Silent Hill f: Which difficulty should you play on?

Silent Hill f, like many games in the series and the genre at large, has multiple difficulties to choose from in order to make the game easier or harder, depending on your preferences. Difficulty settings are split, having a separate difficulty option for puzzles and combat, so you can easily tailor your experience to your liking. 

In this guide we’ll go over all the details for the difficulty settings in Silent Hill f, including what each difficulty setting does and which difficulty setting you should play on. 

Silent Hill f: Difficulty settings explained 

There are three levels of difficulty settings for both action and puzzles in Silent Hill f: Story, Hard, and Lost in the Fog, which is the hardest of the three. Action and puzzle difficulty can be set independently of each other, so you can have super hard puzzles with easy combat or vice versa, depending on how you want to play. 

For action difficulty, the Story mode has you taking minimal damage, dealing more damage to enemies, and you won’t lose max sanity if you’re attacked while using Focus. Visiting hokora, which are save shrines, will also fully restore your max sanity and health for free, so you won’t need to use items to do so if you’re near a save point. You’ll also have access to more resources in the world. 

Hard mode has you taking more damage, with most enemies able to kill you in two or three hits from max health, and enemies will be harder to kill. You’ll lose max sanity when you get hit while focusing, and you’ll need to use faith – gained from making offerings at hokora – or items to restore your health and max sanity. You’ll have access to fewer resources in the world, such as healing items and weapons. 

Finally, Lost in the Fog ramps things up even further – although there are no mechanical changes – but is locked off on your first playthrough. You’ll unlock Lost in the Fog difficulty after completing the game on any difficulty, but it can only be accessed through New Game+. 

All three difficulty levels are available from the start for puzzle difficulty, but puzzle difficulty works a little bit differently. Most puzzles in the game are changed quite drastically depending on the difficulty you play on — an early puzzle such as the Altar puzzle will give you fairly obvious clues to solve to complete the puzzle on story difficulty, while Lost in the Fog difficulty will have you solving complex riddles to figure out where each piece goes. Some puzzles increase in complexity like this, while others are entirely changed to focus on different aspects of the puzzle. 

Silent Hill f: Can you change difficulty after starting? 

You can change the action difficulty after starting the game, making it harder or easier in combat depending on how you’re dealing with the game’s action. If you are playing on Hard or Lost in the Fog action difficulty, you will be asked if you want to drop to a lower difficulty if you die on the same combat encounter multiple times. 

Puzzle difficulty cannot be changed after you’ve started the game — once you’ve selected a difficulty at the start of a game, it is locked in until you finish or restart the game. 

Silent Hill f: Which difficulty should you choose? 

We would recommend starting your playthrough on story difficulty for both combat and puzzles. 

You may, understandably, want to provide yourself with a challenge, but due to the game having multiple different endings and changing quite substantially on subsequent playthroughs, you’ll likely play through the game multiple times. We recommend starting on the lowest difficulty for your first playthrough, and then bumping up the difficulty on subsequent playthroughs to keep you on your toes. 

If you’d rather be challenged right away, you could also do the opposite — start on higher difficulties on your first playthrough, then bump down the difficulty in subsequent runs to make things easier. Keep in mind, though, that you won’t have access to Lost in the Fog difficulty for action until you’ve finished the game, so we’d still recommend starting easier and ramping your way up. 

To get all the achievements for Silent Hill f, you’ll need to play through the game on each difficulty — completing the game on Lost in the Fog puzzle difficulty will not award the achievement for Hard and Story difficulties.