Silent Hill f review – the smart option for survival horror

Silent Hill f – Hinako Shimizu doesn’t have things easy (Konami)

The best new Silent Hill game in over 20 years is another important new entry for Konami’s classic survival horror series.

We’re not sure we’ve ever felt as badly for any video game character as we have for Hinako Shimizu. She’s just an ordinary high school student, living in a rural Japanese town in the 1960s. Out of the blue, the town is enveloped by a supernatural fog and infested with monsters and a plague of tentacled flowers that instantly kills one of her friends. Thus begins a literal nightmare journey, that sees the Silent Hill franchise finally reinvent itself for the modern era.

Last year’s remake of Silent Hill 2 was excellent but Konami’s attempts to continue the franchise with brand new games has been a disaster, with the dreadful Ascencion and the well-meaning but flawed The Short Message. They’re doing a remake of Silent Hill 1 next but it remains a serious question as to whether Silent Hill is suitable to being a long-term franchise, since it’s only the original three that were unequivocally good – even if Hideo Kojima’s cancelled Silent Hills seemed like it would be too.

The baffling number of new Silent Hill titles, that Konami has announced in the last few years, makes it clear they see as it as an ongoing concern but it’s only now that they’ve finally proven it, as Silent Hill f is one of the most intelligent and well-crafted horror games of the current generation.

This is a difficult game to review from a story perspective, as the need to avoid spoilers means it’s difficult to get into specifics. But Silent Hill f has no obvious connections to the previous games, beyond the fog and some of the monster designs. Unlike the dopey mythology of the original games – which had little bearing on Silent Hill 2 – this one is rooted firmly in Shinto traditions, although whether all the talk of angry fox gods is a true indication of what’s going on is very much left to your interpretation.

The game becomes more explicit the more endings you unlock, with an excellent New Game+ system that introduces new story and quest elements, but what’s important to the storytelling is not the lore but Hinako herself. Unlike her older sister, she resents the idea that her only prospect in life is being a housewife. She’s also shunned by her female schoolmates, for preferring to hang around with boys, despite having only an aromantic relationship with her best friend Shu – who one of the other schoolgirls is obsessed with.

Rather than the 1960s setting simply being an excuse not to have any mobile phones it’s used to explore the social pressures endured by young women at the time, exacerbated in Hinako’s case by an abusive father and weak mother.

As in all the best Silent Hill games, the monsters are a physical manifestation of her fears and hardships, which means a lot of mannequin-like female figures (rather too many, to be honest, even if there are lots of variants), a monster that constantly wants to lick her face, and a particularly grotesque one that gives birth to other creatures.

It’s unfortunate that the game’s journal spells out the meaning of these monsters a little too obviously, but the in-game dialogue is rarely as on the nose. We’re not familiar with the work of Ryukishi07 – a visual novel writer whose involvement Konami has been keen to promote – but the script is never preachy and we imagine the themes of the game will fly over some people’s heads entirely.

The narrative is unexpectedly layered and, just like the original Silent Hill, maintains a clear influence from the late, lamented David Lynch, as you spend the entire game questioning what, if anything, is real – a question to which there is no definitive answer from your first playthrough.

The English voiceovers are good, but we played our first run through in Japanese, for extra immersion, and the performance by Konatsu Kato is excellent. The presentation is general is great, with very good graphics, including facial animation, and an excellent soundtrack by series veteran Akira Yamaoka and others, that primarily uses traditional instruments but has just a hint of mandolin and other familiar motifs, to let you know it’s still Silent Hill.

There aren’t many boss battles but they’re good ones (Konami)

In gameplay terms, this functions much the same as the Silent Hill 2 remake, with a third person perspective and simple combat that is purposefully clunky and slow-paced when it comes to Hinako wielding weapons – most of which are things like steel pipes and kitchen knives, with no guns at all.

As straightforward as the combat is, there are a few complications, in the form of a stamina bar and a sanity meter, the latter of which is drained the more you ‘focus’ on an enemy, waiting for it to do a move you can counter for extra damage. If you run out of stamina you can’t dodge or attack, although you have various restoratives you can use to prevent that, as well as collectible charms that offer a range of useful perks.

There’s a faintly Soulslite aspect to the combat, in that even the lowliest enemies can kill you at any time and you’ve got to be time your attacks very carefully, but there’s no reward for defeating a monster and a lot of the time you’re best to just run if you can. Although the game is fairly linear and there aren’t many open spaces, so that’s not always practical.

As is traditional for the series, the game has a surprising number of logic puzzles, which are made to seem harder than they are because the game refuses to offer any hints beyond the initial introduction and never gives you any indication you’re on the right track. We liked that though; it’s the opposite of modern games giving the solution away in seconds and there’s an option to have ‘easy’ puzzles if you want – although it might have been an idea to allow you to change that mid-campaign.

In terms of that other staple of the series, the Hellish Otherworld, it is part of Silent Hill f, but instead of a rusted nightmare world it’s an ominous series of Japanese shrines and temples. That’s not as intrinsically scary but it does play home to some of the game’s most horrific scenes, especially one sequence of cut scenes that are grimace-inducingly grotesque, despite wisely hiding most of the gore off-camera.

Silent Hill f is a very impressive game that gets almost everything right, but while it’s easily the best new game since Silent Hill 3 (over time, it could well end up as our second favourite overall) it does have some minor issues. The combat is purposefully lacking in flourish – this isn’t meant to be Bayonetta – but that means it’s not especially entertaining in itself and there’s too much of it, that takes place against too many of the same enemies.

2009’s Silent Hill: Shattered Memories was only half-successful, but it attempted to create a Silent Hill without any combat, and we can’t help but feel that further experimentation in that direction is probably the way to go for the series in general.

The other problem, and this is subjective, is that while the game maintains a consistent level of tension and dread, we never worried for our virtual existence in quite the same way as our recent preview of Resident Evil Requiem or the infamous P.T. demo, that would’ve become Silent Hills. Although whether that’s a purposeful attempt to make the game more marketable (apart from Resident Evil most horror games don’t usually sell that much) we don’t know.

Even so, we found ourselves captivated throughout and while your first run probably won’t last you much longer than 12 hours the New Game+ elements are very compelling – so try not to get all the endings spoilt for you on YouTube.

Taiwanese developer NeoBards, overseen by Konami producers, has done excellent work here and we hope the game will find the success it very much deserves. There’s absolutely a place for shlock horror in video games, just as there is in films, but this is a more thoughtful, socially conscious game more akin to Heredity than Friday The 13th (and yet still not above a few cheeky homages to The Evil Dead).

With Silent Hill f, Konami has made it clear they understand that and while the franchise remains wildly inconsistent, when it’s at its best there’s nothing else so fascinatingly horrific.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Konami
Developer: NeoBards Entertainment
Release Date: 25th September 2025
Age Rating: 18

The events immediately before this scene are pretty shocking (Konami)

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