At some point gamers (and some critics) really need to stop hyperbolically calling every personally challenging game a Soulslike. The term becomes meaningless if we just use it to describe a hard game. I’m not great at rhythm games, but I’m not going to call Guitar Hero a Soulslike because I find it challenging. It’s not a useful descriptor to slap on every game with a light and heavy attack, or that makes a person sweat a bit when in combat either.
Silent Hill games have always had intentionally miserable combat, with limited resources, and the necessity to whittle away at enemies with household melee weapons to conserve ammo. Taking the bullets away in f, which is narrative and setting appropriate, and leaning on pipes and kitchen knives doesn’t transform this into a Soulslike game. There are no RPG classes, no skill trees, no stat increasing weapons, no parrying, no dodge-rolls, no I-frames, no corpse runs, no deeply winding map with barred entranceways to open creating shortcuts, shrines function not like bonfires but like the save points in all Team Silent games.
Grace Benfel, who I’ve quoted before on the subject, has her own similar list of elements that very clearly delineate Silent Hill f from Souls games:
The game autosaves frequently; you will not always be teleported back to the shrines upon death. Enemies don’t drop currency or items when you kill them. You don’t lose anything when you die except forward progress. Defeated enemies don’t respawn when you rest at a checkpoint. There is no “default” healing item which you can upgrade, and you must find all healing items out in the world. You need an additional item to upgrade your stats, as the main currency is not enough on its own. Your inventory is limited, and you cannot carry everything all at once. And weapons degrade with every attack, eventually breaking.
Being hard or a challenge does not a Soulslike make, and to quote Benfel one final time,
When combat is difficult and wins you nothing, you are more likely to be scared at the prospect of it and to avoid it when it comes up. But the game’s narrow corridors and alleyways will lock you in. That tension, between the narrowing possibility space of the level design and the certainty of harm, is unnerving.
In Dark Souls, you have ample means of mitigating that tension. In Silent Hill f, you don’t. Whatever the superficial similarities, that is a gulf wide enough to encompass genre itself. And so it’s worth taking Silent Hill f on its own terms, and not forcing inelegant comparisons upon it.
