One Avocadoan’s journey delving into the realm of survival horror.

Note: Due to how new this game is, I will do the best I can to avoid including any major spoilers.

Before preparing for this column series, I knew even less about the Silent Hill franchise than the Resident Evil series. Pervasive fog and Pyramid Head were just about the only elements I recognized. It is, from how I now understand it, a series with a complex and rocky history. The first four entries were created in the 90s and early 2000s by a development team known as Team Silent, part of Konami, and received critical acclaim (although the fourth is apparently the most divisive of them). After that, Konami began contracting with Western studios to make further entries, and the reception began to trend increasingly downward. After the mixed reception to 2012’s Silent Hill: Downpour, the series went on an eleven-year hiatus. During that time, a demo for a planned new game, Silent Hills (a collaboration between Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro), was briefly released. The demo, titled ‘P.T.’, was highly acclaimed but the full game was soon cancelled and P.T. was removed from digital storefronts.

Suddenly, in the early 2020s, Konami began to announce a number of Silent Hill projects that were in the development pipeline. Among these was a remake of Silent Hill 2, which released in 2024 to highly positive reception and appears to have reinvigorated interest in the franchise, and a game known as Silent Hill f. Taking place in Japan in the 1960s, Silent Hill f was to be the first game in the series to be set outside of America (and the only one to neither take place in nor mention the town of Silent Hill, Maine). This was unsurprisingly a controversial change, from what I can gather, as many fans believed that the town of Silent Hill is such a vital component of the series that it cannot be removed without altering the entire feel of the franchise. Even after the game released in September 2025, there continues to be a contingent of Silent Hill fans who say, for various reasons, that Silent Hill f is not a ‘true’ Silent Hill game. As I haven’t played any other Silent Hill games yet, I cannot really speak to my take on that argument at this point in time. (Although, through my research, it appears there are a few major and iconic components of the games that show up time and again throughout the series, including a largely abandoned small town, pervasive fog, and psychological torment of the protagonist. All of these are definitely present in Silent Hill f.)

Given some of the clear departures from the rest of the franchise, it may seem odd that I chose Silent Hill f as my introduction to the series. I have both Silent Hill 2 Remake and Silent Hill 4: The Room in the list of games I plan to play for this column series, so why wouldn’t I just start with one of those? There are a few reasons. First of all, I wanted to have the chance to play the game without the baggage of the rest of the series. In other words, I wanted to see what it was really like without having to constantly think about whether it is ‘Silent Hill-enough’. Second, I haven’t had much opportunity in recent years to play a big, newly released game so soon after launch and I thought it would be a fun experience. And third, I just thought the game looked very interesting and wanted to know more. It certainly did turn out to be interesting, a fairly unique survival horror experience with a lot of things that worked really well and some that I struggled with. It was actually kind of tough to pin down my overall opinion on the game for that reason; I ended up retooling this write-up multiple times as my thoughts about it shifted over the time since I finished the game.

Silent Hill f follows Hinako, a high school student in the sleepy town of Ebisugaoka. After an argument with her father, who seems to be something of an abusive drunk, Hinako storms out to go see her friend Shu. Upon meeting up with Shu (who gives her some more pills for her frequent headaches) and two of her other friends, Sakuko and Rinko, the streets suddenly begin to fill with fog and red spider lilies sprout up all around them. Realizing something large is lurking in the haze, Hinako and her friends flee to safety and plot their escape from the now monster-infested village. Along the way, Hinako periodically loses consciousness and finds herself in a strange otherworldly temple called the Dark Shrine, where a handsome man in a fox mask beckons her to complete a series of disturbing rituals.

One of the first things I noticed upon starting up the game is just how gorgeous the visuals are and how much they impact the game’s atmosphere. The winding streets of Ebisugaoka are so lovingly detailed, a maze of houses, stairs, and bridges that combine with the ever-present fog to disorient and confuse the player. Then there are the rice fields, with their vast openness that should be more comforting with fewer places for enemies to hide but due to the obscuring fog are actually quite anxiety-inducing and seem like they go on forever. Most locations in Hinako’s world are cloaked in dull, neutral colors like gray and beige. I might find this a boring choice in another game, but I thought it worked well here. It particularly helped the red of the spider lilies to really pop whenever they showed up and to give them an unearthly feel. Even the enemies have great visual design. I will avoid too much discussion of enemies from the mid- and late-game, but I will say that I think the mannequins and the scarecrows are instantly iconic with their jittery, halting movements and frozen expressions.

Interestingly, I ended up finding the environment of the Dark Shrine somewhat less resonant than the town despite seeming like it should be right up my alley. It certainly is very creepy and well-designed visually, with the constant darkness, oppressive stillness, and grand and ancient architecture, but something holds it back for me. I think it might at least in part come down to cultural differences. As has been noted many times by many people, some of the best horror is able to take the mundane and make it feel ‘wrong’ or unsettling. Hinako’s village certainly uses a specific style of Japanese architecture, but it is undeniably still a rural town – something we have in spades here in America. The fields, the school, the general store, they’re all different in some ways from what we’d see here but not unrecognizably so. There’s a familiarity to it all, a familiarity that works in the game’s favor once the fog and the monsters begin to creep in. The Dark Shrine, by contrast, is more directly steeped in Japanese mythology and symbolism, something I am less familiar with. I can appreciate it from a more detached perspective, but I struggle a bit to form an emotional connection to the same extent as with the village.

I was surprised at how linear the progression felt, particularly in the Ebisugaoka segments. I’m used to survival horror games having a large focus on exploring areas and trying to find the best route forward. While that sort of gameplay is present to an extent in the Dark Shrine and a few areas in Hinako’s world (notably a couple mid- and late-game dungeon-like places), there are long stretches of time where there is really only one direction to go. Although I was disappointed that we can’t explore more of the town and its surrounding environments at will, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing; it keeps the momentum moving forward and the pacing relatively tight. There are also still quite a few puzzles to solve, a hallmark of the genre, and on the whole I found them to be quite good. There’s a scarecrow puzzle relatively early on that I particularly loved for being both challenging and very unsettling. It should be noted that the game allows you to choose difficulty settings for the puzzles and combat separately, which is something I haven’t seen before. It was quite nice to be able to set the puzzles to hard while keeping combat on the standard difficulty.

Speaking of combat, that seems to be one of the most controversial parts of the game – and the part on which I most struggle to come to a decisive opinion. Unlike every other survival horror game I’ve played, which either use only firearms for combat or a combination of firearms and melee weapons, combat in Silent Hill f is entirely melee-based. This significantly alters the combat philosophy; whereas in other games you generally want to keep as much distance as you can between yourself and the enemies while you fire and reload, here you’ll need to instead find ways to get in close while avoiding damage as much as possible. It’s a very different tightrope-walking act, and quite an anxiety-inducing one. One of the biggest complaints I’ve frequently seen about the combat gameplay is that it is clunky. While I do feel like some of that is overblown, there is definitely some awkwardness there. With the way Hinako swings her weapons it can be difficult at times to properly judge timing or distance. There were so many times where I came up just short or started a fraction of a second too late and was punished badly for it. There are a lot of additional mechanics thrown into the mix as well – heavy vs. light swings, focusing, countering, stamina, sanity, etc. It’s an interesting system, and I’m certain others have had fun playing around with it, but to me it all feels a little more overcomplicated than it needs to be for this kind of game. 

Weapon durability and variety is a big factor in combat as well. You can find all sorts of items lying around that can be used as weapons – steel pipes, baseball bats, axes, kitchen knives, etc. Each type has different speed, strength, and durability. Steel pipes are your default weapons, good but not great in all three categories. Axes are strong and durable but slow. Kitchen knives are fast and (weirdly) powerful but fragile. I was initially worried about the durability aspects, concerned that my weapons would break at an inconvenient time and leave me defenseless. Luckily, I didn’t have many issues with that. You can have three weapons at once in your inventory, meaning you’ll usually have at least some backups. Weapons are fairly easy to find, and you can also collect toolkits that can be used to repair damaged weapons. I will say that weapon durability is a mechanic I’m typically not a fan of, but it works for me in a game like this. It seems to me like a clever way of emulating the ammo scarcity of firearm-based games like Resident Evil Remake or Signalis.

A major part of the combat loop in a lot of survival horror games is the choice between fighting off foes and attempting to avoid or circumvent them entirely. This choice is definitely present in Silent Hill f as well, particularly in the first half of the game. This is facilitated by Hinako’s unusually powerful dodge ability. The way the mechanic was incorporated does feel a little out of place – Hinako is a teenager who has never had combat experience before, and yet here she is zooming out of the way like it’s nothing – but it is very handy both during combat and to get around enemies altogether. The further you get into the game, though, the more forced combat situations you will encounter (where progression is gated behind defeating all of the enemies in the room or a particular area). This is especially the case in the second half, and frequently involved some of the tankiest enemies in the game. These sections became quite a slog for me and made the previously discussed clunkiness of the combat mechanics more evident.

One other thing that intrigued me about Silent Hill f’s gameplay is the way it made use of elements typically associated with RPGs, particularly in its customization options. Hinako has three different stats – health, sanity, and stamina. (Stamina is used up when running or swinging a weapon. Sanity is used up when focusing during battle or as the result of certain enemy attacks or environmental hazards. Both automatically refill over time.) At various points Hinako can trade in Faith (essentially the game’s currency) to upgrade any of these stats. This can be done multiple times, but it is unlikely that you would get enough Faith during a first run to fully upgrade everything. This requires you to make a lot of decisions about what stat upgrades are most urgent, something that has a very RPG-feel to it. There are also a whole host of charms called Omamori that you can find that each have different effects. One can decrease enemies’ lines of sight, making it easier to lose them when they are on your tail, while others can increase you health, sanity, or stamina capacity or have other effects. You can generally only have a small number of Omamori equipped at any given time, so there is a lot of opportunity to use different combinations to tailor your experience.

From a story and thematic perspective, there are many layers to the game. Part of this is due to the separation between the village segments and the Dark Shrine segments, which make use of somewhat different imagery and symbolism and don’t fully connect until near the end. The way this complexity unfolds and is handled makes the story one of the strongest parts of the game, in my view. Due to the very deliberate choice to have a young female protagonist living in 1960s Japan, much of the game’s themes revolve around the oppressive way women were treated at that time (which unfortunately is still relevant around the world today) and society’s pressure to conform. To say that this is taken in some dark directions is an understatement. At times it can feel like the dialogue is lacking a bit in subtlety, but sometimes bluntness is necessary when talking about things like this. And in any case, the developers do a pretty strong job of conveying these themes through things like enemy design as well.

It is important to note that playing through once will not give you the complete story. There is only one possible ending that you can get on your first run which, while certainly providing some answers as to what is going on, does not give any true sense of closure. There are four more endings that can be encountered on subsequent playthroughs, three of which are very important to grasping the totality of the story. Even more than that, though, from what I’ve heard each playthrough has somewhat different dialogue, additional cutscenes, and different final boss battles as well. As someone who has noted before that he doesn’t like playing the same game multiple times in a row without taking considerable time off in between, I have mixed feelings about this. I only played through the game once and then watched videos of the remaining endings, and while I think the concept is really cool and like the way the endings build on each other to tell a more complex and satisfying tale, I wish there was some kind of way they could have given a more complete story on the first run for people like me that get burned out easily.

Overall, Silent Hill f is quite an unusual game compared to the other survival horror games I’ve played through so far for this column, both in terms of story structure and gameplay mechanics. It does a masterful job of creating and maintaining its unsettling atmosphere and keeping players engaged in its storytelling, but it is let down at times by its cumbersome combat and forced battles that can turn the second half into something of a slog. (Which can especially be an issue given the intention was to make players play through the game multiple times to get the full story.) In any case, I liked the game a lot and am glad I gave it a try. It has only further heightened my interest in exploring the Silent Hill series.

Survival horror and adjacent games I hope to cover (in no particular order) – Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (original), Resident Evil 4 (original), Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, Resident Evil: Village, Silent Hill 2 Remake, Silent Hill 4: The Room, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Amnesia: Rebirth, Amnesia: The Bunker, Tormented Souls, Alien Isolation, Yomawari: Midnight Shadows, The Evil Within, The Evil Within 2, Alisa, Dead Space (2008), Alone in the Dark 1, Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, Curse: Eye of Isis, Dino Crisis, Darkwood, ObsCure, Cold Fear, Lempo, Stasis, Stasis Bone Totem, System Shock 1 and 2, Metro 2033, Look Outside, Fear the Spotlight, Heartworm, Little Goody Two-Shoes, SOMA, Empty Shell

My Current Survival Horror Ranking:

1. Resident Evil (HD Remaster) (9.5/10)
2. Signalis (9/10)
3. Resident Evil 2 Remake (9/10)
4. Crow Country (8.5/10)
5. Silent Hill f (8/10)

Up Next: Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999)

Header image courtesy GamesRadar.