#758: Silent Hill f

Silent Hill f

NeoBards
Initial release: September 25, 2025 (Worldwide)
Platform: PC, PlayStation 5, XBox Series X/S

This is not typically a spoiler-free
review blog. And a franchise like
Silent Hill is impossible to talk
about without going into spoiler
territory. As such, there will be
spoilers for Silent Hill f and the
Silent Hill franchise as a whole.
You have been warned!

In retrospect, I don't know what I expected from Silent Hill f. Hailed as a return to form for a franchise that, frankly speaking, peaked with its second entry, Silent Hill f was supposed to be a marriage made in heaven: classic old-school Silent Hill goodness (taking the franchise back from the parade of Western developers perceived as having missed the point of the series in one way or another) and a story written by Ryukishi07, the pseudonymous author of the When They Cry horror franchise of visual novels and anime. But throughout my time with Silent Hill f, I was left with the sense that maybe they should have just let Ryukishi07 do another When They Cry storyline.

If you're not familiar with Silent Hill — entirely possible, given that the franchise went through a long period of slow decline and was effectively dead for a decade — then here's a quick primer: it's a long-running series of survival horror games and associated media going back to 1999. Alongside Resident Evil, Silent Hill helped codify a lot of the horror game tropes that we take for granted today. The basic premise involves a lakeside resort town somewhere in New England, long reputed to be cursed and the site of a history of murders, disappearances and paranormal activity and the primary territory of a local cult. While to most people the place is any ordinary tourist trap, a sinister alternate reality exists just out of sight except to an unfortunate few, where the town is devoid of people, choked with fog, and sparsely populated by monsters; beneath that is the Otherworld, a hellish dimension vaguely resembling a crumbling, ruined version of the town that looks like a Nine Inch Nails music video. The reasons people might fall into these haunted realities vary between games, but it's generally treated as somewhere between a kind of ironic hell for people unable to confront their pasts, and a manifestation of the pain and fear of specific individuals that other people are pulled into. The transition from one reality to another is typically heralded by the sound of air raid sirens, one of the most iconic motifs of the series.

Over time, however, the franchise began to explore outside of the original town setting. The first half of Silent Hill 3 is set in some city large enough to have a subway system and a mall connected to it; Silent Hill 4: The Room is set in a town a few hours away from Silent Hill. The franchise has since variously been sit within and without the titular town, though the question arises: what do these places have to do with Silent Hill? Or, perhaps, is the real Silent Hill the traumatic memories we made along the way?

Which leads me into Silent Hill f. On the meta level, with the franchise having been in the hands of western developers for so long, it was felt by some at Konami that it had lost some of its original Japanese-ness. Thusly they moved the action to rural Japan in the 1960s to kind of reclaim the Japanese characteristics that had so defined the original few games (despite them being set in America.) Sure, that makes sense. But the question remains: what does 1960s rural Japan have to do with Silent Hill?!

The answer, as it turns out, is nothing. The dying town of Ebisugaoka doesn't have a sinister alternate self lurking beneath the surface; there are no atrocities in its past. The fog world and fragmented reality that protagonist Hinako experiences is instead implied to be all in her head. This, then, brings the franchise full circle in a way: Silent Hill as a franchise inspired a number of imitators, many of which eschewed explicitly supernatural explanations to instead use dreams and the dark parts of a person's psyche. The default ending of Silent Hill f takes this further and implies that the medicine that Hinako's friend Shu gave her for her headaches, combined with the stress of being forced into an arranged marriage to absolve her father's debts, triggered a psychotic break in which she murdered several people at her wedding.

Of course, the other endings go in a different direction, vacillating somewhere between being metaphorical to suggesting the events of the game actually happened and the folkloric aspects — that is, the stuff involving fox spirits, an ancient demon hidden beneath the town, and so forth — are real. The only constant seems to be Hinako's emotional turmoil over the wedding. Along the way we get a look at how she chafes against the strict gender roles of 1960s Japan, the suffocating nature of ancient cultural traditions and expectations, her fractured relationship with her parents, and of course the existential ennui of living in a small town with no future.

In contrast to the Otherworld of the earlier games, Silent Hill f generally swaps between a Fog World version of Ebisugaoka, and a nearly lightless Shinto temple complex that doesn't seem to correspond to any place in reality but rather occasionally connects to various moments in Hinako's memories. Within this temple complex is a man in a fox mask, implied to be a deity, who guides Hinako through a lengthy — and disturbing — ritual in which she surrenders her sense of self and even her humanity, a ritual that involves dismemberment and disfiguration, with one scene having her face cut off and a fox mask put in its place. The Fog World, in turn, is marked by a mysterious, toxic form of fungal and plant life that spreads over everything in sight. As you progress, some of your enemies will be increasingly covered in the red flowers and fungi that you've been seeing everywhere. These confer their own symbolic meaning, but that's for someone else to get into.

While Konami has said that there is no true canonical ending, that may or may not be true. For one thing, the endings of Silent Hill f (what does the f stand for anyway?) must be achieved sequentially, in a departure from earlier games. The "default" ending — the one where Hinako kills a bunch of people — is the only ending accessible on your first run. To get the other endings, you'll need to play through the game a minimum of two more times, with the "true" ending requiring you to achieve one of the other two endings on your second run. Frankly speaking, this is bullshit, and I shouldn't have to explain why it's bullshit, when it typically takes several hours to complete a run even on the easiest difficulty. Drakengard 2 did this too and you know what I did? I watched the other endings on YouTube. Nobody has time for this. And for another thing, Ryukishi07 is as of this writing publishing a manga spinoff that adds an entirely new and different ending that's intended to be canon. Who the fuck does he think he is, Yoko Taro?

My issues with the way the game handles endings aside, Silent Hill f if nothing else mostly lives up to the promise of a return to form. There are no guns in this game; leaving aside the history of guns in post-war Japan (which is a more complicated topic than is within the scope of this review) the protagonist is also a young country girl in her early 20s. As such, all of your weapons are a variety of melee weapons, from random pipes laying around to heavy wood axes to small-but-quick knives to even a mythical sword (which will wind up being important to the later endings.) Unlike previous games, your weapons will over time take damage and eventually break, in a way functioning like ammo in the American settings. As such, there are melee weapons everywhere, most of them sharing one moveset or another.

Rather than the tank controls of games past, Silent Hill f controls similarly to a modern soulslike, with a fairly typical third person camera and relatively fluid motion. You can dodge, you have a stamina meter, and the combat loop generally involves waiting for the right moment to counter-attack, which is guaranteed to stun your opponent. I've said for a while that soulslikes generally take old-school survival horror sensibilities and old-school RPG sensibilities and mashes them together into a thoroughly modern take on both, and Silent Hill f in turn takes it full circle by playing more like Bloodborne than Silent Hill 2. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it does have the tendency to flatten every combat encounter in the game and takes focus from the game's atmosphere and story and puts it on the combat. And at that point, why not just play Bloodborne?

Where the early games tended to be rather laissez-faire on inventory, here you're quite limited in how much you can carry; you can have up to 99 pills, but some items like bandages only stack up to a limited number per slot, and some items like medkits take up a whole inventory slot all by themselves. You'll pick up all kinds of sweet treats that confer benefits to your health, your stamina, or your sanity (more on the sanity gauge in a bit.) These also take up room in your inventory, but you can drop them off at shrines scattered around the game world as offerings, conferring faith, which in the game's context acts as a currency. You can find or buy various talismans that confer various bonuses, and big blank ones (which are rare) can be used with faith to purchase upgrades for your health, sanity, stamina, or how many talismans you can have active. You can also earn faith by finding high-value, mostly inedible offerings like antique combs.

I don't think I hated Silent Hill f; I've been frustrated with the direction the franchise has been going pretty much since the fourth game if not the third, and if absolutely nothing else, Silent Hill f does at times feel closer to the original games than the franchise has felt in a long time. But there's something about it that leaves me cold, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it feels like the franchise has all but abandoned its cosmic horror roots and is instead leaning into becoming an almost generic psychological horror franchise. This was actually my first exposure to anything written by Ryukishi07, and while he does seem to be a talented horror writer from what I've seen, and I certainly have no issue with a storyline delving into the gender issues of a bygone era of Japan, I'm just left wondering if Silent Hill f was originally an unrelated Ryukishi07 project before someone decided to slap the Silent Hill brand on it during development. It remains to be seen what they do with the upcoming Silent Hill Townfall (another game not set in or near the original town) but I'm not optimistic about a return to what made the franchise unique.

-june❤