My leather shoes make wet, heavy noises as I run through the soaked ground of a rice paddy. Hardly seems like the clothing I should be wearing in the midst of this crisis, but I don’t have time to think about if I should have dressed more appropriately while being chased by a scarecrow resembling my classmate. Realizing that I have to fight, I stop, allowing myself a moment of recovery as I size up my opponent. Yes, she is horrific, moving at odd, disturbing angles, but I keep my eyes peeled; I notice a moment, something that speaks to me, and as she lunges, I strike, sending her–it–reeling into a stunned state where I decide it’s finally time to put this chase to an end. I thrash the scarecrow with my steel pipe until it crumples to the ground, wet, awful noises as I do so, until it stops moving.

I recover, looking around the foggy, gloomy Japanese countryside that surrounds me. That sense that I’ve defeated my foe does nothing to make me feel settled. If anything, I feel more isolated, alone, and worried. I can see many more scarecrows in the distance, and I’ve already faced so many other horrific things. My friends are gone, I’m alone, and so I grab my pipe tighter in my hand. I decide it’s time to keep moving, while a thought thrums through my head, louder and louder with every step, and I smile: Silent Hill is back, baby.

Through the Fog, Connection

Silent Hill f is the most recent entry in the Silent Hill survival horror franchise, a game that Konami earlier this year touted as a “return” to Japan and Japanese horror after years of the series being located in nebulous versions of “America”. It is also hot on the heels of the critically acclaimed and shockingly competent Silent Hill 2 remake by Bloober Team, a company that managed to somehow get out of their own way for once. Silent Hill f also follows Silent Hill Short Message, an aesthetically interesting but narratively flawed game. The hype around Silent Hill f increased at the sudden and surprise announcement that famed visual novel author Ryukishi07, who created the “When They Cry” series, would be penning the story for SHf.

As more details emerged, the game revealed a plot set in 1960s Japan, centering on a girl named Hinako Shimizu and the mysterious events happening in her rural town of Ebisugaoka. Much of the early chatter and even release period discussions focused on the fact that rural Japan and Hinako felt like they didn’t “belong” in Silent Hill, with heavy and limiting comparisons to the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 Remake; my first and best advice I can give to anyone on the fence about this game: Let go of comparisons to Silent Hill 2, or whatever the concept of “Silent Hill” is that lives in your head; to borrow the old adage, if you meet Silent Hill on the road, kill it.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t obvious ways in which Silent Hill f is working on the legacy of a 25+ year franchise, and many of those connections make the game much more charming and interesting in how it does set up those connections. Early on in the story, players can learn about the history and events surrounding Ebisugaoka: a town renowned for mining and industry, the town has struggled in post-war Japan following the closure of the mine, and recent explosions and natural disasters have caused residents to become sick and wary. Further, the town is deeply faithful, paying heavy homage to the god O-Inarisama, a fox deity to which the town not only pays respects to but deeply fears.

I didn’t have to think long in order to draw the obvious conclusions in the ways in which Ebisugaoka and the town of Silent Hill were similar: failing, decaying cities with deep and possibly disturbing religious practices in which mysterious circumstances arise is an obvious and honestly charming way to draw threads between the previous games in the series. Also, many of the hallmarks of “Silent Hill” become increasingly present as the game progresses, most notably being that Silent Hill is often a franchise about women.

The Feminine Horror

Horror as a genre is often a mysterious playground for women: it is oftentimes exploitative, empowering, objectifying, subversive, and affirming, occasionally even multiple of these at the same time. The trope of the “final girl”, the “punishments” of sexuality, femme fatales and more are as deeply entrenched in horror media as long as the genre has existed, such as in the novella Carmilla, and Silent Hill has never strayed very far from these overlapping circles. Silent Hill 1 and 3 both heavily deal with themes of motherhood, childbearing, maturity, and feminine existence, while Silent Hill 2’s most prevalent and well known narrative tropes involve sexual objectification and abuse. Characters like Alessa, Lisa, Heather, Angela and Maria are perhaps some of the best characters survival horror games have ever produced, whose identities are rarely reduced solely to being sexually attractive eye candy or damsels in distress; Heather remains possibly the best protagonist in the series (although, spoiler: I really like Hinako).

Silent Hill f continues this tradition by placing the narrative squarely on the gendered existence of being a woman, specifically, a woman in 1960s Showa Japan. The game begins with Hinako storming out on her abusive drunk of a father who beats his wife and daughters, treating them as objects and property, and shortly after she takes a stroll, discovers a magazine that says “A woman is only complete when she’s loved.” She regards her elder sister, Junko, as “dead” for having married and left her and her mother home alone with their father, and much of the plot of Silent Hill f revolves around the struggles of growing up, maturing into womanhood, and what “womanhood” even means in a patriarchal culture. I will also give Silent Hill f a lot of credit: when I first saw trailers of the game, I was worried that the torn seifuku that Hinako was shown wearing at times would lead to fanservice, but that never materializes in the game, and I never felt like Hinako (or any other woman in the game) was there purely to be fanservice or eyecandy.

Some of the early release reviews and content creator discussions about Silent Hill f piqued my interest due to the debate as to whether the game is “too overt” in its themes and messaging about womanhood, misogyny, and sexism, in that the game doesn’t exactly work its themes in subtly. My day job involves me working with literacy education and publication surrounding that field, and to bridge a conversation from that field: Media literacy is at an all time low, frankly, and while overt themes may seem amateurish or too simplistic, it bears reminding that Silent Hill f is not a niche indie game but a multi-million dollar work for a (potentially) huge audience. If this sounds like I am giving the game a pass in some regards, I am; I think the story works exceptionally well and does what it sets out to do, but I can also recognize that the blatant messaging is both to appeal to a wide audience and to ensure the message isn’t confused. While discussing the game to help organize my thoughts, I was reminded of how during the Barbie movie zeitgeist, some critics panned the film for “surface level” feminism, particularly the speech by America Ferrera that roughly amounts to “being a woman is hard”, the same speech that saw people witnessing actual walkouts in the theater to “protest” the “woke messaging” of the film. Silent Hill f is blatant about its themes about women’s hardships in the 1960s and in general because it has to be, and because sadly media literacy and discussions have functionally regressed, which is a wider topic than this review can discuss, so to sum up: Silent Hill f successfully continues Silent Hill’s tradition of being a series about women and the horrors of being a woman.

There’s No Place Like Home, Not Even Home

Ebisugaoka is cramped, claustrophobic, and despite the fact that I can see the sky, it doesn’t reassure me that I’m actually not trapped in a tight and dangerous maze. The first thing I realized in the middle of my first playthrough was how absolutely massive the city actually is, and the oddly thrilling mixture I had in my mind of how much that meant I had to explore and also how unsettling it was that I’d have to cover all of that space without knowing what to expect or what might jump out at me.

One of the first things Hinako says when “Silent Hill” arrives is “Where am I?” which lent a very unique shift from previous games; in the original trilogy, characters either arrive at Silent Hill by accident, or are returning after such a long time that the city seems foreign to them. But Ebisugaoka is where Hinako lives, and the strangeness of the city and how it seems to be changing on her is not only relevant to the story but also in building the sense that your character is just as lost as you are in a place she should know very well. The sense of having no safety even in your home is one of the worst and most anxiety inducing fears one can have, and Hinako’s exploration of the city she should recognize as home as it changes and warps around her is assisted by haunting audio and other effects that build an oppressive atmosphere.

And, much as other games have tried to tell the story of Silent Hill alongside the story of the protagonists, Ebisugaoka is just as important a character in the story as Hinako is. What is real and what is not, and what the realities of the town are versus the supernatural, warped versions of things as they seem to be are built out of the city itself, representative of fears and larger problems embedded within the culture of the town itself. Much like the iconic monsters of previous games, the Silent Hill f menagerie represent ideas more than they do solid, defined things like zombies or demons, instead representing the warping influence of objectification on women, of the facelessness of people forgotten, or the brute, overbearing cruelty of patriarchy. These things are just as much a part of Ebisugaoka as the buildings and people are, and the game works to represent this town, and the people and ideas residing in it, as something that can be beautiful, but is often hideously ugly.

They Cry, We Cry, We All Cry for Ryushiki07

Although there is likely a narrative team behind the game aside from Ryukishi07, it is hard to miss his influence in the way Silent Hill f’s story is told: A rural, quiet Japanese town featuring mysterious disappearances and deaths and lingering fears of something deeper decaying at the heart of it all; Ebisugaoka and Higurashi no Naku Koro Ni’s Hinamizawa have a lot in common. This generally works in the game’s favor, as it helps build an atmosphere of isolation and dread in both the rural town and the sense that there really is nothing else around these mountains and forests; there is nowhere to go, and no one is going to come and help. Mysterious possible mystic influences, natural disasters, and stories about growing up are where Ryukishi07 has generally made his fortunes, and his spin on Silent Hill feels fitting and natural.

Ryukishi07 is also fairly well known for borrowing from real history and cultural touchstones, and that also feels very much on brand with the 1960s setting of Ebisugaoka. The 1960s in Japan were a period of fairly intense civil unrest, economic uncertainty, and attempts to navigate the Post-War world that would have lasting impacts into today’s modern Japanese cultural makeup and problems. The 60s had heavy Western influence due to America pressing down on Japan to cooperate with it, flooding the country with American culture, products, and more, and Hinako would be one of the first generations of children to grow up in which World War II was a past event, not a recent occurrence. Her rebuffing Showa gender norms reflects the shift in Japanese women’s attitudes towards wanting something more that would surge more directly in the next decade or so, when the women’s movement would take a more aggressive stance towards ending patriarchy and sexual freedom, much of which was influenced by the Anpo Protests of the 60s and the birth (and somewhat death) of Japanese resistance to the Japanese/American relationship.

Gender politics and history aside, there’s also a high chance that Ryukishi07’s vision of Ebisugaoka is borrowing heavily from the collapse of the mining industries throughout Japan, particularly perhaps that of Miike, where massive labor protests against mining conditions resulted in a massive standoff between the workers and industry, disrupting an entire year’s worth of labor. Tragically, Miike is also famous for numerous disasters that led to the closure of many of the industries in the area; Silent Hill f features numerous characters referencing hardships and economic decline due to the end of a “golden era” in the town, which is most prominently displayed in the modernized and lavish school that stands at odds with the rest of the rural setting.

Ryukishi07 has one other hallmark: divergent narratives and “true” endings, and, not to give away too much, Silent Hill f has multiple endings; you won’t be able to see the “Best” or “True” one of them on your first playthrough, and may not even see it on your second. Silent Hill f wants you to uncover the secret of its narrative in a way that feels very much in line with Ryukishi07’s idiosyncratic method of writing stories with multiple layers and paths, and helped pull me into the story deeper than I expected. I had assumed there would be multiple endings, as Silent Hill games often have at least a few, but I didn’t quite expect the game to encourage and almost demand that I play it over again in order to start really seeing the truth of what was happening, or what was possible, and I found it rewarding to work my way through the game again. And yes, before you ask, there is a “Weird” ending.

Hinako, Try to Remember the Basics of CQC

But how does the game play? I assume if you’ve read this far and sated your curiosity for a quick discussion of feminist critiques of horror media and a brief course on Japanese history, you may want to actually know how it feels to play the game, and good news: it feels great… with one note: You need to get used to how dodging feels in the game. One of the jokes from demos of the game leading up to release is that Silent Hill f seemed to feature “Dark Souls” (ugh) like combat, and it is more correct to say that the game features a more active combat system then you might expect. Hinako has the ability to dodge enemy attacks, and if she executes a “Perfect Dodge”, she loses no stamina and places herself in a position to counter attack her foe. Hinako can also use a “focus” stance to help highlight enemy weaknesses, which can also be spotted by an odd shuddering flash of color that enemies do before they attack. If you press RT/R2 during this wind-up, Hinako parries the attack and stuns the enemy, allowing her to unload a flurry of attacks on them.

I don’t know if I ever really expected to say this, but I actually find the combat in Silent Hill f really fun, and enjoy the combat quite a bit. I also highly recommend playing the game on Hard if you want actual challenge, because I also found that the combat, once I understood it, was a little too easy for me on Story difficulty. I’d love to see perhaps extra difficulty or challenges added later that might make it even more exciting and engaging, but throughout my playthroughs of the game I loved combat every time, including the boss fights, and never really felt like I was losing to “jank” controls or bad survival horror instincts.

About halfway through the game, there are more elements added to combat — although speaking about these is spoilers, so I will simply say that there is more to the combat system then it initially seems, with early portions of the game trying to help make you comfortable with dodging, attacking, and parrying, while later fights can really lead to you having Hinako feel like a pretty competent badass. There’s also a fairly wide assortment of weapons to discover, and a weapon durability system that rewards you for playing smart and not simply fighting literally everything you see; although, frankly, I never found myself in a position in which I was going to be without a weapon or in trouble due to too much fighting or bad engagements.

I Beg You to Read the Journal

One of the first things the game asks you to do when you gain control of Hinako is to look at her journal. I cannot stress enough how many people I have seen say that Hinako has no personality or the game story makes no sense who then also admitted that they have never looked at the journal, and I wish to remind you, dear reader, that I literally just talked to you about poor media literacy in the general population. Hinako’s entire personality comes from two things: her interactions with other characters, and the detailed journal entries and drawings that she makes as the game progresses, many of which are where her voice is truly found.

The journal is easy to access and updated regularly, and the drawings that pepper its pages really add a special charm that I fell in love with. You get notes about characters, events, areas, and puzzles, and Hinako also draws the map that you use during the game, featuring her own little notes and doodles about where important things are; as a mild and spoiler-free illustration of how these elements are crucial to her character, her map drawing of her home features only her mother.

I also found the journal really helpful during puzzles, especially when playing on the hardest puzzle difficulty, Lost in the Fog. If I had to ding the game for something, the puzzle difficulty is certainly my biggest complaint. In some cases the more difficult puzzles felt like legitimate head scratchers, and teasing out the solution was fun even if it took a few moments to do. Some puzzles either through lack of useful notation or translation issues, however, felt nearly impossible not due to actual difficulty, but lack of information. I wouldn’t say that the game has a bad localization either, but there are some times in which the game seems to assume that the player knows things about Japan that feel at odds with how well it tells its story and thematic elements; these aren’t dealbreakers by any means but it did stand out as a little at odds with the rest of my experience. I personally preferred playing on Lost in the Fog for puzzles but if you’re looking to experience the game, there’s nothing wrong with playing it on the Story mode difficulty; and, frankly, some puzzles being so obtuse as to require looking for a hint felt like it made the extra difficulty pointless anyway.

Haunting Beauty and Melody in Them There Hills

Aesthetics aren’t always especially crucial to me when I’m enjoying a game, particularly a horror game, because I really enjoy “mid.” I love mid games, media, movies, whatever you would like to offer me, I love mid things. That isn’t to say that I don’t appreciate aesthetically pleasing things, just that many horror games existing in a weird space in which you are often trading aesthetics for something else, or something else for aesthetics, and I’ve enjoyed many hideous looking games for the experience of playing them. Silent Hill games have always been fairly nice to look at though, with perhaps the exception of Homecoming and Downpour, which never really managed to assemble any sort of aesthetic personality that made them unique; at least, unless you consider Downpour’s Silent Hill 2 cosplay “unique.” Silent Hill f is, honestly, gorgeous. Rather than rely on extremely dark interiors and shadows, much of the game takes place in the foggy and blue-gray Ebisugaoka, dotted with other dull colors and spatterings of red spider-lily like patches of infestation. I also found that this might be the best game to represent the “fog” in the series so far (although before anyone jumps me I will say Silent Hill 2 Remake did a great job too, I’m just trying to speak from ‘new’ entries): it clings to the boundaries of the screen and evokes a cold, damp feeling of dread as you explore the ever evolving decay of the town around you.

The music is eerie and entertaining, as one might expect from Akira Yamaoka, and his work here leans heavily into the Showa Japan aesthetic with numerous instances of Japanese staples like flutes, drums, koto, shamisen, and vocals. The title theme, “Dizziness Drawn to a Faint Flame”, is a creepy and evocative song that drew me in the moment the game loaded. The industrial metallic noises and hints of or evocations of chanting, whispers, or vocalizations across a modern interpretation of the historical classic “Sakura Sakura” by Hireally made the entire presentation of the game feel that much more engaging and enveloping. “Sakura Sakura” is one of the most well-known classic songs in Japan, and the use of it as a motif for the title screen theme of the game set my expectations high. As to be expected, Akira Yamaoka absolutely killed it, because the rest of the tracks in the game are great, featuring creepy mash-ups of classic Japanese instruments with modern techniques and unsettling vocalizations, such as “An Alluring Bond Descending into Shadows”, which has an ever rising guttural moan interspersed with a suspensive noise that finally “snaps” after numerous chittering noises much like that of the vengeful spirit Kayako of The Grudge. Some tracks are just absolute bangers, like “TSUKIYONOINERIME”, composed by xaki (otherwise known as Koichi Sakita), a frequent collaborator with Ryukishi07. I absolutely love this song, mixing up a beautiful melody that overlays Japanese flute and chanting with vocals, and “Shichibi no Tasogare” by another Ryukishi07 collaborator, dai, is a similarly strong song featuring piano playing over light vocals and a whimsical, light melody that helps put it as a contrast to the heavier, haunting tracks of the game.

A New Era for Silent Hill and Survival Horror

Survival Horror games are one of my favorite genres; horror games are, in general, and I’ve spent much of my youth and adult life with horror games. I loved them when they first came out, I loved them as they evolved, and I loved revisiting them when I had the chance. To say that survival horror games have had a good present compared to their past is tricky; it would probably be fair to say that the genre hasn’t quite lived up to the legacy of the 90s and early 00s, having found itself either running out of ideas, running into developmental issues, or just failing to modernize with the technology and tastes of modern audiences. Resident Evil 7 tried a new (and successful) tactic of using first-person, but the “over the shoulder” Survival Horror game never really seemed to fully re-materialize in modern gaming until the success of Capcom’s Resident Evil remakes seemed to breathe life back into the genre.

Of course there are numerous indie games that have also tried to recapture some of that magic, and quite a lot of them are entertaining and fun to play, but never exactly genre redefining. Silent Hill 2’s remake proved that Resident Evil wasn’t the only game that could appeal to a modern audience, but these still felt like revisiting games that were, frankly, already very good. If anything, Silent Hill 2 was the most transformative of the group, really changing the original into something that felt almost new and refreshing for a genre and series that had struggled to do much of anything well.

This may sound like I’m gearing up to tell you that Silent Hill f is the most important game of the 21st century and that it will redefine horror games as you know them, right? Well, no. I think the game is very good, and I highly recommend that you play it if you like survival horror, horror games, or even just the idea of playing one. While I was streaming myself playing the game to my group of friends, one of them chimed in that “This is the first time I’ve ever wanted to play a Silent Hill game”, which stuck out to me. When I asked them why, they said that even though the game looked scary, it seemed accessible, interesting, and different, and that they liked the setting.

For me, a lot of my anxiety leading to this review was whether or not I wanted to tackle the question of “Is Silent Hill f better than Silent Hill 2 Remake”, and I decided that the answer to that question was to not actually answer it. I don’t think that question really matters, at least not in any real way that anything matters. If you could only buy one or the other, you should probably just buy whichever one you think is the most interesting to you at the moment. I don’t know if there’s anything I can say that would make that comparison compelling and not reductive, because what I realized at the end of the day is that they are two very different experiences in the same “universe”: Silent Hill, as a concept, is a horror series in which personal fears and anxieties are manifested into a walking nightmare, and both games do exactly that. The story they want to tell is totally different and share very little in common, and I actually respect the fact that Konami really did take a leap of faith on a game that diverted so heavily from the stereotype of what “Silent Hill” means or is.

Personally, I’m hoping that the positive reception and success of the game (at least based on early charting on places like SteamDB and overall critic scores from outlets that received the game early) encourage Konami to continue taking this type of approach with Silent Hill, allowing the franchise to stay true to the psychological horror aspects while freeing itself from the idea that every single game must be some sort of meditation on Silent Hill 2. I also hope that other developers see Silent Hill f for the way it mixes up new concepts and aesthetics to continue broadening horror gaming and media as a whole, especially that Japanese horror or “inspired” horror media do not need to reply on long-haired ghosts crawling out of televisions or haunted suits of samurai armor.

Blooming with Horrific Possibility

If it wasn’t entirely obvious from the review so far, I love Silent Hill f. I don’t think the game is perfect, and I could certainly understand if the game isn’t for everyone. I think that approaching the game without the baggage of whether it “is or isn’t” a Silent Hill game goes a long way to making the game far more enjoyable and yourself more receptive to what the game is trying to do, and if I can convince you of anything in this review, it is that you should give Silent Hill f a chance to tell you a story and provide an experience that perhaps most other games haven’t tried to offer. And, if you happen to be a first time Silent Hill player, this may actually be the best game to try the series out with. The lack of gaming cultural baggage attached to the title can provide some avenues for freedom, or at least a lack of specific expectations of what you should or shouldn’t be experiencing while playing the game.

Of course, I already said that I don’t want to make this SH2R vs SHf, so my final argument is that SHf is the first “full-priced” game I’ve actually purchased, played, and beaten this year other than Monster Hunter Wilds. I’ve mentioned in previous game show wrap ups and even my review of Umamusume: Pretty Derby that I’m finding the buy-in cost of a game at 70+ USD increasingly restrictive on me both in terms of my budget and my time, but I haven’t regretted a single moment I’ve spent with Silent Hill f. If anything, I’m actually sad that I’m slowly approaching being “done” with the game by achieving everything possible in it, but that’s fine too. I’ll likely return to Silent Hill f when I feel like experiencing the story again, or perhaps playing it for someone who hasn’t seen it yet and would like to; I certainly will be there day one for any additional content or updates to the game, and I’m already waiting for the moment that I can snatch an artbook or vinyl of the soundtrack.

Perhaps it is a few months still too early for me to claim what my Game of the Year is (and as I don’t have a PS5, I can’t offer any opinion about Death Stranding 2), but so far I’d have to argue that Silent Hill f is very high on my list, competing perhaps with Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, and that the list is frankly pretty short and unlikely to change a whole lot between now and the end of the year; that being said, for now, Silent Hill f is the game that is living rent free in my head, and I hope you’ll consider giving it a shot so it can do the same for you. And if you’ve been reading this review and dying to know, yes, I did indeed wear the Pink Rabbit Suit for every single playthrough, and the ears wiggle as you run around.

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