Silent Hill f is a horror story about gender discrimination and power dynamics in a traditional Japanese family
By Kirk McKeand
The Hymenopus coronatus, or orchid mantis, captures other insects by pretending to be a flower. The gangly insect finds a perch and sways like an orchid being blown in the breeze. When a creature comes over to eat the petals of this beautiful, distinct blossom, the mantis pounces, grabbing their prey in milliseconds, enveloping them in its serrated, crystalline limbs before biting down with its powerful jaw.
Beauty can be terrifying. It can turn a confident person shy, we’re scared of losing it as we grow old, and there’s the uncanny shiver we feel when we see something too perfect. It draws us in like the luminous lure at the tip of an angler fish in the ocean depths, hiding its true face in the dark.
“Find the beauty in terror” is Silent Hill f’s tagline. The new game swaps out the rust and blood of America for the beauty and rot of rural Japan, the town of Ebisugaoka, inspired by Kanayama, Gero, in Gifu Prefecture. On the surface, it’s a town from a postcard, surrounded by rice fields, dotted with shinto shrines, and its streets lined with one-storey storefronts. But what happens when you shift your perspective and peer into the lives of the people who live here?
When China brought Buddhism to Japan, something else came with it — a poisonous but beautiful flower called the red spider lily. The deep red plant has fleshy petals that curl into a cupped hand, surrounded by stems that reach around the petals to form an inverted bowl. Every single part of the flower provokes a violent response in humans and most animals, with symptoms ranging from vomiting and diarrhea to paralysis and even death. Such is its capacity for pain, Japanese people call it the "flower of the other shore" — the Hell flower. It’s as key to Silent Hill f’s identity as Pyramid Head to Silent Hill 2.
“If you look at it from a distance, it doesn't look like a flower anymore,” series producer Motoi Okamoto tells me via translator Daiki Yamamoto. “It looks more like flesh. So we thought that that was the epitome of what we wanted to convey in the game, meaning that something can be both beautiful and gruesome at the same time.”
Set in the ‘60s, Silent Hill f has you play as a teenage girl called Hinako, who’s overshadowed by her big sister, Junko, and overruled by an alcoholic father. You see Junko through her sister’s eyes – more beautiful, more ambitious, better behaved – but you never see her face, the camera obscuring it, photos all scratched out. It’s buried in the subconscious, hiding in the dark like trauma.
“One of the main themes that we've expressed is societal pressure, the societal norms that are expected of women,” Okamoto explains. “Because the game takes place at a time when female societal pressures were still very much prevalent, but at the same time it was a pivotal moment in Japanese history, because it was when social movements and then the civil rights movement started to take place. The main character is one of these females who experiences these types of social pressures. We take a player through a journey where she tries to combat those pressures, and she tries to free herself.”
Japan in the ‘60s was a time of metamorphosis, where traditional values were at war with rapid post-war growth and modernisation. Parents still saw their daughters as a vehicle to better future generations through marriage, their fates tied to their husband, and arranged marriages were still commonplace. 1966 saw a huge drop in birth rates due to the “Hinoe-Uma (Fire-Horse)” superstition, an event that happens every 60 years where traditionalists believed that any woman born that year was fated to kill their future husband. As a bit of a tomboy who likes to play pretend sci-fi games with boys, Hinako feels suffocated by these societal pressures, which shape her view of the world. She’s stuck in the middle as her parents are pulled between tradition and modern life, at a time when the parent-child dynamic was skewed massively in favour of the parents.
“This is the core tenet of the game that our scriptwriter, Ryukishi07, had chosen to tackle,” Okamoto says. “So throughout this game, you can see those experiences of being shackled by her parents and societal pressures as a whole. Another core theme is the juxtaposition of what is beautiful and what is horrifying, as the flower suggests, but also as a symbolism of what women were expected to be. Beauty was very much expected from women, and at the same time that beauty comes at the price of the woman herself. She is being shackled by these expectations, and she is being forced to endure these pressures. So we would like to have players experience for themselves what it's like to have beauty and terror at the same time, and what lies beneath the surface.”
Silent Hill f tells this story in many different ways, all layered on top of each other. Explore off the main route and pay attention to your surroundings, and you’re rewarded by little stories that strengthen the themes. Then there’s the dialogue and cutscenes for the vital stuff so you can understand what’s going on if you just breeze through. My favourite, though? Hinako’s journal. Hinako keeps a diary of everything that’s going on and what happened before the story takes place, along with hand-drawn illustrations and random musings. But she’s not always a reliable narrator, and sometimes she scrubs things out and changes the context with subtle edits as she explores her emotions, bringing some of it to the surface and burying what’s best left unsaid.
“There's layers and layers,” NeoBards creative director Al Yang explains. “You can't make it all a cutscene. You can't make it all exposition, so we put a lot of that in the journal. As you're going through the game, you'll notice things, and then it might change her point of view on some things. Because of Ryukishi-San, his work has always been very circular in nature, similar to how Silent Hill as a series functions — it’s meant to be played in rounds. Each time you go through it, there's things like different bosses, new areas open up, new items, new weapons, even brand new enemies, and cutscenes will also change. It also changes how Hinako herself views the world. So if players keep checking the journal through specific points in time in the game, I think they'll be surprised at what they might find.”
After my four hours with Silent Hill f, I still have more questions. Does the “f” stand for feminism? (Yang jokingly gets me to turn off my recorder to say it stands for “fan speculation”). What’s the significance of the standard healing items now being painkillers? Is the sister even alive? It nails the mystery and discomfort of the classic Silent Hill games while placing it all in an unfamiliar and exciting context. It tackles tough subject matter with conviction and purpose, heightening traditional scares with layers of subtext like the best horror movies. I’m excited to see how the story recontextualises itself when Silent Hill f launches for PlayStation 5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S on September 25, 2025.