There is no other series that understands psychological horror as well as Silent Hill. That doesn’t mean every game is a hit, but more often than not, they manage to delve into the human psyche and turn it into such a well-rounded narrative. Not only that, fewer games leave you feeling so on edge and anxious. Last year’s Silent Hill 2 Remake embodied everything Silent Hill is about. Silent Hill f aims to hit the same kind of heights as Bloober Team‘s offering, with this new, superb take on survival horror.
Silent Hill f is the first entry to take place out of America. The brand new setting of 1960’s Japan not only makes the story engaging for players who’ve never experienced Silent Hill before, it also allows the developers to tell their own story without a reliance of what’s come before. You play as Shimizu Hinako, a young girl whose town becomes consumed by that all-familiar fog. Ebisugaoka is a perfect setting as it feels so different to what has come before, not just in how it looks but also how it restricts the player.
The visuals are stunning. Ebisugaoka is filled with houses, small shops, and alleyways filled with bikes, metal bins, wooden boxes, and plants. Some roads are blocked by trucks and crates. When you get to step outside the main town, other areas like the nearby farmlands make Silent Hill f feel so different from what has come before. Not only are these environments beautiful to look at, they also feel more restricted than they have before. There’s rarely exploration off the beaten path.
Occasionally, some of the routes are suffocating. When entering the otherworld – a dreamlike area featuring Japanese folklore, Torii Gates, and Shrines, I often got stuck walking into the edges of paths. Even when you see another path mere inches away, you can’t just walk over it. These areas almost feel as though Silent Hill f is an on-rails survival horror. While it does add to the stress and claustrophobia of the atmosphere, it makes running away from something terrifying even more nerve-shredding. Saying that, it still leads to some stressful meetings with the terrors that inhabit the town.
Wandering around the town can lead you to inescapable encounters. A lot of the streets are narrow. It’s almost always tense wandering through these small alleyways knowing some nightmarish creature tries to attack you with no way to escape it. You can run away, but these monsters aren’t going anywhere. This instantly makes you feel helpless in the face of almost every enemy. You have ways to face them, but each abomination threatens your life and leaves you feeling so much weaker than any protagonist that has gone before.
This is what adds to the unpredictability and fear. Your just a teenager who is faced with an unknown fear. There aren’t any guns anywhere. Every single enemy can only be destroyed with a melee weapon. Not only does it make each encounter unnerving, it also adds to that almost unclimbable mountain you’re constantly forced to climb. These weapons degrade over time. While you can repair items like a metal pipe or a baseball bat with a toolkit, they’re still only going to do a little bit of damage until you are able to grasp weapons that do stronger strikes.
Hinako has a health bar as well as a stamina bar that dips with every swing or dodge, and you also have a sanity gauge that depletes when you get scared. There’s an ability where you can focus and hit enemies at the right time to do more damage. Not only that, sacrificing your sanity to get a harder hit can be both a success or a mistake. There are plenty of items that recovers health and sanity, but there will be times when you run out after a tougher enemy or boss.
Combat isn’t tough in Silent Hill f, but you need to be smart. Recklessly swinging your weapon will leave you at the mercy of an attack as stamina loss can leave you vulnerable. One cool feature in the game are charms that can add buffs to Hinako, such as sanity depleting more slowly, or health gained from successful victories in combat. You can pray at shrines to save the game, as well as offering up items in order to get a new charm that might very well help you out as you progress through Hinako’s journey.
Many of the puzzles play into the story of Hinako. They’re familiar to previous titles as far as how layered they are (find symbols, use symbols to open locks, enter room or pick up item), but they also offer story beats to give more background to Hinako and her story. I loved the puzzles and was so glad the developer made sure to put emphasis on them just like the older games did. While they’re not particularly difficult, they still offer enough to keep you drawn in and driven to try and solve them.
It’s hard to make a game that relies so heavily on melee weapons to defeat enemies, and while some combat scenarios can be tough, it is the story that made me keep going. Silent Hill draws on the trauma of its protagonists, yet this one feels much more poignant than before. Abuse, mental health, and other tough subjects are addressed through cutscenes, findable documents, and more. This version of Silent Hill is one of the best designed, and its characters are one of the main reasons I enjoyed it so much.
Silent Hill f feels both familiar and new. The setting is gorgeous despite it being filled with so many horrors. The story is great, and the characters are all important in Hinako’s journey. While combat can be challenging and some of the areas can trip you up and restrict your movement a little too much, it’s a great entry into the franchise and one that most players will love getting into.
