Grace Befell with another great Silent Hill f essay:

Silent Hill f Is the Series’ Most Profound Reckoning with the Horror of Home

Whether they work or not, a home is the domain of a woman. It is the place she is expected to hold and maintain, a place she may inherit from her mother, or a place where her father or husband may trap her. All people have homes, or at least a place where they sleep, but women are expected, if not required, to be its angels. In 1999, players first visited Silent Hill as outsiders. Harry Mason was waylaid in the town after a car accident. His adopted daughter goes missing. Over time, he discovers that she is from Silent Hill originally. The occult forces in the town called her home. Throughout the series, men are foreigners drawn to Silent Hill by the women who belong there. Silent Hill is a place men visit, but it’s where women live.

Throughout the series, Silent Hill stands in for what we must confront but cannot bring ourselves to. Because of the looming shadow of Silent Hill 2, people most often understand that to be about grief and trauma. But it also respresents, especially in the cases of Heather Mason and Hinako Shimizu, the forces that exist outside of our control. We are all born to a home. Many people remain there for all their lives. But whether we escape or remain, we must linger over what that place has made of us and what we will make of it. Silent Hill is a long exercise in recurring confrontations with that truth.

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.