All the way out here with a steel pipe and a dream
I don’t know what actually happened behind the scenes during the production of Silent Hill f, but after spending 21 hours with it, this is the scenario I imagine:
The team at NeoBards set out to make a proper modern survival horror experience, influenced by but not beholden to the rest of the Silent Hill franchise. SHf’s story has little explicit connective tissue to the rest of the series, but it’s thematically similar while still largely going in its own direction.
Konami’s producers took one look at NeoBards’ pitch and, after housing that morning’s glass of drugstore rum, said “It needs to be a Soulslike.” Now here we are.
Just to put my biases on the table: I have very little use for Soulslikes and all that sail under their flag. (I know my use of the term will annoy the producer, and I do see his point, but man, we all know what’s up with this.) If you’re a fan of that subgenre, you’ll almost certainly enjoy SHf more than I did.
For my money, however, this is a game that’s in deep conflict with itself. Silent Hill f is a grimy, desperate experience, focused on a confused teenage girl who does not deserve to be in, or understand why she’s in, her current situation. She also fights like she’s been training her entire life just in case she hit this kind of trouble someday. The vibe says horror; the combat system says dirtbag samurai movie. In its most action-packed moments, SHf looks like Ryuhei Kitamura tried to remake Yojimbo with a budget of whatever he could steal from a construction site.
SHf is set in 1960s Japan, in the fictional village of Ebisugaoka. Hinako Shimizu is 17, and has hit that strange crossroads in her life where she still feels like a kid, but everyone around her wants and expects her to grow up. Ideally, she should do it in the next five minutes.
After a fight with her parents, Hinako goes into town to hang out with her friends. Their conversation is interrupted when a bank of strange fog sweeps through Ebisugaoka, which kills anyone it touches, infests the landscape with strange flowers, and brings a horde of monsters with it. After her escape from the fog, Hinako ends up alone in what used to be her hometown and is forced to fight for her life.
My first impression of SHf was that it felt like an original game that got rebranded as Silent Hill in order to sell more copies. While it has a few superficial similarities to the rest of the series, its post-war Shōwa setting, deliberate shift to Japanese-styled horror, challenge level, and emphasis on combat set SHf so far apart from its predecessors that it might as well be entirely new.
Most of Hinako’s weapons are old tools, like a steel pipe, kitchen knife, or sledgehammer. They degrade quickly in a fight, which creates the same tension that other games get by sharply limiting your supply of bullets. It’s a clever spin on an old mechanic, especially when you’re in hostile territory and all your current weapons are one hit away from breaking.
I’m less enthused about the stamina management. SHf’s combat revolves around counterattacks and stuns. Against rank-and-file enemies, you can knock them around with your heavy attack, but anything bigger has what amounts to infinite armor. You’ve got to watch their attack patterns and either counter at the right time or hit them while they’re recovering from their biggest swings. Either way, any single enemy in the game is potentially lethal if you’re unprepared, reckless, or simply lose your rhythm at the wrong moment.
To be fair, I’ve seen worse implementations of this kind of combat, and SHf doesn’t put any arbitrary limits on your healing ability, like how every second Souls-inspired game has its own spin on estus flasks. You might limp into the credits with Hinako barely held together by candy and bandages, but you can heal through most of your problems if you’re careful.
My problem with SHf‘s combat, beyond simply being annoyed by its existence, is what I said before: it simply shouldn’t work like this. Hinako is routinely depicted as an ordinary, hapless 17-year-old who has no idea who she wants to be. It doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense for her to also be capable of smacking a half-ton monster around like she’s Little Mac. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of a back-alley action-horror game like this, where you beat an army of monsters to death with whatever improvised weapons you can pry out of your environment, but this wasn’t the protagonist to do it with or the franchise to do it in.
That aside, I will give NeoBards credit for one thing: it may be the first third-party developer to work on Silent Hill that actually understood a particularly crucial part of the assignment. For all my problems with the combat, SHf is the best psychological horror game in the series since SH2.
Granted, it takes its time about getting there. SHf saves many of its best scares and twists for its back half, and up until that point, it often comes off as more random than anything else. Once you learn enough about Hinako herself, however, the game’s story starts to make a new and terrible kind of sense.
It’s also worth mentioning that SHf has an unusually robust New Game+ mode, to the point where some crucial details of the plot only show up on a second run. SHf’s NG+ offers new documents, different conversations, a couple of bonus puzzles, some hidden areas, and some entirely new bosses. You really haven’t finished it if you’ve only cleared the game once.
I’ve had a lot of fun picking through all the random details in SHf in an attempt to figure out what’s actually happening in Ebisugaoka. It’s a game that goes out of its way to confuse every issue, with strange details on top of details. If you’re the sort of person that enjoys this kind of multiple-choice, obfuscated plot arc (here I pause to look directly at Signalis nerds), then SHf will keep you entertained for years to come.
It’s a shame I don’t enjoy playing it more than I do. There are several aspects of Silent Hill f that are great, both on their own and as potential innovations for survival horror as a subgenre, and I eventually came around to liking how it cheerfully ignores (almost) everything else in the franchise. Both Silent Hill itself and many of its indie imitators had gotten slavishly adherent to a basic formula, and SHf was smart to throw almost all of it out. It’s just too bad that somebody let a Soulslike guy into the room at some crucial point and let him have his way.
If you have more patience for stamina-based combat than I do, you may enjoy Silent Hill f. There are two games here and, as far as I’m concerned, they’re almost diametrically opposed. The horror game’s actually pretty good once it gets going, but the Soulslike aspects are simply in the wrong place, in the wrong genre, at the wrong time.
Score: 7
A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.
