I have a variety of complicated feelings about this game. I think it will warrant more time and more reflection before I can pen anything more coherent than what follows. But it is a game worthy of analysis, worthy of study, and worthy of your time, nonetheless.
4) SILENT HILL F | NeoBard Studios 2025
“Whatever you choose, you will definitely regret it.”
Since we’ve been talking about games that had a lot to live up to, Silent Hill f arrives on the scene of my reflection, sheepish at first, but increasingly confident. It is unashamed of its own identity, even if that identity is itself frustrating at times.
The first new, full-length survival horror Silent Hill game since Silent Hill Downpour back in 2012, Silent Hill f also had the unenviable task of following-up the very well-received Silent Hill 2 remake last year. I wrote a short article about early Silent Hill f impressions earlier this year, and thoughts about the game have continued to percolate in my mind since then. I think it tells a good story in a genuinely bold way. It tells a story about growing up as a young woman in a traditional Japanese setting, where that young woman is forced into an isolating arranged marriage out of a sense of duty and tradition. It forces you to obtain the worst ending on the first playthrough, and then demands that you replay the game in its entirety repeatedly to comprehend the totality of its meaning and the depth of its characters.
I feel this may be the shortest article in this series, and it is for one, simple fact: Silent Hill f frustrated me to play. It is a game that claws at greatness, and I think achieves it in narrative structure and overall boldness. The acting is fantastic, the cutscene direction phenomenal, and the writing interesting. It held my attention and captured my imagination throughout. It is the gameplay that baffles me.
The opening twenty minutes of the game are a perfect set-up. A wistful walk through a Japanese rural setting, oddly abandoned and fog-wreathed. I spent ages luxuriating in how beautifully haunted the game felt. I enjoyed being introduced to all of the characters – even if their dynamics were all made pretty obvious right from the start, the game’s writing does enough to subvert that later on. It does take a long time to get to that subversion,and I think that’s where the crux of Silent Hill f’s controversy lies. It is also a very, very combat-heavy game. Some of the other Silent Hill games are also combat-heavy, but the key distinction is that you can avoid almost every combat encounter in classic Silent Hill games, with enough careful maneuvering. In Silent Hill f, enemies are everywhere, and they’re fast. They pursue you and burst from around corners, sometimes provoking inescapable grabs. Once you’re in a grab, there’s nothing you can do but watch as Hinako, the protagonist, is mutilated in some way, which tanks your health.
Healing items are tough to come by – or at least, you have to use a lot of them on a first playthrough, where threats are uncertain and you can be ganged up on by teams of enemies in a game that is clearly designed for one-on-one combat. There are no ranged weapons, just a variety of melee weapons, some of which can break. Everything feels calibrated to frustrate or confound you when it comes to enemies, which makes combat a genuinely dangerous affair. All of this might be fine if a) you weren’t locked into certain difficult encounters or b) you weren’t swarmed by multiple enemies at almost all times. Combat is actually highly enjoyable when you’re facing off against just one foe at a time, but it’s painfully clear that the system just does not function very well against multiple combatants. The fact that it happens so often is hair-tearingly tough.
But Silent Hill f feels like a natural extension and revision of the original games’ atmosphere and ethos in other areas besides excessive, punishing mandatory combat. Everything is soaked in layers of dread. Areas are expansive yet constrictive, with every safe path blocked off by some survival horror contrivance. All of this just adds to the surreal feeling. It feels just as eerie and haunting as some of the original games, and I loved the game’s puzzles for the most part, as they fed into the narrative and atmosphere, the game’s two strong points.
While the narrative isn’t totally revelatory in the context of every story ever written in every medium, it still feels important to see in a big-budget video game format. Hinako suffers as she is cut off and ostracized by every important person in her life, and the pain that she suffers fuels her self-loathing and pain as she bottles all the trauma and hurt up to become a different person, raising a mask against the terror she feels. By the end of the game, she is a changed person, harrowed by what she’s seen, the misery she feels. One of the game’s most harrowing scenes is an act of body mutilation that does not cut away at an expedient moment – it is deeply uncomfortable, seeing the lengths to which Hinako will apparently go to change herself.
The monster designs go a long way to selling this game for me. Each of the monsters links in very well to the narrative’s symbolism, as any good Silent Hill monster will try to do.
I think that Silent Hill f is an incredibly important game, but it’s also a very strange one. It only has one traditional “Silent Hill dungeon” of a good length, the school. The game’s journal system points out the game’s symbolism in painfully obvious ways. But there’s still something very compelling about a story told about how women in society are controlled and made to loathe themselves for what they are being made into by that same control. It is a terrible loop, one where enforcement is performed by the subjugated without any additional hate needed from the oppressor. It’s a pivotal game in the Silent Hill series. Silent Hill f is an interesting, experimental leap in asking the player to beat the game over and over again with little variation, just to see a different ending and pick up some new notes that provide different context. It deserves to be played, but whether or not it will frustrate you, I think, is up to each individual player. I don’t always have the patience for Silent Hill f, but something odd kept drawing me back in. The loop needed dealing with. The story explicitly repeats, time and time again, echoing down history. Fog, blood, and monsters obscure the pain of misremembered or misunderstood trauma, before a revelation that perhaps has the potential to cause even more harm, but also might mean, at last, liberation. Silent Hill, at the end of the day, is still Silent Hill.
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