Silent Hill f review: elevated horror in 1960s Japan

• Name: Shimizu Hinako

• Town: Ebisugaoka

• Age group: 13-16

• Gender: m/f

Japan in the ‘60s was a time of change, where superstition warred with science and folk remedies fought medicine. It was the old gods versus capitalism, tradition versus modernity. And as tradition dictated, man was king and his word was law. Many women born in the era were seen as bargaining chips to be married off to raise children and the social standing of their family. 

Shimizu Hinako isn’t like most teenage girls. She likes to play with the boys, escaping to an imaginary world where her domineering father – a failed chef with debt problems – can’t break her down. That’s her first escape. Her second is self medication. 

Silent Hill f might have swapped the titular American town for something more abstract, the fog town in your mind, but Hinako is the perfect protagonist for this series. Her subconscious reflects back at her through every horror you face as she attempts to find the beauty in life, even as she limps through Hell. Hinako is still figuring out what she wants, even if her parents have already decided for her. This is pure elevated horror where everything has a deeper meaning, every element a carefully crafted piece of the puzzle box story. 

One of the many creatures you face is a living mass of flesh covered in bloated, breast-like sacks undulating down its torso like a cow’s udders. It rides atop a swollen phallus that spits out fleshy eggs, birthing yet more monsters. In her journal, Hinako writes that she doesn’t ever want to become that horror — this manifestation of tokophobia. Another is the Kashimashi, a marionette stitched together from different women's bodies. Its name means “a clamorous gathering of women”. 

As she’s pulled through the story, her school uniform frays and tears like some kind of chrysalis process or skin shedding, but is it rebirth or transition? 

Being the first original Silent Hill game in over a decade, these are fitting themes for a series experiencing a rebirth of its own. Traditionalists might balk at the idea of a Silent Hill game not being set in the physical town of Silent Hill itself, but this is the transition the series needed, allowing the developers to explore a culture they’re deeply familiar with in a setting that’s refreshingly original, touching on real, heavy topics few games dare to explore. 

This shift in setting brings with it an entire gameplay shift, too. Unlike Americans, schoolgirls in rural Japan in the ‘60s didn’t have access to an arsenal of firearms, so you have to get your hands on anything you can. In the fog town, that’s baseball bats, kitchen knives, steel pipes, and fire axes. In the other world, which resembles the inside of some deity’s domain, it’s spears and daggers. This melee focus means you can’t detach yourself from the action. You have to stand and face Hinako’s demons as the angle grinder soundscape pierces your eardrums. 

Melee combat is slow and methodical, with simple heavy and light attacks bolstered by a special and a counter. Enemies have an invisible poise statistic, which knocks them into a vulnerable state when you smack them just right. But they also hit you with unblockable grabs and all manner of sneaky strikes. Get backed into a corner and it’s not long before an artery gushes. Dodge too much and you’re gassed. Once you’re used to it, most standard enemies don’t present much of a threat, but if you rush a fight, you’ll be in trouble. You also have to choose the right weapon for your environment, too, as long weapons bounce off walls ineffectually if you take wild swings in a confined space. 

Up close, you notice those little quirks, like how the Oi-omoi, a mass of hina dolls structured into a skeleton made of limbs, hopscotches toward you. Or how the Kashimashi moves erratically like someone pulling on its invisible strings. The game is full of tricks to keep these enemies scary. It does the classic thing of placing a body in view that you know will reanimate, but instead of it popping up behind you, there’s a rustle of leaves and it’s gone, only to spring at you from around a corner further on. Some enemies only move when you’re not looking in their direction, their joints clicking behind you whenever you dare turn your back. 

Being a survival horror game, your resources are limited on Hard (which is Normal in Silent Hill f) so sometimes you have to run because your weapons are broken. You might think you’re safe because you’ve climbed a ladder or clambered up a ledge, but most of the enemies are agile and will leap right after you, breaking the game design rules we’ve been conditioned with. 

The puzzle designs are just as smart across all three puzzle difficulty levels too. Instead of just adding more to solve when you crank the difficulty up, the clues become slightly more vague, the solutions more nuanced. The same puzzle can feel like something else entirely when you go back for another playthrough, working in the same way as writer Ryukishi07’s circular story, which becomes richer and more layered with each NG+ run. 

Every time you play again, there are new documents to find, new journal entries, new areas to explore, enemies where they didn’t exist before, and there are whole new cutscenes. All of this deepens your understanding of the puzzle box story. But even when scenes play out the same way, your cumulative knowledge of the story recontextualizes conversations and shows them from a new perspective. I’m on my third playthrough and I’m still finding new things and unlocking a better understanding of Hinako’s state of mind. While this process of replaying might sound boring, the developers have done an excellent job of smoothing things out, with new items and abilities to unlock, as well as abilities you carry over allowing you to skip parts of the game that would otherwise be tedious to run through again. 

From the cast’s detached, off-kilter performances – both in Japanese and the English dub – to the art, which contrasts beauty with horror, every aspect of Silent Hill f is calculated to enrich the story it tells. It trusts its audience completely, never spelling everything out in bold letters, allowing you to bring your own interpretation and making you feel like an active participant in the telling without resorting to dialogue trees with arbitrary choices and consequences. This is Hinako’s story, but just like the village gossips, in one final violation of her autonomy, everyone will have their own opinion on how it ends. 

Read more: An interview about the strong themes of Silent Hill f