Japanese version of the legend. Silent Hill f game review

Silent Hill f caused a lot of controversy long before its release. And it's no wonder: how could they take the American town of Silent Hill and transfer it to 1960s Japan?! Instead of the usual foggy streets, there's a nondescript post-war province, instead of a tired man, there's a schoolgirl in a "sailor's dress," and instead of an adult's personal drama, there's patriarchal troubles, bullying, and a school love triangle.

But why not? The fight against one's own demons knows no nationality or borders. So perhaps the metaphorical Silent Hill could be anywhere. Or could it not? Let's figure it out.

Few technical details

I played on a regular PlayStation 5 of the first revision. At the same time, my friend played the game on a computer (AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS, NVIDIA RTX 4050, 16 GB DDR5 RAM). I didn't have any artifacts, but he sometimes had them, especially after cutscenes, when part of the image looked normal, and the rest was falling apart on the rays. After one of the patches, this effect disappeared.

Both me and my friend noticed occasional fps drops, although not very often. And the fact that all the cutscenes are locked at 30 fps… It seems like this is already a tradition. Maybe they will get to 60 fps someday – who knows!

Silent Hill f runs on Unreal Engine 5, so the picture looks quite modern: not nextgen in all its glory, but very decent. However, the main thing here is not the technological sophistication of the image, but its atmosphere, as always in the series.

A little about localization. Unfortunately, unlike the remake of Silent Hill 2, there are no Ukrainian subtitles here. The voice acting is English or Japanese. Along with the entourage, the second option is more authentic. I played with Japanese voice acting and English subtitles.

How this story began

No, we won't delve into the history of the series - we've already done that before. Here we'll just remind you that apart from last year's remake of the second part of Silent Hill, a new full-fledged game in the series was released only in 2012.

So even though Silent Hill 4 doesn't have a number, fans of the franchise have high hopes for it. It's already selling well, so perhaps we're not just waiting for remakes.

The events take us to the Japanese town of Ebisugaoka. The main character is a schoolgirl, Hinako Shimizu, a girl of about sixteen, active, athletic, a member of the school track and field team. She lives in a family where fear reigns. Her father drinks, shouts, humiliates. Her mother is silent, used to suffering. Her older sister has already left home: she was given away to be married, and she simply resigned herself, deciding that this was the way it should be. Hinako is not like that. From an early age, she was more interested in playing boyish games, for which she was teased. She does not want to repeat the fate of her mother and sister, does not want to live in eternal fear.

One day, during another scandal, Hinako runs away to the city. But something is wrong: Ebisugaoka is strangely empty and quiet. There are no people, only a few familiar faces - her best friend Xu and two friends from school. And suddenly everything falls apart. One of her friends, Sakuko, disappears right before her eyes, the city is covered in thick fog, bright red lilies grow from the ground, and reality begins to distort. The streets bend, space shrinks, and Hinako is left alone in a strange, inhospitable world. This is the beginning of a story where the main horror is not monsters, but people. Are they the same thing?

The plot is like a dream during a high fever, lasting about ten hours. Sometimes it seems that you have already understood everything, but new details appear, scenes change, fragments open that were not there before. The game has five endings, including the traditional humorous one, but to see the real ending, you will have to go through everything several times. This is not a formal time-waster: when you repeat the passage, new entries, scenes and even unique weapons open.

Due to the visual features, at some points you get the impression that you are watching a drama, the plot is not always able to touch, but overall it is not bad and new layers are gradually revealed. Even the emotional Japanese voice acting, which sometimes seems too expressive, sounds sincere here. It does not knock out of the story, but rather enhances it.

Gameplay: survival horror plus wooden soulslike plus puzzles

Typically, Silent Hill gameplay involves exploring the area, finding items, fighting monsters, and solving puzzles. Silent Hill f is about the same thing, but here the developers decided to change the proportions a bit. Or rather, the accents.

I admit: in such games I don't like to bother with the combat at all. For me, it is just a part of the atmosphere, so it should fit well into it and not interfere. And it's not that I'm special: something tells me that I'm a fairly typical fan of a foggy town. I'm the one who leads to the fact that there is hardly a person who played any part of the franchise just for the sake of fighting monsters. But in Silent Hill f, the developers decided to give more weight to the battles to make the game more dynamic.

Did it work? Only the lazy didn't notice that the combat here clearly plays with Dark Souls. Hinako has three scales: health (of course), stamina (for strikes and dodges) and concentration (a kind of "mana" for enhanced attacks). Add to this parrying, "perfect dodges" with time slowing down, heavy attacks with long animations - and you get something like Elden Ring on minimal settings. But...

The hitboxes are weird, the parry timing isn't always obvious, and the hit-stops after successful hits (such short animation stops for effect) killed me (in reality). They just take away from the atmosphere: it feels like you're not playing a depressing psychological horror game, but rather you're at an amusement park with your friends and fighting on an arcade machine. No, spending time like that is really cool. But what's the point of Silent Hill here?

The bestiary, as usual, is quite limited. There are basically four types of enemies, not counting rare variations. Probably 90 percent of all enemies are some kind of twisted women with knives in various modifications. Their name is Kasimasi.

There are no firearms, by the way, because we are in Japan in the sixties, what pistols are there. So only close combat with all sorts of pipes and sickles and no variety. Except that the number of enemies increases, and they become somewhat stronger. But for all 10-12 hours of passing, you have to repeat the same actions over and over again, which are not implemented in the best way: dodge, repel, hit with a heavy attack, hit with a light one. Well, practice sneaking up behind the enemy. But no evolution. We were a schoolgirl with a stick, and we remain that way until the final credits.

In fact, there is a leveling system here, but it is quite simple and superficial. For faith, the currency you get by sacrificing items on the altar, you can improve three characteristics and the number of slots for amulets. Amulets give different bonuses, but they are not always described clearly: "increases damage with high weapon strength". How much does it increase? You will find out in battle... By the way, the inventory here is quite limited in size, so some items are really better to put on the altar. There are a lot of types of lich here, but not all of them have a generally good effect. However, this is almost a spoiler.

Weapons in the game often break and you have to repair them or look for new ones and save your shots. After trying to play on normal difficulty mode, I switched to story mode. There are usually enough weapons in this mode, it is easier to play. But in general, this does not solve the problem: it seems that the combat system has not been finalized, although I heard somewhere that this is done specifically to feel how difficult it is for a defenseless girl. But I don’t really believe in this version.

But I set the puzzles to a difficult level and am quite satisfied with them. They are traditional for the series: look for clues, solve puzzles, find codes. Some of them are quite simple and can be solved randomly by brute force, while others will require some thought, especially considering that they are often related to Japanese mythology. So some of the puzzles may make you google the cultural realities of Japan.

Exploration and searching are quite linear. There aren't many places to get lost in the game. Although sometimes, when you decide not to fight, but to dodge and run away from enemies, you can run into the wrong place. However, the game has a map, where, like in Silent Hill 2, goals and dead ends are marked - convenient and easy.

Atmosphere and surroundings: foxes are not what they seem

Ebisugaoka is a place that seems familiar from the first minutes. Maybe because I've seen similar Japanese towns in Persona 4 or some cozy anime about school days. The same tiled roofs, nondescript one-story buildings, old shops with faded signs.

Silent Hill in classic games has always been extremely unpleasant, filled with rust, decay, loneliness and fear. And the Underworld, its infernal counterpart, which opens after the sirens wail, turned familiar places into a living nightmare: even the walls seemed alive and sick. Being there was physically unpleasant, you wanted to return to "normal" Silent Hill as soon as possible.

Silent Hill f is different. Ebisugaoka can be scary, but not in the same way as Silent Hill, where you can almost physically feel the slime on the walls and want to wash your hands after another scene. It's just a slightly abandoned Japanese village where people have disappeared, almost cozy.

The secret world here does not "turn over" familiar locations, as in the classic parts. It looks like a mysterious temple here. Clean, orderly, beautiful. Instead of creepy corridors - halls flooded with soft light, instead of meat and metal - paper shoji partitions. Beautiful? Yes. Scary? Well, maybe a little. This is more of an atmospheric fairy tale than a nightmare. Also, the weapons here do not break, unlike in Ebisugaoka.

In Silent Hill f, each world is its own. Ebisugaoka lives by its own laws, the Dark Sanctuary by its own. And this gap is very tangible: the sense of cycle, the familiar transition between horror and relief, disappears.

This is why many fans of the classic series were a little offended. Although in general, such a concept has the right to exist. Sometimes horror can be quiet and metaphorical. If you perceive the game not as a direct continuation of the classic Silent Hill, but as a Japanese interpretation of this myth, everything looks more interesting.

In the Afterlife, Hinako encounters a strange man in a fox mask, who the Japanese associate with the deity Inara. In Japanese folklore, foxes, or kitsune, are contradictory creatures. They can be guardians, pranksters, seductive beauties, vengeful spirits, or even gods. They guide the heroine through a world where the line between reality and dream is blurred.

Scattered throughout Ebisugaoka are wooden "ema" tablets that can be offered at shrines. In real life, they are used to write wishes for the kami gods. In the game, this is a way to level up, but the symbolism remains. If you look closely at the tablets, instead of good spirits, they depict yokai - evil creatures from folk legends. This choice of artists immediately hints that something is wrong, even in the shrines themselves there is distortion.

The legend of the "fox wedding" is particularly well woven. In Japanese legends, kitsune hold their secret ceremonies in the middle of the night, hiding them with fog or rain in clear weather. Anyone who dares to peek risks going crazy or disappearing. How beautifully this legend is shown in Dreams / 夢 by director Akira Kurosawa!

And now, in Silent Hill f, this legend comes to life once again: in the Dark Sanctuary, lanterns flicker, resembling a procession of foxes, and the atmosphere itself takes on a mystical ambiguity.

The image of Inara, the goddess of fertility and trade, is not just decorative here. Her presence is felt everywhere: in temples, in foxes, in notes where people curse the gods for their troubles.

General impressions and conclusions

Silent Hill f is the story of a Japanese girl struggling with the traumas of a patriarchal society. It's beautiful, it's interesting, it's even scary in places. Silent Hill f is not about rust and blood. It's about beauty that gradually rots from the inside. About a temple where every ritual can turn into a curse. About foxes that are not what they seem. And about fear that is not always loud.

It's about childish cruelty, about the habit of humiliating the weaker. Or those who are different. About the pressure of tradition and religion, primarily on women. But not only on them. About the unwillingness to seek compromise. Each character carries his own guilt, and the game forces you to face it. There are few screams or harsh screamers, instead there is a heavy, oppressive atmosphere. And in this sense, yes - it is Silent Hill, as a metaphor, as a legend, and not as a specific place on the map.

However, not everyone will accept the Japanese version of the legend. Some "oldfags" may be upset by this, because some of them were waiting for a return to the American Silent Hill. And here's the question: would the game have won if it had been called something else? I suspect that if that happened, it would have immediately been nicknamed "Japanese Silent Hill" and accused of borrowing ideas. So it's up to you to decide whether this is a new life for the series, or just another dream that Silent Hill saw before finally melting into the fog.