Silent Hill f (2025)

Still waiting for the combat to lose its sense of fun. Hasn’t happened yet.

I was also told there is never any meaningful evolution to the combat. I feel like I was lied to 🤣

Side note: James Sunderland would never have survived having the flesh carved off his face by a shrine maiden, and he was way too much of a pussy to sever his own arm off at the shoulder with a bone saw. Just saying 🤷🏽‍♂️

Another great piece of writing over at Endless Mode:

Silent Hill f Returns the Series To What It Always Should Have Been: An Anthology

When development changed hands from Team Silent to the many other studios Konami brought in to chase the original games’ fleeting magic, this is when the self-referential nostalgia and reverence for lore became unbearable. Eventually, it culminated in Silent Hill: Homecoming infamously bringing back Pyramid Head, the iconic nemesis written specifically to reflect James Sunderland’s tortured subconscious, in the most bald-faced nostalgia play the sinking series had made yet. The blatant recycling of that foe in particular eventually caused its creator, Masahiro Ito, to write, “I wish I hadn’t designed fxxkin Pyramid Head” on social media.

In short, Silent Hill went the way most series do eventually, with its past eventually becoming its future as it became trapped in a maze of rehashed plot points: referencing pre-made lore and existing signifiers became more important than trying anything new. It’s part of what killed the series.

But thankfully, Silent Hill didn’t stay dead, and eventually, it got the chance to do something fresh again with this year’s excellent Silent Hill f. Set in Japan instead of the United States, the game has very little direct plot or lore overlap with its predecessors, maintaining only what’s necessary. Namely, it keeps those three pillars mentioned earlier: psychological horror with a focus on symbolism, a chilling soundtrack from Akira Yamaoka, and lots of fog. Much like Silent Hill 2, it acts more like the next installment in an anthology series than a direct sequel, reinventing instead of regurgitating. It’s little surprise, then, that it may be the best game in the series since that particular all-timer.

If I had a a nickel for every horror game released between september and october about a teenager rejecting the role society tries to force on her because of her gender, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

I wrote an article in spanish about the incredible similarities between Silent Hill f and Bye Sweet Carole.

(Thematic spoilers for both)

Going to buck the prevailing trend and say, the combat is actually quite a bit of fun. It’s still tense, and the balance of power is not in your favour, as is expected of survival horror, but I’m having a blast choosing when to fight, and when to run. Loved it when I assumed an enemy was dead yet it got back up, and I made a beeline through a storage area to get away, only to run straight into two more creatures in an impossibly tight space. The game lulls you into momentarily believing you have the balance of power, because individual creatures are a pushover. But in true Silent Hill fashion that feeling quickly fades when you’re ambushed by a creature around an awkward to see corner, or when you’re suddenly outnumbered (it doesn’t take many) and your confidence washes away, replaced by the only feelings your lizard brain knows how to process.

The combination of atmosphere and the futility of fighting on lopsided terms is, chef’s kiss, perfection.

Somehow this game irked me more than disappointing games usually do. In my review, I promised I would open up more on my paint points with this game so here we go.

• The combat isn't good. It's sluggish and chaotic. Your absolute worst enemy is your stamina bar. It gets a little better nearing the end of the game with new abilities and better loot (weapons have durability, you constantly need to find new ones). Still I wouldn't call it fun at any point in the game.
• The combat is monotonous. The battles are typically getting one hit in, then retreating, and hoping you don't run out of stamina in the process.
• There's too much combat. There's even many instances where you are required to kill all enemies before your path becomes unobstructed again.
• The enemies have long grab attacks that do tons of damage and, if they hit, all you can do is just watch you get pummeled. No interactivity, just watching the attack animation. Often these grabs come with a seconds notice from around the corner.
• There's enemies hiding in the ceiling who jump down on you if you are close. This happens quite a bit. Really hard to spot beforehand, and not exactly stimulating gameplay to walk around areas looking at the ceiling.
• The enemies take different amount of hits at different times. Some times the same amount of hits kill the enemies, sometimes not. I don't know why.
• There's little enemy variety. Not a sin in itself but exemplifies the annoyment of the next point.
• There's not really a single enemy in the game I liked to fight. All were either hard to read, dodge or defeat without getting too much damage yourself.
• The inventory management is a pain. It's really easy to get a full inventory so you'll have to leave stuff on the ground, which is annoying because...
• There are constant points-of-no-return. If you leave stuff on the ground and go a bit too far ahead, tough luck, those items are left there. At least later on you can run through old places again but late-game finding enough supplies is a lot lesser problem.
• You can't drop stuff on the ground. You need to discard items when you pick up items with a full inventory. There's no item box either. I mean, come on, the resource management is already a pain enough as it is.
• The dungeons are pretty dull and repetitive. Some are total chores to get through. There's pretty much just one dungeon that I liked (second to last one, you loop through variations of the same house).
• The puzzles are fine if repetitive. Except for the scarecrow one. That is just stupid and repetitive.
• The city and its surrounding environments are pretty restricted areas. It's not all bad since there's some optional extra exploration but the game world is mostly narrow paths. The game world just feels outdated by design (you can only walk on paths, and there's silly blockades limiting the areas).
• The game looks good but most of the areas so cramped that you rarely have a good view of the environment. Thus, there's not really visually pleasing, memorable locations.
• Later on in the game, there's pretty huge frame drops. I don't know what caused them since they were situational but still. Also, is it just me or does the game freeze for a few frames before enemies appear?
• Sometimes there's autosaves constantly, sometimes there's long stretches without them. The game of course wants you to focus on save points but because I was dying constantly, I became pretty familiar with the irregular autosave spots.
• The characters act stupid about the game world. The characters in the game are high school kids that are stopped by a broken bridge over a ditch or a chainlink fence.
• The game doesn't have too much of cutscenes but still manages to make some of them feel redundant. How many cutscenes of Rinko being an asshole did we need to see to get the point?
• The voice acting is occasionally pretty dull. The game probably goes for a subdued vibe but for example the performance of the father of the protagonist wasn't really convincing in my ears.
• The dialog is pretty cheesy at times. Of course, plenty of horror games swim in dialog cheese but in this, the strictly serious tone, dull voice acting and uninteresting characters don't do favors for the cheesiness.
• The story was somewhat interesting and unravels slowly by reading the documents scattered around the gameworld but, at the end of the game, I couldn't understand what actually happened. I may be bad at interpreting or the game is purposefully so vague that you need to play it multiple times to understand. And yes, the game does have multiple endings which might reveal more but playing through this just once was more than enough for me. You'll even unlock an even harder difficulty for later playthroughs... I can't even imagine.
• The game just isn't scary to me. There's some nice ideas here and there but mostly I anticipated what was coming. I guess I'm missing the surprising weirdness of the older Silent Hill games, like the mirror room in SH3 or the constant audio-based creepiness of SH2. The creepiest room in this (the one with the huge wooden doll with an eye that follows you) is heavily reminiscent of one in SH4. Nice callback but I would have liked to see more of such kookiness.
• The game doesn't feel like Silent Hill. I know this game is new ground for the series but I can't really understand why this was actually called Silent Hill outside the fact that the composer is Akira Yamaoka and it's a survival horror game in a foggy town.

Whew. Do I feel better venting all those personal annoyances about this quite well-regarded game? Actually... no. And I was supposed to go to sleep already a while ago. Sheesh, what am I doing...

As always, an excellent piece by Grace Benfell:

Is It Accurate to Call Silent Hill f a “Soulslike”?

Since Dark Souls altered the entire video game market in 2011, referring to something as “like Dark Souls” has become a foundational cliché of games criticism. As the genre has become further entrenched as a mainstream staple (encoded with the clumsy nomenclature Soulslike), this tendency has now hardened. It’s been used to describe games as diverse as Jedi: Fallen Order, Hollow Knight, and now Silent Hill f. Reviews from GameSpot, TheGamer, and IGN make at least passing mentions of “soulslikes” and the term has shaped more casual discussions of the game. Fundamentally, this shorthand relies on a slight and shallow idea of what a “soulslike” is and an urge to generalize how Silent Hill f works (and how it makes meaning) in detail. In fairness, more than a few reviews disregard the comparison or don’t mention it at all. But no reviews I’ve read dig into the comparison, exploring its validity or even just where it comes from. So let’s be specific and clinical. In what ways does Silent Hill f resembles a soulslike? How it is different? And if it isn’t a soulslike, what it is?

Read the article to find out her answer, although I will say that there’s a nice little hint in her clever leveraging of Betteridge’s Law.

I can't blame you if you stopped playing after beating the game the first time. Not just because is a natural stopping point but because who want to experience that combat system again...

... but goddamn New Game+ really changes things. Opens up the lore, new areas, new bosses, weapons, collectables. Feels more like a director's cut. But in reality is just Ryukishi07 doing a "Higurashi", where you only can understand what happened if you play it like a hundred times.

I have to say, an hour in... I'm really, really bored. Does it pick up from here?

Maybe it's because I've played Fatal Frame and other games set in a very similar setting, but I'm just not vibing with anything here. It almost seems like a rerun of a show I've seen before.

I'm gonna keep playing for now, but I would really appreciate someone letting me know if it goes somewhere interesting or just stays like this.

Completed my first playthrough of the game so I want to get a few thoughts out.

• What build did you guys do for Hinako your first run? I went for a bit of a dex build myself, using the charm that lowers durability loss when using a light attack. Also, bladed weapons are really strong I came to realize so it just seemed pretty obvious to do so. Might do strength build next.

• I had a bit of a jump scare when one of the calendars you pick up in Hinako's house towards the end of the game said October 6th.

• I swear on my life during the scene with the ring exchange I heard the vine boom sound effect. It completely caught me off guard and I need to double check at some point.

I finished my first playthrough on Hard + Lost in the Fog for puzzles and it was a fairly solid experience on the combat side of things. Was not expecting Hinako to basically be a Souls protagonist and I hate to take the low hanging fruit and use that comparison but c'mon.. the Yarnham side step? The Shrine sections were rather neat though I'm a little disappointed they became very combat oriented towards the end. Maybe disappointed isn't the right word but I was definitely taken back by uh, how Hinako fights later on in those sections. The 2nd boss was really cool though. Despite unlocking Lost in the Fog for action now, I think I'll do Story mode. I like the combat for what it is, but the late-game gets a bit too heavy on combat for my liking. It was a little tedious. Exploring the abandoned town of Ebisugaoka is neat, but I kinda miss the staple of exploring large abandoned complexes that Silent Hill tends to do. Apartments, hospitals, hotels, the sewe- wait not you. I think I would have liked exploring Ebisugaoka more if you didn't have to backtrack so much of it at various points in the game. I loved the middle school, despite it being short, and I just wish it had a bit more of that.

Anyway, I'm a little stunned. To say this game is depressing is a bit of an understatement. There's just so much to unpack and process and I honestly don't think I have the ability to really talk about it in depth. It's not surprising though considering this is very much Ryukishi07's writing. There's quite alot that's hard to stomach, and not only in regards to some of the visceral depictions we have to see (the three rituals? It's like ratatouille except I'm taken back to the nail scene in higurashi and it's all just awful to see and hear) but also the subject matter in general. I'm reminded a bit of Ep3 of Higurashi in particular which still remains some of the most difficult to stomach content I've had to read, especially at the time I read it. As you learn more about not just Hinako, but the other characters and the town, it just gets progressively sadder and depressing. I'll be hopping back in soon as I've come to learn that the full story of the game won't be made clear until I see the rest of the endings it seems. Looking forward to the Answer arc, but knowing Ryukishi07, I'm sure this will have a happy-ish ending.... right?

Couple of notes so far!

• This game is scary! I can tell how scary it is by how much I am manually saving during each area despite a pretty generous auto-save. I've got the jibblies.
• Ebisugaoka Middle School is terrifying. On its face its a lot of hall-crawling and that classic obtuse puzzle solving, but the secret sauce is the long lapses without any enemies... at least, I think there aren't any, but I can never be sure. The slower the burn, the more horrifying it will be when something eventually happens. Tensed are my knuckles whitened around my baseball bat, waiting. Wait, what was that sound? Speaking of—
• Akira Yamaoka's soundscapes have been scaring the shit out of me for 25 years. They lied, this hill isn't silent at all! Some really beautiful compositions too during melodramatic moments. From Slitterhead to Shadows of the Damned to Unsilent Hill f, I'm so thankful for Yamaoka.
• I really wish Hinako would close the door behind her when she enters a room. Close all the doors. Actually, shut the windows too. While you're at it, just don't go outside.
• I'm starting to think something is amiss in this town!