Idle Thoughts

What does that “f” mean? Silent Hill five? Silent Hill flower? Silent Hill fox? (★★★☆☆)

Silent Hill is back, baby! It only took twenty years. I suppose it depends on how you count, but Silent Hill f is the most authentic new “Silent Hill” game since Silent Hill 4 in 2004. Time flies, huh?

I’ve had the brilliant idea of looking up fan forums and, of course, the game is accused of not being a “real” Silent Hill. If anything, the game’s fundamental flaw is that it hews a little bit too close to the classic survival horror formula of the golden era of the genre. Fans, what do they know, eh? But let’s back up a little.

I can describe my enjoyment of the game as a parabola. The game doesn’t start very strong. It confusingly asks you to select between “Story” and “Hard” combat. Story is usually a euphemism for baby mode and hard is, well, harder than whatever normal is supposed to be.

Most of the early dialogue is flat and monotonous. Hinako, the main character, and her friends are obviously talking about something very important happening, but it’s not explained what. They all know what it is, but you, the player, don’t. That’s excellent storytelling: you don’t need supernatural mumbo-jumbo to create a plot twist, just something left unsaid between friends. Still, the delivery of the dialogue feels off, like one character completely “forgetting” someone he was running away with just ten minutes ago. It doesn’t help that you never actually come in contact with another character outside of cutscenes. Characters are always “one step ahead of you” or just disappear for no particular reason. You can sort of frame this as Hinako being symbolically alone, but it’s really a cheap way not to program any NPC interactions.

Also, you get the saddest “broken bridge out of town” that I’ve ever seen to signify that the characters can’t leave . At least Siren had the decency to replace the entire fricking outside world with an ocean of blood.

Early on, you get your first weapon. It has durability. The combat, exclusively melee, is vaguely soulslike in that you have a stamina bar, a dodge with invincibility frames, light and heavy attacks, plus ripostes. So far, so good, but there’s also a confusing “sanity” bar. It’s kind of a second HP bar, except it’s also a MP bar for slow-mo counters and special attacks. It has “current” and “max” values that go down independently, except a lot of these mechanics don’t even apply to Story difficulty. Uh, okay? What kind of game neuters the only original mechanic it has on its “intended” difficulty setting? Your starting inventory is small, so you constantly feel the need to return to a save point shrine to donate your items for “faith”, basically experience points. This hinders the already slow pace of the game. Exploration in SHf can only be defined as “classic” Silent Hill: claustrophobic corridors where you need to rub against the walls like someone who has an erotic fixation on doorknobs, all to find the “real” doors. I admit I just dropped the game at first. Silksong won’t 100% itself, you know?

But after a while, things start to click. Once you get used to it, it turns out SHf has the best combat of any game in the series. Considering all Silent Hill games have pretty mediocre combat, it’s almost damning with faint praise, but there you go. Eventually, you accumulate enough equipable charms to create what can be generously described as a “character build” for different situations. Of course, all of this is secondary. What you’re really here for is the psychological horror.

Now I’m not someone who judges a horror game solely on the fact that I was “scared” or not. Gosh, most horror fans are grown adults that have seen it all already; don’t tell me you’re still scared of harmless images? No, horror is as much a stylistic exercise as any other genre. It requires building tension, defying expectations, that sort of stuff. With that being said, at first I thought the question “Is SHf a real Silent Hill game or not” was just rage bait for nerds. But then I realized that what makes SHf a good horror game and what makes it a “real” Silent Hill game are one and the same. If for no other reason, it’s because the Silent Hill formula has become a blueprint for many horror games. So here goes (with as few spoilers as possible):

WHY SILENT HILL f IS A “REAL” SILENT HILL

– Silent Hill: Let’s start with the big one. I guess it’s not much of a Silent Hill game if it’s not set in the town of Silent Hill, huh? Considering everything else I’ll describe below, I don’t think this is such a deal breaker. And yet… Silent Hill f is set in the Japanese town of Ebisugaoka, which apparently can be translated as Ebisu’s Hill. Who is Ebisu? He’s the Japanese god, or perhaps patron saint, of fishermen. Why is a mountain village named after the god of fishing? Weird… Anyway, He’s also deaf. When you don’t hear anything, it’s silence. It’s the hill of someone in silence. Get it? Silent Hill.

– Visual motif: Your horror has to come with a specific flavor visually. Silent Hill really leaned into rust and blood for a long time. Nowadays, you probably need to aim for something a little bit less obvious. To name another random example, Kuon was about a world infected by silkworms: white thread everywhere, cocoons, that sort of stuff. Silent Hill f makes its horror about… flowers? Specifically, red spider lilies. The big bad of the game is constantly followed by weird, fleshy flowery growths also reminiscent of coral. It’s an audacious choice. Horror doesn’t usually rhyme with flowers and fleshy pink. Some of the death scenes are also clearly trying to trigger your trypophobia. I don’t think any game has used that specific trick yet. Ew.

– The Otherworld: One of the defining elements of Silent Hill is being thrust into another version of the world, except even worse. Instead of being a blood and gore alter ego of reality, the otherworld is now a Japanese temple. At first, that seems a little bit tame, maybe even cliché. This is entirely missing the point. This otherworld is not about creepy stuff happening around you, it’s about what Hinako is forced to do. Or is she forced? What is her mindset in these segments and why? The answer to that question is basically what SHf is all about.

– Ambiguousness:  Is what you’re seeing really what’s happening to the characters? This has been an element in every game of the series, although contrary to what some may think, having an unreliable narrator protagonist, as in Silent Hill 2, is the exception and not the rule for the series. Anyway, it’s not much of a spoiler to point out that the game isn’t really about monsters showing up out of nowhere and attacking a sleepy Japanese village. Some of the notes you find say conflicting things. Some characters seem to think Hinako is already dead. What is going on here, really?

– The supernatural: As ambiguous as the story may be, Silent Hill is never so simple as “this is all just a dream, duh”. There are supernatural forces at play in the town of Silent Hill or Ebisugaoka, perhaps even opposing forces. Maybe these otherworldy influences are the catalyst for people having mental breakdowns, or maybe not. There’s a lot in SHf about foxes. I’m sure they are powerfully symbolic animals in Japan, even religious figures, but from a Western mindset it feels a bit silly. But hey, I’m game. It still feels more authentic than whatever made up gobbledygook the cult stuff was in the original Silent Hills.

– Symbolism: Much ado is made about the monsters in Silent Hill “symbolizing” some fear or trauma of the main character. While it’s an interesting idea, I always felt the point is overwrought. I mean, here the monsters are a bunch of wobbly women with knives and fat sacks of dead flesh. You don’t need any special trauma to find them horrific. SHf has a wonderfully illustrated journal where Hinako gives her thoughts on every monster. It’s a bit ham-fisted in that it gives away the “symbolism”, but this entry about a drum-shaped enemy is really good: “It tries to cancel out any noise with its loud voice and banging. That’s how it’s always been.”

But the symbolism is about more than just monsters. It’s about the fact that the places you visit in the game are not mere accidents. It’s about the game coming full circle, figuratively and literally. It’s about the puzzles being a reflection of the characters.

Even the achievements are in on it. They all have a Ukiyo-e woodblock look and the wording of the main trophies is a little bit creepy in and of itself. The best part is that they all have a little sparrow on them. Hinako is symbolized as a baby sparrow or, more accurately, a fledgling. So a trophy like “Coming home to roost” is itself a double entendre, hey triple entendre when you think about it.

Speaking of symbolism, flowers always symbolize something. The language of flowers is a whole thing. In Japan, red spider lillies are ominous. They represent death, sad memories and last goodbyes. Hmm…

– The pivot: This is what really sets apart classy horror from the schlocky stuff. As I said elsewhere, the pivot is when horror switches to appealing to another emotion than just fear. Once the truth is laid bare, it turns out that what the game is really about is not whacking monsters with a steel pipe. It’s really about much more down to earth emotions. The ol’ human condition. Coming to terms with difficult choices. Nostalgia even, perhaps. You’ll see.

– Multiple endings: Another Silent Hill staple. Different choices lead to different endings. I suppose you need “something” to get the fans to argue about what’s the canonical ending. Multiple endings give an incentive to replay the game, perhaps even obfuscates the truth even more. But this is where the problems start…

Replaying the game a second time is surprisingly fun, especially with the newly unlocked hardest setting. The second way through the game is about 30% new: additional areas, new files to read, new items, new cutscenes (although the difference between two scenes is often barely noticeable). There’s a new subquest to track down an important item. Some areas get streamlined and keeping all your upgrades speeds things up a lot.

But you are expected to beat the game five times in total to get all the endings. That’s a lot to ask for. That’s when the parabola of enjoyment comes back down. Not much new happens the third time through the game. Even less after that. Fights become slogs. Only a few cutscenes near the very end differ. The rub is that these scenes are just interesting enough that you need to see all endings to really understand the plot. They’re not just “the character decides to turn left instead of right at the end”. In fact, some of the most revelatory scenes about what’s really going on are at the end of the most complicated ending path. This is of course a massive flaw. If your story is so damn important, don’t hide the best bits behind hours upon hours of repeated content. At least the game makes the ending requirements crystal clear and not some “get hurt, but not too much” crap. To be fair, the Silent Hill 2 remake had even more endings and more inconsequential ones at that. So yeah, this kind of repetition is pretty much par for the course for golden-era survival horror, roughly the PS2 era. But that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?

Something in the classic design should have been adapted here. I’m still waiting for that open-world Silent Hill where the ending depends on where you decide to go. Ebisugaoka is already microscopic. I have no idea why on top of that 80% of roads and alleys need to be blocked. Such a concept, of course, would have required a complete rework of the game. Failing that, I dunno, chapter select? Maybe even more shortcuts? Or perhaps just drop the old classic survival horror act and try something else. It’s not quite clear what the cancelled “P.T.” Silent Hill was going to be about, but it was promising to be bold. While its execution is solid in an old-fashioned way, SHf is not bold.

Psychological horror thrives on the unexpected. It’s hard to find SHf all that special in an era awash with amateur horror games of every stripe, some better than others, but none asking for 30 hours to get to the point, and especially when every kind of mechanic has been turned into a horror game, even slot machines and fishing.

With SHf, Silent Hill has proved that it could be as good as it used to be 20 years ago when it set the bar for the entire horror genre. But a lot of stuff has happened since then. Now the real challenge is to set the bar once more, even higher. Maybe with the next entry. Silent Hill s?