Konami’s Silent Hill franchise has been through its fair share of ups and downs over the years, but it finally seems to be back on track.
With Bloober Team’s excellent remake of the beloved Silent Hill 2 last year, and now a brand-new entry full of fresh ideas to torment fans, it’s never been a better time to be a fan of spooky fog and stories about unrelenting trauma.
The tricky thing about horror (in particular great horror) is that it’s inherently extremely personal and highly divisive. Horror as a genre is born from injecting personal experience into terrifying stories and settings that speak truth to trauma in ways that are provocative and uncomfortable.
By nature, it’s not going to land for everyone. But when a developer can strike that perfect balance of pacing, intensity, and foreboding tension, there’s real magic at play. Across the entire game, I think Silent Hill f nails that delicate formula far more often than it misses the mark.
New kind of fear
In Silent Hill f, players take on the role of Hinako Shimizu, voiced in English by Suzie Yeung (Yuffie in Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth), during what appears to be a typical day in the fictional rural village of Ebisugaoka. Hinako is an athletic high school student with a small friend group.
According to the game’s lead writer, Ryukishi07, a young female protagonist was chosen to subvert the series’ habit of depicting vulnerable female characters with little agency. In this game, we take direct control of Hinako, experience the events through her frame of reference, and become immersed in the social, cultural, and personal trauma of what it could have been like to grow up in a city like this during the 1960s.
At first, I was apprehensive about the dramatic shift in setting. Although the series hasn’t strictly been about the fictional city of Silent Hill in Maine for quite some time, I wasn’t sure how well the tone and theme would transition to an entirely different continent and time period. Fortunately, my uncertainty was misplaced, as the team at NeoBards Entertainment absolutely did their homework here.
This was a risky move for Konami. Not only was Silent Hill rapidly losing capital in public conversation a handful of years ago, but staking so much on a new entry that seems to diverge entirely from genre conventions and staples could be seen as a real gamble. Ultimately though, thanks to the tact and care afforded by NeoBards, an intricate and captivating story crafted by Ryukishi07, and a willingness to expand an IP desperate for innovation, Silent Hill f definitely delivers.
All that is to say, for all intents and purposes, SIlent Hill f was a big swing, but the end result has defied the odds in delivering one of the most captivating stories I’ve experienced in a game in quite some time. I don’t want to reveal too much, but suffice to say that the content warnings you’ll see before the title screen are valid and entirely necessary.
Silent Hill f is so unsettling, that I found myself looking away from the screen multiple times due to what was depicted. And that’s not even to mention the subject matter itself, which covers highly sensitive topics. They’ve somehow managed to toe the line between grotesque and beautiful here in a way that’s truly commendable.
But crucially, it’s worth stressing, that none of the material in this game feels like it’s there just for shock value or just to elicit some type of reaction. It’s all handled expertly with care and I applaud the developers for having the tenacity and courage to go where few games are willing to go.
Visually, Silent Hill f is impressive. While playing on PlayStation 5 Pro the game seems to try and combine performance and quality modes into a singular experience, but when playing on a standard PlayStation 5, you can choose either performance mode or quality mode. Personally, in my time trying both systems for my playthrough, I noticed a lot more framerate dipping on the base model PS5, sometimes to the point that it would stutter for multiple seconds during scene transitions or quick saves. No crashes or game breaking issues, just momentary dips in stability.
Notably, Konami’s approach of essentially outsourcing the IP to an external studio, while retaining a semblance of creative cohesion, has really paid off. We’ve seen this practice also work even as recently as Konami working with Bloober Team on last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake, with Konami acting as more of a publisher and creative director.
This type of approach has a lot of benefits because it means publishers don’t have to maintain massive in-house teams for their AAA IP, so it’s easier to scale up or down a project based on the team size and external studio that’s selected as the partner. External studios also introduce new ideas and insights that are typically less visible for creators that work too closely with a single franchise for too long. It also means hiring collaborators for specific expertise is possible, such as a studio specializing in Unreal Engine working with a team well-versed in a particular genre.
A lot could have gone wrong when shifting from a small town America format, but horror as a wider genre in film is extremely popular right now, and specifically cultural diversity in horror is having a bit of a moment and that’s starting to bleed (pun intended) into video games too.
Even though the location is wildly different and there are very few similarities between Silent Hill f and the rest of the series at face value, once you experience things, the commonalities become more apparent. The foreboding and ominous presence of the mysterious fog, for example, permeates the town, consuming everything street-by-street as you progress deeper and unravel the story.
Beyond that, the dual world mechanics common to the series are front-and-center as Hinako must traverse both a “real” world overrun by a terrifying, albeit beautiful, blooming fungus and a dream-like hellscape full of monsters and trials. Not to mention the core themes of personified trauma, visceral gore, and emotionally devastating revelations that cut deep into Hinako’s life and experiences.
At the end of the day Silent Hill is a game series about coming face-to-face with the terrors of your own mind and that’s exactly what Silent Hill f understands so well.
Laying down roots
As a straight white male born and raised in the United States, I went into Silent Hill f woefully ignorant of the setting, time period, and cultural implications of everything going on. That being said, it’s a testament to the immersive qualities of this world that I was able to remain entirely engaged with a strong sense of presence throughout Hinako’s harrowing journey.
The minor problem then, is that some key elements of Silent Hill f seemed to actively disengage my desire to stay immersed in the setting. The main offender is how combat is handled.
Combat is a difficult thing to get right in a horror game because if the main character is too capable, then enemies pose far less of a threat which lowers the tension and eradicates the sense of fear. However, if the character is too helpless and unable to fight back, or at least run away and hide reliably, then you veer too far into the realm of frustration and a feeling of futility that’s just not fun.
There’s a good balance here for the most part, but Hinako is just far too cumbersome to control. Considering the game makes a point to emphasize she was a track star at school, I’d expect her stamina to be better, instead of being entirely gassed after just a few swings of a bat. Furthermore, maneuvering around enemies is often clunky thanks to the camera angle and the odd range most weapons have. Constantly Hinako will swing and miss, despite seeming to be close enough, resulting in a multi-second recovery animation that leaves her entirely vulnerable.
The frustration is amplified because most enemies move incredibly fast, to the point that they can often stun-lock you and lop off huge chunks of health before you even have a chance to respond. Hinako’s dodge also has a dramatic cool-down at the end of it, alongside her limited stamina gauge, leaving her entirely vulnerable once again, so fleeing from a fight is often easier said than done.
Silent Hill f is very clearly not a Soulslike game by any means, but I do think you can trace the influences on its combat systems to other very slow-paced, deliberate, and methodical melee combat games such as From Software’s Dark Souls series. It’s an interesting example to see how that style of gameplay continues to influence many genres even far beyond action-adventure RPG titles and expands interest for otherwise niche franchises, such as horror games.
But ultimately, the real breaking point (again, pun intended) for me is that all of your weapons for the majority of the game have a durability status. This means they can break, and replacement weapons or tool kits required to repair them are few and far between. If you’re not careful, you could find yourself without any weapons in the middle of a required fight which is extremely annoying. Terrifying? Sure, but mostly annoying. Especially when you factor in that enemies do not drop items or anything useful, which means you’re not trading durability for any benefit. At its core, it’s an unbalanced design, because it’s stress and tension at the expense of pacing and fun.
All of that being said, though, boss encounters were thrilling and each time I came across a new enemy to study and outsmart, my heart was absolutely racing.
Conclusion
Silent Hill f is the first new entry in the series in over a decade. By leaning on the power of the brand, which has a new lease on life thanks to the Silent Hill 2 remake last year, Konami’s big bet on its staple horror franchise is paying off. As a (relative) newcomer to the franchise who only just played the original on PlayStation 1 and the new remake of SH2 on PlayStation 5 last year, I’m eager to dive into the rest of the series sometime soon to see what I’ve been missing out on. That’s the power of a great revival.
I finished my first Silent Hill f playthrough at around 12 hours with both combat and puzzles set to “Story” difficulty as recommended by the developers. The first time you play the game you can only earn the first ending. But once you begin a new playthrough in New Game+ mode, you get to start over from the beginning with all of the upgrades you’ve accrued along the way thus far still intact.
Additionally, new cutscenes, new lore, and even new boss enemies become available on subsequent playthroughs as you unveil more threads of the story. For longtime fans of the series, this is to be expected, as even the original entry from 1999 had several different endings.
Remarkably, Silent Hill f is a single-player horror game that, despite genre conventions, provides a litany of reasons to keep playing, and replaying, not just for the action-minded skill players, but for the lore-focused narrative players as well. That’s a great thing to see, as it encourages sticking with the experience and digging deeper, which can help establish long-term brand loyalty and franchise interest.
This game is also a fantastic example of how to reignite interest in a formerly dormant IP with something that leans into series staples thematically and stylistically, but colors outside the lines with bold and creative ideas as well. Finding the right balance is crucial, and despite its cumbersome combat, the end result is a story that I haven’t stopped thinking about since I rolled credits. In all likelihood, I won’t stop thinking about it for years to come.
Rating: 4 / 5
Disclosure: A representative on behalf of Konami sent me a digital download code for this game for this review. The game will be available for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 on September 25, 2025. I played the game on both PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 5 Pro for this review.