Trigger Warning: Silent Hill f features significant scenes of graphic violence, child abuse, and self-harm among others. It is intended only for mature audiences and may be disturbing to some players. This review features imagery that some readers may find disturbing.
Silent Hill is back again! First we got the excellent remake of Silent Hill 2 last year from Bloober Team and Konami and now Neobards Entertainment has brought us Silent Hill f, a bold new take on the Silent Hill series that shows that the series doesn’t have to be restricted to blue collar America. It was beyond high time that publisher Konami went back to the series and tried to recapture its roots and now it’s time to see how good a job they’ve done this time around!
Silent Hill f takes place in Ebisugaoka, a small Japanese town in the 1960s. You play Hinako Shimizu, a high school girl with some serious problems going on around her. Her father is an alcoholic and her friends seem oddly distant. Living in Ebisugaoka means that there’s plenty of small town drama, as anyone from one will attest to. She has a best friend, Shu, who she grew up playing with and several girls that she considers close friends. One day after a particularly rough encounter with her father, she storms out of the house to meet her friends at the local candy shop and things start to take a turn.
We’re not going to ruin the plot of Silent Hill f for you. If you want to do that, there are plenty of videos and walkthroughs online you can do that with. Instead, let’s talk a bit about the overall approach to plot. Silent Hill f takes a more revealing approach to storyline than other entries in the series. We’re intimately familiar with the character and the people around her and there’s no mystery as to what’s going on, at least if you’re familiar with the lore of Silent Hill. The situation around Hinako is having a direct impact on the world around her and unlike previous entries, we see the protagonist shift with each revelation in real time. In other words, we’re following Hinako on her journey and finding out exactly what’s happening as it happens. That’s a distinct change from the more mystery-based entries in the series where you feel almost like an investigator. Here you know exactly what’s happened and why and you get to see the inevitable and gruesome consequences of those events.
Clear as mud, right? But the horror isn’t in the gameplay here. Sure, there are monsters galore but the real terror isn’t that. It’s what’s happening inside Hinako’s head as she learns more and more and shifts between the real world where things are spiralling out of control and the temple where reality has warped. It’s not quite clear through the game which world is more real either or if either is at all. There’s a lot of intentional ambiguity in the design of the Silent Hill series and on that front, Silent Hill f is no exception. But we’re definitely looking more at the root causes for a much longer period than you do in say, Silent Hill 2 where we know exactly why James has gone through what he has at the very end.
While you shift between worlds based on story progress in Silent Hill 2, much of your time is spent in the misty real world. A strange red plague of flesh and plants (think evil, bloody kudzu) is spreading throughout the town, blocking your progress and bringing monsters with it and you’re going to have to fight them. Silent Hill f has an absolutely spectacular combat interface however, making combat a breeze once you get the timing down for it. Enemies appear and attack, and you’ll have to fight back with whatever is on hand, be it an old pipe, a scythe, or even a sledgehammer. Most weapons are fairly slow and you’ll need to time your strikes against much faster opponents. Dodging is an absolute necessity, but once you get a feel for the combat, it’s all relatively easy. You’ll take the occasional hit but that’s about it if you’re playing on the default difficulty. That’s partially because you can charge your focus, draining your sanity to detect their strike patterns, then dodging at the right time to charge your stamina with a perfect dodge. Each swing of your weapon or dodge drains that stamina though, so you’ll have to play a bit of chicken with the blazing fast enemies in order to take them out.
Unfortunately, combat also has one of the worst mechanics in gaming – weapon degradation. As you hit enemies, your weapon slowly degrades, becoming weaker and then breaking. That’s not great considering how many enemies are about and how few weapons are available. Fortunately as you wander around, you can find more and hold up to three at once, but it’s still irritating to have your favorite blood-soaked bat break in half. You can also find items to repair your weapons, but they’re fairly uncommon. Dumping weapon degredation would have cleaned up both your inventory and the amount of time you spend playing about though. The few sections of the game that don’t have it are noticeably more fun than those that do, just to reinforce the point.
While weapons can be a bit frustrating in Silent Hill f, they aren’t the only way through combat. Sure you can get some great swag if you kill some monsters, but not all the time. Fortunately if you’re running low on weaponry, you can also run away. Zipping past an enemy dodging and juking to slide past and then running out of their line of sight until they stop chasing you is a pretty easy way to hoard resources. You can even run up and pillage stuff with the enemies right there! This leads us to the main critical failure of Silent Hill f, the overall level design and GUI.
You see, Silent Hill f looks like it’s a fairly open game but as you explore the town, you’ll quickly find that there are only two routes in every area. One is the route that progresses the story, the other is the alternate route where you get a bunch of swag from healing items to the incredibly valuable ema, small tiles that allow you to pray at shrines and expand your abilities significantly. Once you beat a given enemy, they don’t respawn either. That means that you can slowly winnow away the monsters, run back to the nearest save shrine (some are far) and then wander back, secure in your safety to pillage. The entire gameplay loop kind of collapses in the game as soon as you realize that there’s no re3al stress to enemy encounters and you can just keep save spamming to build up your inventory. There was almost no point in the game aside from the beginning where we were not fully stocked with healing items and various goodies throughout an area and couriering items back to the save points also allows you to cash in some of them as prayers to further empower you by expanding your abilities with the emas or using your faith to cash in for a random omamori, little charms that boost your abilities as well.
Because there’s no impetus to move forward other than to progress the story and the story is both a bit more predictable than it perhaps should be and a bit less engaging too, the fear in Silent Hill f fades pretty rapidly. Even larger enemies and bosses are rarely a challenge and their patterns are extremely predictable. Normal enemies are actually a smidge more difficult due to their speed, but are still not particularly challenging on default settings. That’s probably the cardinal failure of Silent Hill f. It just isn’t very scary. There’s nothing forcing you forward, nothing particularly terrifying in cut scenes (though it really does try in the late game), and the plot points that people talk about end up having far less impact than you might think.
In fact, working our way through Silent Hill f ended up being more routine and far less enjoyment than you might expect. There are some very graphic scenes mind you, but by the time you get to them, they’ve lost any chance at really making you uncomfortable but it’s just explore, collect, kill, collect, explore, collect, trade in, repeat. That’s really a shame because there’s a lot of potential here. However, once you realize that that monster that comes right up to you and grabs you doesn’t really do any significant damage, it’s easy to just get in close, take the hits, and wipe him out.
While the gameplay and level design in Silent Hill f might leave something to be desired, the visuals certainly do not. This is honestly one of the best looking PS5 games we’ve ever seen and that’s saying something. The attention to detail in the village, the character mapping, the overall ambience of both the village and the temples…they’re all simply magical. Everywhere you look, the horror and mystery of the game jumps out of the screen at you. Character designs are fresh and remarkably creepy, backgrounds are incredibly complex and beautiful, and the traditional Japanese designs that dominate the entire game are utterly fantastic in every aspect. In short, this is one of the best-looking games we’ve played!
It’s genuinely hard to explain how good Silent Hill f looks in motion but the cut scenes truly steal the show. The detail and expressiveness of characters is simply fantastic and adds a layer of subtlety to the emotional interplay going on between Hinako and her friends. Monsters are so captivating that you actually want to watch the cut scenes again for the sheer horrifying fascination of it. And even the subtle design work in the houses and buildings you enter has such attention to detail that it’s easy to become distracted just exploring everything there is to see. On top of all that, the GUI is smooth and streamlined and mostly excellent (though the automatic slotting of items to the quick menu is kind of irritating). Everything has a degree of visual polish that raises the bar to an uncommonly high standard.
Added to that is a genuinely wonderful audio soundscape. The traditional Silent Hill music has been augmented with more traditional Japanese music, haunting, lovely, and occasionally remarkably terrifying. Unlike the game itself, the music can definitely be a bit scary and the Deluxe Edition of the game features a separate download of the soundtrack and a player to listen to it with. You’re definitely going to want to do that if you have the chance. The voice work for Silent Hill f is extremely good as well. We chose to use the sacrilegious English dialogue instead of Japanese for this review but the English voice actors are very committed and the performance is amazing across the board from everyone. This should be the gold standard for performances and it’s a shame that the story isn’t quite up to the talents of the actors portraying it.
Sadly, having gorgeous visuals and lush audio doesn’t make a game. Silent Hill f is missing that special something…that palpable trepidation that other entries in the series managed much better. The plot is extremely heavy-handed with predictable events and even famous horror movie tropes (not spoiling them though) but the fear isn’t quite there and even the extreme scenes don’t make players all that uncomfortable. The events that are clearly meant to create strong emotional reactions in players just kind of ring hollow and that’s a shame because it’s clear the developers were really working hard here. But between the very simplistic game structures that are easy to exploit and the weak attempts at emotional manipulation, the game’s themes of otherness and lack of belonging don’t really work all that well and even the feminist themes lack the punch they were intended to. All that would be fine but Silent Hill f also manages to not be nearly as scary as it should be, making the overall experience more disappointing than positive, even though there are some great parts to the game.
When played on the recommended difficulty settings (story for gameplay, hard for puzzles), the game is remarkably easy too, with enemies barely damaging Hinako, and puzzles that are remarkably simple to solve, limiting the thinking challenges in the game. There’s simply very little risk from enemies in Silent Hill f and even if they get you, you can just reload at the last save point and keep going until you slaughter them. But if you’re not afraid to wade directly into combat with an old pipe or whatnot, how much more work is it for the game to achieve the strong emotional reactions we’ve come to expect in Silent Hill?
All in all, Silent Hill f is a very mixed bag with strong artistic design and an interesting premise but suffers from a weak plot (strong script though), average and uninspired level design, and tepid horror that leaves veteran horror players wanting something with a bit more pizzazz in the scare department. While it has a solid script and excellent voice acting, the game falls short in level design, and a few other areas that are frustrating because you genuinely want Silent Hill f to become better as you play it since the ideas that are in place are quite good. Right now though, this is a very average horror game that doesn’t manage to scare people nearly as much as it should, even with the extremely good visuals and accompanying audio. The deluxe edition also comes with a weird in-game bunny outfit as well as a full soundtrack and a very cool digital artbook which are both accessible separately from the game on the dashboard to add a bit more depth to the main game. It’s still not enough though and with the price of Silent Hill f coming in at $70 and $80 for the Deluxe Edition (worth the extra $10 for the soundtrack alone), you may want to hold up for a little while before deciding to pick up Silent Hill f.
This review is based on a digital copy of Silent Hill f Deluxe Edition provided by the publisher. It was played on a PS5 using a 1080p 55″ TV and on the Playstation Portal where it played well but the screen felt a bit small for the experience. Silent Hill f is also available on Xbox Series X/S and for PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.