Our review of Silent Hill f, developed by Konami Digital Entertainment. Available now for PS5 (reviewed), Xbox X/S, and Windows.
WHAT IS IT?
The first proper new Silent Hill game in over a decade.
IS IT GOOD?
Yes, and it has some great ideas, even if it’s not as frightening as we might have hoped.
WHO SHOULD PLAY IT?
Harry Mason, James Sunderland, Heather Mason, Henry Townsend.
OF YUREI AND YOKAI
J-Horror aficionados will tell you nothing’s better than a creepy doll, an abandoned shrine, and a ghostly apparition or two.
For years, the primary exponent of this formula was Fatal Frame, Koei Tecmo’s brilliant “helpless horror” series of games featuring hopelessly overwhelmed heroes and heroines trapped in decrepit villages and even more decrepit mansions. For our money, the original Fatal Frame trilogy on PS2 ranks among the greatest and scariest horror games of all time, rivalling even the Resident Evils and Silent Hills of the world.
It’s been a decade since the last full-fledged Fatal Frame – 2015’s middling if creepy Maiden of Black Water – and longer still since the last standalone Silent Hill game. Not counting remakes, delisted demos, and weird TV tie-ins, you’d have to go all the way back to 2012 for Silent Hill: Downpour, the poorly received, long-forgotten seventh entry in the series.
Thirteen years is a long time for Konami to get its act together, and it’s with great delight – particularly for all you Fatal Frame fanatics out there – that I can announce that the latest Silent Hill, mysteriously titled Silent Hill f, has been worth the wait.
It’s not P.T. (of which more in a moment), but it’s a fun, eerie, J-Horror adventure, obviously indebted to Fatal Frame and, in turn, the films (Ringu, Ju-On, Kwaidan) which inspired FF. It’s also not nearly as frightening as it might have been, though it’s certainly nightmarish – mostly in a fun way, though occasionally in disturbing, Severe Content Warnings ways as well.
ZERO PROJECT
Marking a significant departure for this series, Silent Hill f is neither set in the United States, nor in present day. Leaping across the ocean and back in time, this latest entry resituates the action to 1960s Japan, in a sleepy village in the remote Japanese countryside. Familiar elements remain – an eerie fog that descends on a small town, the plague of psychosexual monstrosities it brings with it – but this new setting offers Konami a chance to do something at least superficially different: play around in the space previously inhabited by the likes of Fatal Frame, the underrated Siren games, and FromSoftware’s little-known PS2 title Kuon.
f‘s 1960s setting is also, it’s worth noting, the era of the first wave of Japanese horror cinema, and, if you know where to look, you can occasionally spot the influence of cinematic ghost stories like Onibaba, Kwaidan, and Kuroneko, with their allegorical hauntings and interrogation of gender and sexual norms. It’s probably safe to say that f’s lead writer Ryukishi07 (best known for a niche series of murder mystery “visual novels”) is a fan of these classics and others from fabled directors Kaneto Shindō and Masaki Kobayashi.
F TO PAY RESPECTS
Moment to moment, Silent Hill f plays a lot like Silent Hills past. You’ve got your pipe-wielding protagonist, alternatingly battling and fleeing from biologically impossible monsters, who look (and move) like broken puppets made out of flesh. You’ve also got your cast of nominally helpful non-player-characters, who appear and disappear at suspiciously opportune moments. Finally, in proud Silent Hill fashion, f offers a plethora of puzzles, some reasonable, some plain dumb, and too many of which are interrupted by annoyingly persistent baddies.
On the whole, this new Silent Hill works well. The story is reasonably compelling, the combat tough but fair. I could do with more inventory slots, but that’s a relatively minor gripe. The twists on the formula are also fun: I especially like f’s take on the series’s frequently recurring “Otherworld”, which here resembles a Japanese temple complex, albeit one constructed on dream logic (not unlike the Himuro Mansion of Fatal Frame), and hosting the majority of the game’s puzzles.
But Silent Hill f also suffers from two problems increasingly present in modern horror games: it’s too combat-centric, and its enemies tend to become annoying as the game wears on.
Let’s start with protagonist Hinako Shimizu’s pipe-wielding antics. Across the board, horror games (outside a few noteworthy indie titles) have in recent years tended towards power creep, handing their protagonists bigger and better weaponry with which to mow down the legions of enemies stalking their crumbling mansions and haunted spaceships. Sure, it’s fun, but it also ignores a very simple formula: the bigger the arsenal, the less frightening the foe.
Which brings us to the other f problem: enemies which start off oppressively scary but eventually devolve into irritants through sheer force of repetition. Resident Evil 4 was and remains the prime offender for this: with its hordes of rocket launcher-wielding zombies and relentless action movie set-pieces, RE4 was only intermittently scary, largely abandoning the slow-paced, bone-chilling creep of its predecessors. Silent Hill f, while not nearly as bad (mercifully there are no guns here), still suffers from the lazy trick of trying to overwhelm the player with enemies, rather than deploying them judiciously for scares.
This is especially problematic when it comes to puzzle-solving, as enemies increasingly interfere in your attempts to solve the game’s many nefarious brainteasers. A particularly egregious early example requires that you closely inspect scarecrows to find the “helpful” one. Annoyingly, any “bad” scarecrows will instantly attack you, meaning you can rarely get close enough to look for clues. (I wound up solving this one through brute force, disposing of scarecrow after scarecrow until I could identify the correct one.)
M FOR MATURE
If Silent Hill f invites comparison to Fatal Frame, there’s also another spectre looming over this game, that of the game which would have been the seventh Silent Hill.
It’s become nigh-well impossible to talk Silent Hill, or really any modern horror title, without reference to the infamous Guillermo del Toro/Hideo Kojima collaboration P.T. Back in 2014, P.T. made waves when it was stealth-revealed to be a “playable teaser” for a planned Silent Hill sequel – only to make even bigger waves after Konami cancelled the game and delisted P.T. entirely, robbing players of the opportunity to experience even the demo for the game that never was.
That f does not even try to resemble P.T. is understandable, Konami choosing a different direction which largely resists direct comparison. Still, playing f, it’s hard not to wonder what this game might have been had Kojima, in all his idiosyncratic glory, had been allowed to play around in this sandbox a bit longer. As it is, f lacks the oppressive, helpless atmosphere which marked P.T. (and which has since been so brilliantly replicated in titles like the Canadian-made Visage), trading it instead for a trauma-focused narrative which, while only intermittently scary, deals in some very mature themes which might be distressing for some players. (Seriously, steel yourselves for this one.)
All that said, Silent Hill f is fun, and it has its moments, and I admit that one or two of its jump scares caught me. But it’s not terrifying, in the cower-in-the-corner-and-cry way that only the Fatal Frames and Visages of the world have been able to pull off. It’s not even as scary as the original twofer of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2, the games which more or less invented this psychological-horror subgenre, and which to this day continue to shock players new and old.
If f ever gets a sequel, or if a proper Silent Hill 8 comes along, all I ask is that its protagonist be just as wimpy and cowardly as I would be, if trapped in that haunted town.
***
Final score: 8/10 Kwaidans.
Visit the official website for Silent Hill f here.
