Silent Hill f is the first game in the series in years that feels dangerous in the right way. Not dangerous because it is packed with jump scares or because it wants to shock me every few minutes, but because it feels unstable from the start. Its version of horror is beautiful, poisonous, and hard to settle into. I was often impressed by it before I was comfortable with it.
Moving the series to 1960s Japan gives Silent Hill f a different shape without losing the unease that defines the name. Ebisugaoka does not feel like a reskinned Silent Hill. It has its own rhythms, fears, social pressures, and imagery. That freshness carries the game through some uneven combat and a few harsh difficulty spikes. I did not always enjoy fighting my way through it, but I was rarely able to stop thinking about it.
Ebisugaoka gives the series a new kind of fear
NeoBards Entertainment
The town of Ebisugaoka is the strongest argument for Silent Hill f. It is quiet, rural, and ordinary enough at first that the horror feels like an infection rather than a destination. Streets, homes, schools, shrines, and narrow paths begin as recognizable places, then slowly become harder to trust. The game is good at making beauty feel wrong.
That visual contrast gives the horror a strange pull. Flowers, fog, rot, wood, cloth, and ritual spaces all become part of the same language. Silent Hill f often looks gorgeous, but it never lets that beauty feel safe. The more ornate the image becomes, the more suspicious I felt. It is one of the rare horror games where I sometimes stopped to look at a scene and immediately regretted lingering.
The new setting also helps the series escape its own shadow. Silent Hill has spent years carrying the weight of its best entries, especially Silent Hill 2. This game does not ignore that inheritance, but it does not spend all its time imitating it either. Ebisugaoka gives the series new soil, and that makes the familiar fog feel alive again.
Hinako's story is strongest when it stays personal
NeoBards Entertainment
Hinako Shimizu is not a heroic lead, and the game is better for it. She feels young, cornered, angry, frightened, and confused in ways that fit the story’s emotional weight. The horror around her is not only about monsters in the street. It is tied to family, expectation, shame, gender, control, and the pressure to become what other people demand.
That gives Silent Hill f a sharper emotional center than I expected. The story can be blunt, and some scenes push their symbolism hard, but the best parts feel intimate. Hinako’s fear is not abstract. It comes from the places she knows and the people she cannot fully escape. The game understands that home can be terrifying when it stops feeling like yours.
The writing also benefits from restraint when it trusts the player to sit with discomfort. Not every answer needs to arrive immediately, and not every image needs to be explained. The game is at its best when it lets a room, a line of dialogue, or a strange visual detail hang in the air long enough to become unsettling on its own.
The puzzles understand the series better than the combat does
NeoBards Entertainment
The puzzles feel like one of the cleanest links to classic Silent Hill. They ask me to slow down, read carefully, connect clues, and pay attention to the space around me. That pace suits the game. After tense stretches of exploration, stopping to make sense of a puzzle gave the horror room to breathe.
I appreciated that the puzzle difficulty can be adjusted separately from the action difficulty. It lets the game preserve the satisfaction of thinking through a strange clue without forcing every player into the same level of friction. When the puzzles land, they feel fair without becoming obvious. I often had to step back, reread notes, and think about what the environment was trying to tell me.
Combat is more divisive. Silent Hill f leans heavily into melee, with dodging, stamina, weapon durability, and timing playing a much larger role than some fans may expect. At its best, that physical struggle makes Hinako feel vulnerable and desperate. At its worst, it turns dread into repetition. I wanted to fear encounters more than manage them, and the game does not always keep that balance.
Fighting can wear down the atmosphere
NeoBards Entertainment
The action is not bad, but it asks for too much attention too often. Enemies are threatening, and the weapon degradation gives fights a scrappy edge, yet repeated melee encounters can start to flatten the horror. When I am focused on dodging, spacing, and preserving resources for the next fight, the fear sometimes becomes mechanical.
That is a problem for a game this atmospheric. Silent Hill f is strongest when I feel watched, trapped, or emotionally cornered. Combat can support that feeling when used carefully. A sudden fight in a narrow space can be terrifying. A weapon breaking at the wrong time can create real panic. But when the game keeps leaning on combat, I start reading enemies as obstacles instead of nightmares.
The difficulty curve also feels uneven. Some stretches have the right amount of pressure, while others push too hard for too long. The lack of a comfortable middle ground in action difficulty can make the game feel harsher than it needs to be. I wanted challenge, but I did not always want the fight system to dominate the mood.
The second half becomes harder to shake
NeoBards Entertainment
Silent Hill f takes time to show its full shape. The early hours are atmospheric, but they can also feel stiff while the game settles into its own identity. The combat is introduced heavily, the story holds back, and Hinako’s situation is more interesting than fully clear. I was intrigued, but not completely won over.
The game becomes stronger once its emotional and supernatural threads start folding into each other. The imagery grows stranger, the symbolism becomes more pointed, and the story begins to feel less like a mystery box and more like a pressure chamber. That is where Silent Hill f earns its place in the series. It stops feeling like a bold setting change and starts feeling like a horror story that could only happen here.
Its later sections also make better use of repetition and uncertainty. Spaces return with new meaning. Details that seemed decorative begin to feel loaded. The game rewards attention without turning everything into a clean explanation. I still had frustrations with the combat, but the story and atmosphere became strong enough that I wanted to push through them.
Silent Hill f is worth the discomfort
Silent Hill f is one of the most interesting games this series has produced in a long time. It is not the smoothest, and it is not always the most enjoyable in a simple moment-to-moment sense. The melee combat can overstay its welcome, the difficulty balance could be cleaner, and some early pacing issues make the opening less gripping than the game’s best sections.
But the strengths are hard to dismiss. Ebisugaoka is unforgettable, Hinako gives the story a human wound to press on, and the visual design finds horror in beauty without making that contrast feel cheap. I would recommend Silent Hill f to players who want psychological horror with atmosphere, symbolism, and discomfort that lingers after the screen goes dark. Anyone coming mainly for smooth action may struggle with its rougher edges. For me, the flaws were real, but the game’s best moments were strong enough to stay under my skin.
Discussion
0
We want to hear from you. Share your perspective in the comments below, and please keep the conversation respectful.
Log in to join the discussion - vote, reply, and share your take.
Silent Hill f is a survival horror game published by Konami as part of the Silent Hill series.
It is set in rural Japan during the 1960s, marking a departure from the franchise’s traditional Western settings. The story is written by Ryukishi07 and focuses on psychological horror,
