After a tumultuous few years, Konami are back with a new Silent Hill, and it’s surprisingly good, combining creepy visuals, an interesting multi-layered story, and methodical, stamina-based combat I think soulslike fans will enjoy.
It’s always tricky to talk about the plot of a Silent Hill game without giving too much away, so I’ll keep it short by saying that the story takes place in the 1960s, and you play as Shimizu Hinako, a Japanese high school student in the mountain town of Ebisugaoka. All is not well in the Shimizu household, and Hinako must contend with her abusive father, subservient mother, and the ostracism of her older sister.
The familiar dense fog soon makes its appearance, though this time it’s accompanied by deadly red spider lilies that kill or mutate everything they touch. After narrowly avoiding being killed herself, Hinako sets out to find her high school friends and escape the town.
The change of location may irk some Silent Hill purists, but I actually enjoyed leaving the American mining town behind for the ancient Japanese shrines, water-logged rice fields, and the 1960s shops and houses. It’s a change that also allows for the exploration of themes that are intrinsically linked to Japanese culture such as honour, duty, and conformity to social norms at the expense of freedom and independence.
I’ve always enjoyed the NPCs in Silent Hill games, you’re never quite sure if you can trust them or not, and Silent Hill f is no exception, with a trio of high school friends who can go from kind and trusting to evasive and controlling in the blink of an eye. When the game in typical Silent Hill fashion transitions to its alternate reality dark world you’ll meet up with another mysterious character wearing a Fox Mask, who by all appearances seems to want to help Hinako despite messages left by her childhood doll warning he is not to be trusted.
The combat is probably what will draw most soulslike fans to the game, and it’s definitely taken its inspiration from the genre, with attacks, dodges and parries that are governed by stamina, and sanity gauge that can be used to slow time and set up powerful attacks. Weapons are breakable, but there are so many lying around it’s not really an issue. In fact, the only problem is that most of the time it’s just not worth fighting the enemies at all. They don’t drop anything, and don’t even give Hinako any xp, as all levelling in the game is done by offering up items at a save point.
This means that most of the time, the best solution is just to run past the smiling scarecrows and knife-wielding mannequins to conserve both weapon durability and healing items. Apart from a couple of arenas and a handful of bosses, I ended up barely killing anything throughout the entire game, which is a shame as the combat was actually pretty fun.
All that remains to talk about are the puzzles, and I found these to be a bit hit and miss. There are some switch-based mazes that were fine, as were some of the codes and ciphers, but a few I found harder to decrypt, including a scarecrow maze that was made even more difficult by some poorly translated clues, and a puzzle box with obtuse glyphs I couldn’t work out. Overall, however, I found these quieter, enemy-free sections to be interesting, as they often helped lift the veil on a part of the game’s mysterious story, especially a late-game ritual sequence that will have more squeamish players hiding behind the couch.
Silent Hill f impresses with its eery red-tinged aesthetic, well drawn characters, and dark story. The combat, however, may disappoint some soulslike fans, as while it remains functional, the fact that it’s not rewarding in the slightest begs to question why it should be engaged with at all.
Despite this minor niggle, I still had a great time with the game, and while it never quite managed to evoke the same sense of horror and dread I felt playing through the first four games twenty years ago, it definitely earns its place in the series and I’d certainly recommend it to anyone interested in Japanese horror.
