Game Review: Silent Hill F
After 2024’s successful Silent Hill 2 Remake, the future of Konami’s long-running psychological horror franchise looks to be much brighter than the game’s traditionally foggy settings. In Silent Hill f, the series goes to a new location for the first time, taking the horror from the titular town into 1960s Japan.
The Silent Hill series takes place in a foggy, fictional American town, where characters come up against their own sins, guilt, and traumas. The horror series draws occasionally on religious themes. While the games’ setting has sometimes been likened to Hell, each iteration explores the town slightly differently. In an interview conducted prior to the game’s release, writer Ryukishi07 said the new game took place outside Silent Hill, but aimed to recreate the series’ theme of, “characters’ struggles with the evil within themselves: sin, discontent, and conflict.”
In 2022, Konami resurrected the long-dormant series with an online video announcing the franchise was being refreshed with new games and a film. Shortly afterwards, a new, free game called The Short Message appeared on the PlayStation 5’s store. As well as a new villain covered in cherry blossoms, the game hinted at a wider world, where the nightmarish phenomenon plaguing the American town was now being observed all around the globe.
In the case of Silent Hill f, the title is set in 1960s Japan, namely Ebisugaoka. While not a real-life place, this fictional town is closely based on Gero in Gifu prefecture, with the team using historical pictures as reference. As with previous titles, the game takes players to the fog world and ‘otherworld’ versions of this setting. The story follows high school student Shimizu Hinako, who is the child to an abusive father and submissive mother. When her hometown is transformed by a strange fog, Shimizu comes face to face with strange, twisted monsters and her own psychological torment.
Location is not the only thing Silent Hill f has changed or refreshed. The game features a new combat system, where players are encouraged to duck, parry, and respond on-the-spot to enemies’ attacks. The new combat system is a big shift from prior games, which often positioned escaping as the player’s best bet for survival. However, the series’ usual penchant for puzzles remains, and long-term players will be quite at home with the challenges that seem difficult at first but then become obvious.
In keeping with the game’s tagline, ‘find the beauty in horror’, Silent Hill f has a beautiful artistic style, but one that is deeply unsettling. The game plays smoothly and looks nice in both settings, but Insights noted a visible uptick in the framerate after switching to performance mode.
While Silent Hill f has many of the standard tropes familiar to anyone who has ever played a horror game, there are some unique ideas at work that may appeal to a Christian audience willing to endure the game’s atmosphere. To save their game, the player must ‘pray’ at shrines. While not a Christian ritual, it rewards increased faith. The narrative also makes for an interesting exploration of the character’s psyche. Abuse, bullying, and past traumas are all laid bare, every bit as disturbing as the Kashimashi Shimizu must fight off.Players will likely find this disturbing, but this kind of exploration is designed to elicit discomfort. Shimizu is nonetheless depicted as a strong character with her own agency. As Ryukishi07 put it, when writing the game’s script he wanted his young female protagonist to, “be able to make her own decisions, for better or for worse.”
Like previous iterations, Silent Hill f has five different endings, only accessible by playing through the game multiple times and depending on the way plays resolve certain puzzles. While Silent Hill f is a disturbing journey not for the faint of heart, its narrative and positioning of faith as a strength make it worth playing, especially for fans of the franchise willing to see it go in a new direction. The game truly belongs in the series’ upper echelon, and will no doubt get players thinking through their fear.
Silent Hill f is available now on XBox Series X/S and PlayStation 5.
Jonathan Foye is a freelance journalist and academic
