There are few who would dispute that last year’s Silent Hill 2 was a supremely well-executed remake of the 2001 original, but you could also argue in retrospect that developer Bloober Team’s modernising of a survival horror masterpiece was a pretty safe bet. Silent Hill f, from developer Neobards Entertainment, is a much bolder undertaking by comparison. It offers an entirely new story in a completely foreign setting, with a captivating protagonist who bucks the series’ trend of featuring predominately morose, middle-aged men, and keeps its handguns holstered in favour of a strictly melee-focussed fighting system. Although the cumbersome and inconsistent nature of its pipe-swinging combat made it something I had to grin and bear rather than rip and tear, Silent Hill f is a success in almost every other way and is certainly one of the strongest new games in the series since the PlayStation 2 era.
In case it wasn’t clear, Silent Hill f is a Silent Hill story that doesn’t in any way feature the well-trodden town of its namesake. In fact, it’s the first mainline entry in the iconic Japanese survival horror series that’s actually set in Japan – in this case the fictional village of Ebisugaoka in the 1960s – and it provides a backdrop rich with carefully crafted cultural touches that make it one of the series’ most intriguing locations to explore. Every little detail combines to evoke a strong sense of place, from the muddy rice fields to slosh through to the ramune soda bottles to gulp down and the puzzles inspired by local folklore to solve, some of which proved to be seriously challenging for my ignorant Australian brain. (I’ve tracked down plenty of keys and crests in the survival horror genre over the years, but I’ve never needed to put my controller down and Google what a kudzu plant looks like before.)
It’s also the first time in a long time that a mainline Silent Hill story has allowed us to take control of a lead character with any sort of meaningful depth, in this case high school student Hinako Shimizu. The black sheep of her family, Hinako is clearly the victim of an abusive, alcoholic father and her subservient enabler of a mother. In typical Silent Hill fashion, her many psychological scars manifest themselves into menacing physical threats as her sleepy village adopts an increasingly creepy visage, forcing Hinako to become a doggedly determined agent of her own destiny rather than a mere damsel in distress. From there, Silent Hill f’s story confidently explores the complex themes of gender discrimination, child abuse, and drug dependency – among many other horrific human afflictions – gradually teasing out the root causes of Hinako’s torment through the uncovering of private letters from her school friends and increasingly frequent encounters with malevolent visual metaphors.
What unfolds is an utterly absorbing adventure, tautly paced and packed with surprises including some moments of genuinely unsettling body horror and torture – seriously, there’s one particularly grisly moment in here that makes Heavy Rain’s infamous pinky-severing scene seem like little more than a paper cut. It all builds to a thoroughly harrowing conclusion at the end of Hinako’s nine-hour journey that left me with plenty of disturbing thoughts to process, as well as a strong urge to head back into New Game+ to explore Hinako’s other potential fates further via the four additional endings to unlock.
As a fog descends on Ebisugaoka and blood-red flowers and veiny tendrils start to entangle its mysteriously abandoned streets, so begins the emergence of various nightmarish creatures that hound Hinako at every turn. Some of the neighbourhood nasties seem pretty fog standard for a Silent Hill campaign, like the mannequin-esque dolls that go for your throat with kitchen knives from around unchecked corners. However, there are a decent number of inspired new creature creations too, such as the twisted scarecrows modelled on Hinako’s schoolmates that shift from contorted stationary poses to startling lunges whenever you turn your back to them, like they’re playing a more stab-happy game of schoolyard statues. Later there are some truly disgusting, slack-mawed beasts covered in bulbous bellies like an enormous cluster of rotting flesh grapes, that give birth to howling demon types in an attempt to overwhelm you. There’s no doubt that Silent Hill f took one look at the series’ dedication to conjuring up the most repulsive monstrosities possible, and asked someone to hold its can of Asahi.
I just wish I had as much fun fighting these magnificent monsters as I did marveling at their exceptionally ghastly forms, because actually taking them on usually isn’t fun and it isn’t particularly frightening. It’s just annoying – and this doesn’t seem like the type of survival horror where you’re supposed to feel outmatched and avoid combat whenever possible, at least not beyond its opening hours. Unlike many previous Silent Hill stories, there isn’t a single shotgun or pistol to be found in Silent Hill f to battle these beasts with. Instead Hinako is only capable of carrying up to three breakable melee weapons like crowbars and baseball bats that she finds in her surroundings – which makes sense in context, since you’d assume that firearms would be harder to stumble upon in a mountainside village in Japan than they would be in the series’ usual home in the United States.
As a result, the strictly close-quarters combat encounters largely involve delivering a mix of light and heavy attacks as well as performing dashes and dodges to evade incoming blows, all of which sap Hinako’s aggravatingly stingy stamina bar and momentarily curb her ability to perform any of these actions should you allow it to deplete. There is also a focus ability that allows you to pull off special charged-up hits and easier counters, and even blocks if you're holding a heavy weapon like the sledgehammer, but this too comes at a cost – draining your sanity meter which, once emptied, makes Hinako’s health bar vulnerable to both physical and shrieking psychological attacks.
Having to constantly keep tabs on your health, stamina, sanity, and the state of your weapons, all felt like a bit too much to balance for my tastes – certainly off the back of Silent Hill 2’s fear and instinct-driven point-and-shoot simplicity – and I never really settled into an enjoyable groove with Silent Hill f’s comparatively stilted and repetitive combat as a result. These attributes can admittedly be enhanced slightly over time with buffs and consumables you collect, and nailing a perfect dodge does reward you with a handy stamina boost, but more often than I’d have liked Hinako would run out of puff faster than an asthmatic in a smoker’s lounge and I’d be forced to sort of awkwardly shuffle backwards away from a snarling enemy while I waited for her to remember how her arms worked. Even when there was still plenty of stamina up her school uniform’s sleeve, there were countless times where Hinako would just stubbornly pause between strikes for extended periods while I furiously pumped the attack button in vain.
Coping with the restrictive nature of the stamina bar wasn’t my main problem with Silent Hill f’s melee combat, though. Nor was it that my slow and energy-sapping swings would often clang harmlessly into nearby walls despite the fact enemies were often somehow able to hit me directly through scenery. It also wasn’t the way the lock-on target switching seemed frustratingly unreliable when the campaign’s second half puts you up against enemy groups in greater numbers, or how monsters would occasionally hack chunks off my health bar when I was defenselessly trapped in animations like entering a doorway. No, my biggest gripe with Silent Hill f’s fighting is that it’s all risk and no reward.
Unlike, say, Dark Souls, where you earn XP from killing enemies in order to level up your character, or Resident Evil 4 where freshly dispatched foes will often drop vital ammo boxes or healing herbs, winning a battle in Silent Hill f means likely losing some of your health bar and definitely doing some damage to your annoyingly brittle weapons. (Hinako is unable to fight with her bare hands.) This was also true of last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake – if you substitute a loss of ammo in place of wear and tear on your breakable bats and sickles, that is – but the major difference is that I found the breathless and intuitive thrills of Silent Hill 2’s shotgun-toting scraps to be its own reward. Since I didn’t find Silent Hill f’s fighting to be anywhere near as urgent or exciting, I opted to just straight-up avoid enemy encounters wherever I could – especially the more heavy-set foes that can absorb half a lead pipe’s worth of overhead swings before they expired. (Seriously, if I have to use a big stick to violently smack something eight or nine times before it caves in, I’d at least expect it to suddenly spill packets of Skittles all over the floor at a birthday party.)
Surprisingly, this wasn’t too hard to do for the most part given that most enemies can be comfortably juked around with the dodge button, and many of these easily distracted demons give up the chase the instant you slip around a corner and break the line of sight, as though they’re hellborn babies who’re yet to fully comprehend object permanence. I quickly started skipping combat wherever possible by just running past each ghoul on the way to my next story objective, or ducking into a side street to search for supplies before hoofing it right back.
This passive strategy of exploiting the enemies’ weak AI only worked for so long, and indeed in the story’s final hours there are an increasing amount of repetitive gauntlet-run slogs where the path forward is fully blocked until you kill every creature in the vicinity, but there were lengthy stretches in the first half where I was hustling along a sped-up run-through of Ebisugaoka that seemed more Benny Hill than Silent Hill. That made it tough for the town’s increasingly bleak atmosphere to completely work its way under my skin, no matter how insistent its genuinely ominous ambient audio became, but at least I was having fun rather than feeling frustrated.
Meanwhile, the Torii gate and lantern-lined shrine realm that Hinako drifts in and out of over the course of her journey does mitigate some of these combat issues, but it also gradually empowers her to a point where fighting becomes arguably too easy at times. Visits to this ethereal otherworld, which provides a sinister yet strangely beautiful contrast to the village’s increasingly festering streets, sees Hinako slowly slip under the spell of a morally ambiguous mystery man wearing a fox mask, who’s given the decidedly Kojima-esque name of ‘Fox Mask’.
Early on, Hinako is given an indestructible dagger and polearm in these sections, allowing her to tackle the same monster mobs from the real world minus the risk of each weapon splintering to bits in her hands mid-scrap. However, by the story’s midpoint she’s gained the supernatural ability to siphon the soul power from each enemy she kills and channel it into a sort of beast mode that makes her overpowered and invulnerable for short bursts at a time. To be fair, Hinako’s otherworld evolution does make sense thematically, but her newfound, fox-powered fighting ability is kind of at odds with the fundamentals of survival horror, since unleashing it made me feel less like a vulnerable little red riding hood and more like the big bad wolf.
The shrine realm also brought some frustrations with Silent Hill f’s inventory system to the surface. Having limited pocket space in a survival horror adventure is a given, but I wish that there had been an item storage box of some sort at each Shinto shrine save point so that I could carry consumables that made more sense in the ornate otherworld than they did in the village. For example, I tended to stockpile the toolkits required to repair weapons out in Hinako’s hometown, but since they were useless in the shrine realm I was forced to either offload them completely or sacrifice some precious inventory slots to hold onto them until Hinako returned to the real world. I mean, her collection of earthbound weapons are there waiting for her upon her reemergence from the shrine realm, why not the toolkits too?
Having said that, Silent Hill f’s otherworld does at least play host to the bulk of its boss fights, which offer bursts of flashy spectacle on par with other melee-focussed adventures like Elden Ring or Lies of P, but thankfully without being nearly as punishing to overcome – at least, not on the standard combat difficulty setting. Again, there are some really striking character designs on display here, such as the aggressive apparition that shrouds the arena with a red mist to mask its sneaky teleportations, attacks from long distance with a spiked flail, and wraps Hinako in a bear hug to gnaw on her face if you get too close. While these battles still rely on the same sluggish slashing and dodging as every other enemy encounter, they at least provide a bit more in the way of strategic depth.
More importantly, the bulk of the shrine realm’s levels are structured as elaborate puzzle boxes that are consistently satisfying to solve, from disorientating switch-based mazes to confoundingly cryptic treasure hunts. In fact, in general the puzzles in Silent Hill f do an excellent job of momentarily sidelining combat for a more cerebral challenge, and also serving as crucial storytelling devices. Playing on the hard puzzle difficulty setting, I was regularly forced to pore over every scrap of information in Hinako’s journal for clues, and there are some really clever puzzle sequences to explore here, such as collecting scattered calendar pages in Hinako’s family home and then using them to jump through different time periods to hunt down the disturbing ghosts from her past. If the next Silent Hill focuses more on this sort of thing than on aggravating combat, it will really be onto something.
