The very popular Silent Hill game series began back in 1999. It’s grown through some 16 games and numerous adaptations of the story in novel and movie form. This psychological/survival horror franchise has primarily been set in the fictional town of Silent Hill, a place plagued by creepy supernatural events.
With Silent Hill f, however, game makers at Konomi Digital Entertainment have taken a sharp left turn, leaving the game’s hair-raising American burg in its rearview mirror. This time the nightmarish happenings unfold in the mountain-pass Japanese town of Ebisugaoka.
Silent Hill f tells the story of Hinako, a teenage schoolgirl in the 1960s whose major problems appear to be a combative homelife—thanks to her heavy-drinker father—and the unwelcome prospects of being married off. She’s also dealing with painful migraines and a few light squabbles with three friends.
However, all of those collective daily struggles are about to take a distant second place in the young teen’s hierarchy of worries. For as Hinako storms away from yet another argument with her dad, her beautiful mountain town begins to fill with a seeping mist.
That creeping, foggy corruption gives way to thorny, blood-red vines, spiritual decay and monsters. Worse still, those foul things all seem to be aimed at Hinako.
Hinako must navigate an increasingly spooky real world and an internal dream dimension that she keeps slipping in and out of—a place of struggling deities, strange rituals and dark, bloody trials. The teen is called upon to push through the mounting madness and try to piece together clues if she hopes to save her life and the lives of her friends.
Gamers are tasked with exploring Hinako’s two nightmarish realities; solving environmental puzzles that block their way; and discovering and reading bits and pieces of messages, journals and news clippings. They must not only figure out how all the horrors relate to Hinako (and what appears to be her mental breakdown), but come to understand the cultural, spiritual and societal expectations of the Japanese world they’re in.
All the while, this game’s hard driving pace pushes players into battle after battle with ghoulish monstrosities that lurch and leap from the shadows.
Like other games in this series, Silent Hill f is a single-player game that does not require an online connection. There’s no multiplayer or co-op gameplay in the mix.
The Hinako we first meet appears to be a kind girl who values her three school friends: Shu, Rinko and Sakuko. It’s also implied that she has a loving relationship with her elder sister, Junko. She clings to those good things in her life as the world around her becomes darker and darker.
And this newest Silent Hill is graphically impressive.
However, Silent Hill f presents an incredibly complicated story that never seems to lock into anything good or upright. The twisted world is a mixture of foul Shinto spirituality, masked deity infighting and a crumbling form of insanity. Some “positive” elements and characters are eventually revealed to be disguised forms of evil.
Even though Hinako initially makes choices to aid and honor her friends, for instance, she changes upon entering the dream world. There she can be cruel and seemingly heartless. In fact, there are multiple versions of Hinako that play into the possible game endings (four alternative endings can be accessed after the initial playthrough).
On that game-ending front, the various finales range from psychotically dark and murder filled to somewhat positive to lightly goofy. But the game as a whole is a dense and confusing nightmare. (Don’t expect a satisfying happy ending.)
Bloody battles are a constant. The game relies on continuous combat scenarios involving light attacks, heavy attacks, focus attacks and counters. (You can lessen the intensity of battle in the game menu.) Hinako uses a lead pipe and various other bladed weapons. Blood splashes and spatters freely as characters are impaled, slashed and ripped apart.
That brutality heightens in cutscenes where the gore flows freely during intensely vicious acts. We see characters infected and dotted with spreading blisters; a person burned alive in a cage; someone is forced to ritualistically hack off her own arm and cut the skin from her face. Hinko watches as her parent’s heads are crushed in a monster’s large hands. On and on the carnage stretches, all shrouded in dark, swirling spirituality and ritual.
The ghoulish monsters are convoluted Lovecraftian amalgamations of raw flesh, hanging entrails and rancid corruption. Some appear to be melded grotesqueries made of children: all faces, arms and mottled flesh on a pair of schoolgirl legs. Others are naked, bloody women that twist and flop like disjointed string puppets. Enemies can have faces with melted flesh or exposed bone and cartilage. Etc.
Silent Hill f is an incredibly bloody and unsettling fever dream of a game. It’s steeped in Japanese culture and mythology, but an intensely disquieting tea, nonetheless.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
