Silent Hill f: Our First Look at 5 Hours of Japanese Horror
The latest entry in the terrifying Silent Hill series is almost here. For many, the 2024 remake of Silent Hill 2 set a new standard for horror games. Now, a different developer steps up to the plate with Silent Hill f. This new game comes from Taiwan-based Neobards. It promises the same level of quality and polish, but in a very different setting. After spending five hours playing Silent Hill f, its unique world and unsettling story deeply impressed us.
Welcome to Ebisugaoka
Silent Hill f pulls you into the fictional town of Ebisugaoka. This remote village sits in the mountains of rural Japan during the 1960s. The moment you begin walking its dense, yet empty, streets, you notice the incredible detail. The game uses an over-the-shoulder view with no on-screen display during exploration. This choice helps tell a powerful story through its visuals alone.
Ebisugaoka is one of the most striking Japanese townscapes ever seen in a video game. It offers a truly authentic feeling. It feels like a real, living place, even in its deserted state. This adds a deep sense of immersion.
A Town with a Past
Unlike some previous Silent Hill games that focused heavily on indoor areas, Silent Hill f encourages you to explore Ebisugaoka itself. The town oozes atmosphere. Documents and files scattered around provide insight into its past. Ebisugaoka once thrived as a mining town. Now, it is largely forgotten. Its people hold onto old ways. They prefer traditional healthcare over modern medicine and show intense devotion to the Shinto deity, Inadi.
This background for Ebisugaoka and its people feels essential to the game's story. It makes you want to explore every corner. You will search for every hidden file to understand more about this unsettling place. This deep storytelling, conveyed through environment and lore, makes every step meaningful.
Hinako's Journey Begins
The story starts with Hinako, a high school student. She runs away from home after her drunk father scolds her. Walking through the empty streets of Ebisugaoka to meet friends at a local candy store feels like a calm, authored experience at first. It reminds you of games that focus on walking and story, like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.
However, this calm does not last long. Soon, Hinako and her friends discover something wrong in town. Before you know it, Hinako holds an iron pipe, a classic weapon in the Silent Hill series. Ebisugaoka quickly changes from a quiet setting to the perfect stage for a horror game. Its narrow alleys and staircases hide enemies around corners. They also create a maze for players to get lost in.
Unsettling Puzzles and Japanese Horror
Exploring Ebisugaoka often leads Hinako into traditional tatami-floored houses. Open doors and windows invite her in. Inside, she solves simple puzzles to move forward. These puzzles usually play out in surprising ways. For example, you might find keys for a locked door, but nothing special inside. Then, as you return to the corridor, another door suddenly swings open, causing a genuine scare.
Yukishio7, Silent Hill f's scenario writer, sees Japanese horror differently. It does not just rely on direct threats to life. Instead, it makes you feel uncomfortable. It creates situations that feel off. This aligns perfectly with the Silent Hill series. While scary monsters exist, some of the most unsettling moments in past games come from strange conversations with odd characters.
Friends and Fears
In Silent Hill f, Hinako and her friends try to escape the haunted town. Their interactions start normally. But then, they say or do things that catch you off guard. This subtle creepiness adds to the psychological horror.
Puzzles also often connect to Hinako's own story or the world around her. One puzzle on a misty rice field involves examining scarecrows to find your direction. This puzzle links to a childhood trauma for Hinako, where she got lost and feared scarecrows.
The puzzles are not overly complicated. Files provide hints that guide you without giving away the complete solution. This allows you to figure things out on your own. Silent Hill f includes difficulty settings for both combat and puzzles. You can choose how much of a challenge you want.
Brutal Melee Combat and Resource Management
While the puzzles offer a balanced challenge, combat in Silent Hill f can be demanding. The game focuses entirely on melee attacks. Hinako finds various weapons, such as iron pipes, kitchen knives, and baseball bats. Guns are not part of her arsenal. Most weapons are found throughout the environment, not tied to story events. Up to three weapons are allowed at a time. And if you do enjoy horror games, you will like to see the Maiden of Black Water too.
A key feature of combat is weapon durability. Weapons break down with use. It's a nice touch that their appearance changes as they near the breaking point. You might see a bent pipe or a broken bat. Hinako even comments on needing to fix them. Repair kits can fix weapons, but they are scarce. Often, you will have to say goodbye to a favourite weapon.
This weapon's durability, often disliked in other games, works well here. Finding new weapons and repair kits becomes a crucial part of resource management. This is a hallmark of the survival horror genre. Since there's no ammo to worry about, managing your melee weapons takes centre stage.
Smart Resource Use
Silent Hill f has a clever system for resources. At save points, you can turn in extra resources for an in-game currency. This currency lets you increase Hinako's stats or buy new amulets. Amulets provide helpful buffs. This means careful resource management pays off. Any leftovers from your expeditions can become valuable, rewarding, imaginative play.
Combat feels similar to Silent Hill 2's close-range fighting. You can dodge enemy attacks and use light or heavy attacks. Hinako's limited reach and slower attack motions give combat a realistic, weighty feel. Heavy attacks are slow and require good timing. This highlights that Hinako is just a teenager with limited strength.
Timed Dodges and Focus Mode
What makes Silent Hill f's combat different is timed dodges and counterattacks. Counterattacks deal much damage and are vital in battles. Enemies briefly show a sign when a counterattack is possible. Reacting in time can be hard, especially if you haven't played reflex-heavy games before.
This is where Focus Mode helps. You activate it by holding L2. In Focus Mode, enemy counterattack signs appear for longer. It also lets you charge a power attack that staggers enemies. You might go into Focus Mode for a counterattack, but switch to a power attack if it charges before an opening appears.
Focus Mode uses Hinako's mental energy gauge. This is separate from her stamina and health. The upper limit of her mental energy goes down when enemies scare her or during frightening events. This directly links the gameplay to the story and Hinako's mental state. Items can recover the mental energy limit.
Hinako's stamina is also limited. If she runs out of both stamina and mental energy, she can become too frightened and tired to move for a while. Managing these energy resources is key to survival.
Fighting one regular enemy is usually manageable. But facing multiple enemies often means running away is the best choice. Enemies do not give experience points or drop resources, so there is no direct benefit to fighting every single one. Despite this, combat is engaging enough to make you want to fight, even if only to explore more freely.
Silent Hill f makes you feel weak, which adds to the horror. What looks like a boss battle might actually be a sequence where you must find an escape route. This clever design reinforces the feeling of helplessness.
An Alternate World and Tough Bosses
The classic Silent Hill element of an alternate world also appears in Silent Hill f. Hinako sometimes moves to a different dimension. This dimension shows a more traditional Japan. Here, a mysterious masked figure guides her through shrine grounds. In this alternate world, Hinako discovers conventional Japanese weapons, such as the Naginata. This pole weapon, with a curved blade, was often used by women. These alternate-world weapons do not break, but Hinako cannot carry them back to Ebisugaoka.
It was in this realm that we faced the main boss of our playtime. This boss was much more challenging than expected. Even with a good grasp of the combat systems, its long reach, unpredictable attacks, and multiple stages required many tries. The boss took nearly an hour to beat. Learning its patterns and slowly chipping away at it was a welcome challenge that always felt fair. Our colleague, playing on story mode, beat the boss on their second try. However, another person, also on story mode, could not defeat it at all before running out of time.
Series producer Moto Okamoto noted that Silent Hill's combat takes inspiration from the popularity of more challenging action games with different difficulty settings. While not a "Soulslike" game, its boss design offers a similar learning curve. Beating a demanding boss provides a great sense of satisfaction.
Dungeons and a Full Story
The last part of the demo took place inside a school. This school acted like a traditional dungeon, similar to the apartment buildings, hospitals, and hotels in Silent Hill 2. Inside, Hinako finds a map of the building to help her navigate. Just like James in Silent Hill 2, Hinako is a diligent note-taker. Any locked doors or passages are marked on the map for you.
Within the school, we solved many puzzles to find keys for classrooms and floors. We fought and sometimes ran from enemies along the way. Okamoto stated that the average play time for Silent Hill f will be about 12 to 13 hours. Our five hours of gameplay suggest we experienced roughly one-third of the game.
While our playtime felt linear, Silent Hill f will feature multiple endings, including the famous UFO ending, a hallmark of the series. This promises replayability and different outcomes based on player choices.
Final Thoughts on Ebisugaoka's Horror
Our time with Silent Hill f was auspicious. The game's world and story hooked us deeply. We are still thinking about our brief visit to Ebisugaoka a week later. Ebisugaoka feels like the perfect backdrop for a psychological horror story. All of Silent Hill f's systems and mechanics work together to enhance this setting. Series composer Akira Yamaoka's soundtrack also does a fantastic job of making players feel uneasy throughout the entire experience.
Silent Hill f appears to be game that does everything right regarding horror. If the Silent Hill 2 remake was one of your top games of 2024, then Silent Hill f has strong potential to be a serious Game of the Year contender. It releases for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S, and PC on September 25th.
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