It’s been a while since we’ve gotten a new Silent Hill, so I was cautiously excited to see Silent Hill f’s announcement given the current state of Konami. However, the recent release of Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater helped calm my nerves in regards to what it could turn out to be. And now having played it, I can say that Silent Hill f definitely moves the series in a bold direction, even if it lacks a sense of overall cohesion that is a core part of a Silent Hill experience.
Taking place in 1960s Japan, you play as Hinako, a troubled girl living with a family that doesn’t really appreciate her: her father is abusive, the mother never really makes her presence known, with the only real comfort being her older sister, who used to be the protector, but since marrying has left the house and Hinako to her fate. Living in a backwater town that has long since past its heyday, it’s no surprise that one day she finds it to be flooded with the familiar fog, those of us who know what it’s about is bound to bring.
Along with her friends, Hinako finds herself battling all sorts of hideous creatures as they look for a way out, and in doing that, end up falling into themselves, and discovering the horribleness that stems from within. In this, Silent Hill f does a masterful job at exploring the many issues that teens and early adults face when growing up, such as jealousy, platonic relationships, and the many aspects of friendships within the ever-shifting minds of youth. As Hinako digs deeper in her journey, the uglier it most definitely gets.
The weakest part of the game is easily your interaction with the many adversaries you face along the way. The melee combat is limited at best, and for as athletic as the protagonist is given her background in track, she’s slow to attack, with long windups between hits, which is certainly not an issue for her enemies. There is a more powerful attack she can use by spending some of her sanity meter to charge it up, and that, on the normal difficulty setting, is enough to stun monsters for long enough for the girl to get some wacks in with whatever improvized weapon she happens to be holding at the time.
Avoiding direct hits comes into play the same way it did in the Silent Hill 2 Remake, where you can do so by timing it correctly, giving you room to squeeze out of the way and have a bit of an opening for a counter. It works well enough but can be a little tough to pull off, so I ended up just continuously dodging for as long as her stamina could muster, getting pretty much the same result, or as serviceable as it could be.
You’ll be doing plenty of fighting throughout the game, making this the most combat-heavy out of the series by far. Surely, while most encounters can be avoided in your comings and goings in town, there are moments where you don’t have a choice but to duke it out with the most hideous that Hell or whatever dimension they come from have to offer. So it’s a good thing that there are a number of items you can consume in order to better the odds of survival.
But at the same time, you might want to save them, because most serve the double purpose of being sources of faith, which can be spent in shrines in order to level up that meter and allow you to upgrade Hinako’s stats, or to buy emblems that give her an edge during play, like obscuring her enemies’ view allowing a quick escape in a pinch, for instance. These demand quite an amount of faith, making for the need of balance between consuming and spending them at the shrine.
For all that it annoys with its combat, Silent Hill f almost makes up for in sheer ambiance. Hats off to developer NeoBards Entertainment’s treatment in this regard, managing to make a quiet Japanese town from decades ago feel like the most dreadful place on Earth, dripping with goo and deadly red vegetation everywhere. The creature design is also to be commended or abhorred, depending on how you look at it, with some of the most disturbing imagery in a game I’ve played.
Still, for as much as it’s all scary, there comes a point where the videogame of it all comes to play. Difficulty is split between easier and harder modes for both the action and puzzles, allowing you to tailor your experience as needed. I went with hard mode for the latter and easy for the former, and even so, had somewhat of a challenging time making through fights for the reasons noted, not really finding a point where I felt confident in my time playing through Silent Hill f.
Even so, the puzzles proved to be a much welcome distraction, at least in regards to the ones that don’t require a whole lot of backtracking, which happened in a specific point of the story, driving me absolutely nuts in annoyance. On the whole, this is a facet of the game that works really well regardless, and taking its progression as a whole, it’s not that big of an issue given the game’s other glaring issues.
If you take the problems with combat and that lack of cohesion I talked about in the opening, that stems from the predictability that hinges on the constant repetition of fights, it absolutely takes away from what is otherwise a thrilling and absolutely disgusting psychological ride. Silent Hill f is surely a step in the right direction, and for as much as it’s not taking place in the town proper, it certainly has most of the elements that make Silent Hill… Silent Hill.
