I first played Silent Hill on the original PlayStation 26 years ago, and after enjoying last year’s Silent Hill 2 remake, I had high hopes for Silent Hill f. Ultimately, those hopes fell as flat as the knife-wielding monster children of the original game.

Silent Hill f is a notable departure from the franchise’s previous entries, with no ties to the town that drives the series’ horror. It feels like Konami may have slapped the Silent Hill name on an unrelated game, similar to the online theory about 2004’s Silent Hill 4: The Room.

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To put it simply, Silent Hill f doesn’t have the same psychological thrill, interesting lore or even likable characters the series is known for. Instead, this game comes off like an early 2000s anime involving Japanese schoolchildren secretly hiding how much they want to kill one another, which makes sense considering the writer of the story is Ryukishi07, the pen name of the author of the Higurashi: When They Cry visual novel series, which is about Japanese schoolchildren killing each other. Just a bit too much on the nose.

As far as I can tell, at least in my first playthrough, Silent Hill f has no connection to the other Silent Hill games. There are three additional endings in New Game Plus, which may have a link. Hell, I don’t even know what the «f» even refers to. However, it took me 10 hours to beat the game once, and I have zero interest in doing it again just for the chance of getting a nugget of a connection to the other games.

Did I get some jump scares? Sure. Did I enjoy some of the twists in the story? Absolutely. Did I remark that the feminine mechanical enemies that freeze in seductive poses when they’re about to attack you are a sign of the developers being a bit too horny? Of course I did, but nevertheless, I did not have an enjoyable time with Silent Hill f.

I need a hit of White Claudia

Silent Hill f follows Shimizu Hinako, an athletic schoolgirl from a troubled family in a rural Japanese town during the 1960s. One day, her parents get into a big argument, so she goes to meet up with her friends. The town quickly becomes a nightmare as strange monsters appear, as well as some mysterious red plant growth.

Throughout the game, Hinako fights monsters with a range of weapons such as a crowbar, bat and axe. Though there are no firearms typically seen in other Silent Hill games, she eventually gets a special weapon later in the game that can decimate enemies.

Overall, combat in Silent Hill f isn’t enjoyable and feels outdated. Hinako can use light and heavy attacks with her weapon, and she can use a Focus attack by holding down a button (L2 for the PS5) to charge up and then hitting the light attack button deals some extra damage to an enemy. Using Focus depletes Hinako’s Sanity meter, and once that’s empty, she can no longer focus, and enemies that can damage her sanity will take off portions of her health bar.

The combat loop revolves around Counters, which is when you use a heavy attack when an enemy flickers red for a quick second. There’s a timing to this, and once you get it down, the enemies are pretty easy to handle.

Aside from Hinako having a quick dodge, the combat, for the most part, feels like it’s from the PS2 era. It’s just very boring for most of the game, with the only interesting fights being against the bosses — even then, it’s still unexciting. Even worse are the aggravating moments when Hinako’s big swings with certain weapons get interrupted by environmental objects requiring her to be at just the right angle to land her attacks, especially in close corridors. The enemies, however, don’t have to worry about that same issue, as their attacks clip through the environment.

There are some light roleplaying elements. Leveling up happens at shrines using Faith, earned by offering items. Enough Faith grants Hinako a wooden plaque called an Ema that boosts health, stamina and sanity. There are also equippable charms called Omamoris, which enhance attributes or damage.

Beyond the dull combat, the game’s UI and puzzles are frustrating. The Journal, meant for lore, is poorly organized, with letters and documents scattered under collectibles, making it hard to track older notes. This is 2025, and interfaces should not be so awkward.

Second, and this really bugs me, is the game’s item management — specifically, how the items stack. Like other survival horror games, there are healing items to pick up. They’re scarce enough, but the items also have different stack sizes: bandages have a max of three per inventory slot, while a first aid kit can only have a stack of one. If you gather, say, seven bandages and two first aid kits, that will take up five slots in your inventory, which starts off with only eight slots. This might make more sense if the number of items held were based on the size of the items in the bag, similar to Resident Evil 4. Throughout the game, I had to leave behind many items because I didn’t have enough space. 

The puzzles, which in previous Silent Hill games make you wrack your brain to understand clever riddles, often didn’t make sense. For example, one puzzle involves a box that has sliding slots that uncover a picture of a type of food, such as oranges, apples, strawberries, a pumpkin and so on. The clue says the answer is related to a cake that someone ate that had sweet and tart fruit on it, but that description of «sweet and tart» doesn’t help me understand how many fruits I need to reveal to solve the puzzle. The answer was five, and since I’m not a scholar of Japanese culture, putting grapes on cakes wasn’t obvious. There were other puzzles that similarly lacked the same charm found in other Silent Hill games and were more frustrating due to some cultural differences.

Take me back to the real Silent Hill

Boring combat I can (mostly) overlook. Frustrating interface, I can deal with. Yet I draw the line when a Silent Hill game doesn’t give me Silent Hill vibes. There’s simply not a hint of them here.

Silent Hill games typically split their progression between a normal world and a nightmarish otherworld. Silent Hill f substitutes the Dark Shrine as its nightmare, which is devoid of that horror landscape of splattered blood and rusted metal floors that echo the steps of enemies approaching. It was just repetitive. In fact, it seems like half of the game is simply going back and forth through the town, repeating your steps, with only a school and two big houses to really explore. 

Also, I get that the Silent Hill f development team wanted to give the franchise a more Japanese-focused game, but there are some problems for players unfamiliar with Japan. A big glaring issue is the lack of translation in environmental text. There were so many times that Japanese words were splattered on the walls in blood, and I had no clue what they said. So now I have to wait for some lore YouTuber to translate everything for me after the game comes out.

Cultural references are also lost in translation. The fox is a prominent figure throughout the game and has ties to Japanese folklore, but its cultural significance isn’t really explained. While I don’t need hand-holding, it feels like some context is missing on why certain events happened in the game. 

In fact, there is just a lack of a cohesive lore for Silent Hill f. Like I mentioned earlier, I obtained only one ending, and I’m not even sure what’s going on. This is a Silent Hill game, so there’s some psychological trauma that is being played out in some supernatural way that needs to be dissected. But I was still utterly confused about how it ended, as the mid-roll credits scene implies what you need to do to get one of the other endings. There’s also almost nothing giving a ’60s vibe to the game other than the lack of electronics.

The game is colorful and artistic but visually bland, with unremarkable character models and forgettable music, despite longtime Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka working on the game.

To say I’m disappointed with Silent Hill f is an understatement, but I’m also not surprised. When I saw the first trailer for the game, I felt nothing that reminded me of the Silent Hill franchise that I love, and those feelings ended up coming true. You could give this game a totally different name, and it would be just a passable survival horror game. Putting that «Silent Hill» name on it is downright offensive to fans of the series invested in the lore and vibes that have been built over decades of the franchise’s games.