A Beautifully Crafted Horror Game

What makes a Silent Hill game a Silent Hill game? According to Silent Hill f, the specific trappings aren’t important. The newest venture from Konami and developer NeoBards Entertainment focuses on two trademark features: endless waves of fog and acute psychological suffering. As it turns out, that might be all you need.

Set in a Japanese mountain town in the 1960s, Silent Hill f tells the story of a schoolgirl named Shimizu Hinako. Hinako flees a family quarrel to venture into town, where she meets up with several acquaintances. She takes comfort in seeing her closest childhood friend, a boy named Shu, but an undercurrent of tension is interrupted by the start of supernatural happenings. A red bloom is spreading, beautiful and deadly in equal measure.

Silent Hill F Is A Tale Of Two Worlds

Not Every Shrine Means Safety

Hinako speaking to one of her friends in Silent Hill f

From this point onward, Silent Hill f establishes two alternating gameplay loops. In what appears to be reality, Hinako navigates the foggy town, following her friends as they search for safety. In another, more dreamlike space, she’s guided through a somber world of shrines by a mysterious figure in a fox mask. As the game progresses, those lines begin to blur.

Both worlds are intricate mazes, scrawled out piece by piece in an elegant map system. In classic Silent Hill fashion, trying doors and discovering key areas annotates the map with red markings. The cramped linearity of the level design means you won’t need to check the map much at first, but it becomes increasingly useful once the game starts breaking out area-wide puzzles.

These puzzles, which often focus on deciphering vague clues or finding missing keys, are generally some of Silent Hill f‘s best elements. If you set the puzzle difficulty to “Hard,” most challenges provide just enough resistance to make you feel satisfied without slowing you down for long. Across the course of a ten-hour game, there was only one notable puzzle that I didn’t particularly like, which is a pretty strong track record.

Laborious Combat Works For Silent Hill F

Less Fun Means More Frights

Hinako holding a metal pipe as she faces an enemy in Silent Hill f

Hinako also faces a rotating selection of monsters, which routinely shuffle out of the fog to spring at her in lurching attacks. Her only weapons are the ones that she can gather — metal pipes, kitchen knives, or even sledgehammers — which all break after enough attacks. Rather than feeling inconvenient, the mechanic increases the tension of conserving supplies and picking your fights.

Silent Hill f feels old-school in a lot of ways, and the combat is one of them. Despite incorporating features like slo-mo dodges, whacking enemies with makeshift weapons is ponderous and repetitive. On some level, this resistance feels necessary. If you make the fights too dynamic, the threat of monsters will feel too fun.

The combat does start to wear a bit toward the end of the game, and it would be nice if a couple of enemies hit harder and went down faster. I haven’t tried out the tougher combat difficulty, but I’m interested in seeing whether it feels more compelling or more exhausting.

Story & Art Are The Stars Of The Show

Impeccable Direction Carries Silent Hill F

Silent Hill F Shu holding Hinako in his lap

Silent Hill f‘s real focus is its story, which nudges Hinako closer to the breaking point with every new development. The narrative wrestles with loaded concepts, emphasizing generational trauma and the pressures Hinako feels as a girl uninterested in what her society and family want her to be.

Within the scope of a single playthrough, Silent Hill f leaves plenty of room for questions, and the basic ending is relatively abrupt. New Game Plus mode opens up the opportunities for four additional endings, as well as some new story material along the way. You’re not going to get a comprehensive experience in one go, but what you do get is still interesting.

As for scares, the game relies on a relatively limited set of techniques. The sound design does a lot of heavy lifting, and you’ll get jumped by some enemies if you don’t pay enough attention to it. The rest of the fear factor leans on cruelty. Hinako is forced to take the roles of both perpetrator and victim in a succession of violent acts, which become increasingly concerning as the dreamlike world edges closer to reality.

It didn’t ultimately scare me much, but I consistently appreciated Silent Hill f‘s presentation. Well-directed cutscenes are judicious about what to show. You never see its most grotesque moments directly, but you’re very aware that they happen. It also draws from a nice bag of cinematic tricks, from dolly zooms at Dutch angles to a gradual pull in focal length that makes an ominous hallway feel even more isolating.

Silent Hill f‘s lighting feels much more bespoke than most Unreal Engine 5 games I’ve seen, and there’s consistent artistry in the way it renders characters against the fog and red bloom. It also runs better than most. While I still experienced some stuttering, I was pushing my system to run it on max settings, rather than being forced to lean on DLSS upscaling.

Silent Hill f visual glitch showing color lines rendering on each side of the screen.

The one big caveat to my experience was a graphical glitch where the screen would occasionally flick back and forth between a standard display and the kind of image shown above. I relayed the issue to the team through PR, but I haven’t received any updates. Hopefully, this is a relatively isolated problem that will be fixed quickly, but I might advise waiting if it turns out to be widespread.

Silent Hill F Stakes A New Claim

Konami Is Finally Moving Forward

Hinako with a sledgehammer in Silent Hill f

I appreciate Silent Hill f more as an aesthetic object than as a succession of scares, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Wandering through the fog offers a compelling cadence of gameplay, and drip-fed narrative context maintains a consistent sense of intrigue.

The resulting experience doesn’t inject the horror genre with many true innovations, but it does reinvent the Silent Hill series after a long wait for a proper new entry. Whether Konami returns to the town of Ebisugaoka or leaves it behind as a one-off diversion, Silent Hill f builds a solid foundation for the franchise’s future and stands strong in its own right.