documents and notes—really could have done with being pruned back aggressively.
Silent Hill f’s combat system has been controversial since its unveiling and has continued to be controversial after people got to try it for themselves. Personally, I had a great time with it. Just as the game’s UI is rendered in a boldly old-fashioned style that I’m going to dub “PS2 maximalism”, the game’s combat feels like a throwback from another era, one where cinematic story-driven games weren’t afraid to include lots of on-screen meters and gauges and doo-dads.
Combat this time around is strictly melee-only, in keeping with the move in location away from Bullet Hell Nation. You’ve got a standard light and heavy attack, stamina, and multiple different types of breakable weapons that need to be either repaired or discarded as their durability wears down; pretty standard action-game stuff. An interesting wrinkle is added in the form of counter-attacks, which are big-damage stun attacks you can pull off when an enemy flashes red. Some of the windows of opportunity to land a counter are very small, but you can extend them by activating a “focus” mode that slowly depletes Hinako’s sanity bar. Take damage while focusing, and your max stamina will deplete and need to be restored with items; additionally, you can intentionally burn some max stamina to unleash a super-attack after charging it up enough. You can also do a perfect dodge by evading right before an attack lands, which lets you keep the stamina you would have otherwise spent.
This sounds like a lot for a franchise whose combat system has rarely been more complicated than “press button to hit monster”, but I found it easy to get to grips with after some initial tutorial-spam, and it was consistently fun and engaging throughout the game. Hinako’s sluggish attack speed and her limited stamina mean that she still feels like an ordinary teenager desperately trying to survive even as she pulls off slow-motion dodges sick counter moves, which is quite an impressive needle to thread. If another game gets made with this system I would like the animations to get a bit of fine-tuning, as the hit-stop effect on using a heavy attack is a bit too pronounced, and I think Hinako’s dodge should have been smaller but grant more invincibility frames to compensate, as currently it’s a bit excessive when used indoors.
There was a lot of hand-wringing prior to release about Silent Hill f being more “action-focused” than previous Silent Hill games. This is true, but not in the way people were assuming. In terms of sheer number of enemy encounters I think the Silent Hill 2 remake has more; the “action focus” comes less from enemy volume and more from the way the gameplay systems have been designed around the combat mechanics. For example, you can sell certain items at shrines (usually those that restore sanity, or which heal sanity in addition to health) to earn faith which you then spend to increase Hinako’s health, stamina and maximum sanity, but obviously doing so robs you of resources that might have been useful later on in a fight, as enemy encounters increasingly begin to rely on using counter-attacks to complete efficiently. Thus, the game’s item economy is clearly geared towards fighting enemies rather than simple surviving them, which is a pretty big change from the franchise formula. (Although you can absolutely avoid many enemy encounters if you want to).
One strange way the game does itself a disservice is by defaulting to the “story” combat difficulty, which I found so easy that I actually restarted my first play-through an hour in so I could go through the rest of the game on hard. Playing on story, most of the gameplay systems I just described where you have to choose between selling or keeping items is completely negated, as you can restore lost sanity by visiting any save point. Enemies also go down far easier and there’s much less of a need to use focus for counter attacks. This difficulty level is advertised as being aimed at Silent Hill veterans, which I guess is appropriate because the classic Silent Hill games were never particularly challenging... but the thing is, this Silent Hill game clearly was designed with a higher level of challenge in mind, so it’s strange that the game is directing people towards a default difficulty that essentially breaks it.
Before I move off the combat, I have one criticism. While I did find enemy encounters consistently enjoyable, towards the end of the game their density gets a bit much. In particular, there’s a gauntlet right before the climax of the story where you have to fight four of the same mini-boss level enemies one after another; I had been getting kind of tired of running into these things already—they have way too much health for something that can also spawn other enemies—so fighting four of them in a row felt like the game was trolling me.
One of the things you will notice right away about Silent Hill f is that it looks ridiculously good. The Silent Hill 2 remake was also beautiful, but f’s production values are on a whole other level. I’m not exaggerating when I say that frequently throughout my time playing it, I felt like I was looking at pre-rendered CGI that someone had pasted a user interface over. I don’t know how Neobards pulled this off (hopefully it wasn’t horrible crunch), but they’ve set a new benchmark for horror gaming visuals that even Resident Evil might have trouble surpassing.
This graphical fidelity is mostly used to render the foggy streets, fields and forests of Ebisugaoka, which are an utter delight to explore. Every square centimetre of the town feels hand-crafted and packed with detail, and it comes across like a real, lived-in location even when Hianko is stumbling into areas of her hometown that don’t quite seem to fit into mainline reality. My only problem with this half of the game’s environments is that I would have liked more interior locations; there are two big ones and a few smaller ones scattered around, but I found myself constantly wishing I could enter more houses and poke around.
Back during my trailer analysis, I raised some red flags around the “Dark Shrine” location, which I thought didn’t seem very enticing as this game’s version of the Otherworld. I was sort of right and wrong about this at the same time, in that my concerns about the Dark Shrine not being terribly interesting were well-founded, but also it isn’t actually the direct Otherworld analogue I assumed it would be. It seems like it’s going to be at first, but as the game goes on it becomes apparent that both its metaphysical nature and the role it plays in the story are quite different, and as such I started to think of it as its own unique thing rather than comparing it to my beloved rusty hell-realm of old, and it does a lot better when standing by itself. Of course, it helps that most of the really insane shit in the game’s second half happens there.
All that aside, I do still wish it was a little bit spookier. Games like Fatal Frame have proven that you can make this sort of traditional Japanese environment intensely scary, and it would have been nice to see the technical and artistic skill on display in Silent Hill f used for that purpose. (Although a full remake of Fatal Frame 2 was recently announced, so I guess I’ll be getting that soon enough anyway).
In the end, it’s undeniable that Silent Hill f asks a lot of players, whether they’re Silent Hill fans being asked to accept radical changes in tone and style, or whether they’re just horror gamers in general being asked to complete a game multiple times in order to get at its full story. I can fully understand why some people just don’t have the time and patience to meet the game halfway. But if you do, you’ll find a fascinating and complex puzzle-box whose multiple layers will keep you engaged for a long time.
How I ultimately relate to the game is coloured heavily by the circumstances of its development and release. If this was the one and only Silent Hill game we had gotten after a decade-plus drought, and there was nothing on the horizon but potentially more games like it, I might have come away from it feeling negative overall. But in a world where we have the Silent Hill 2 remake, Townfall, the upcoming Silent Hill 1 remake, and (according to leakers who have been right in the past) even more besides? I’m perfectly happy to have Silent Hill f in the franchise, complaints and all.