“It made me sad, honestly. I was so emotionally drained just getting to the end of this mess."
PC | PS5 | XBOX SERIES |
HOW I PLAYED: I played on PS5 with a physical copy on an LG C1 with AirPods Max headphones.
STORY — 10/20
INTRO (2)
The game's real tone setter is an unremarkable cutscene depicting a quiet mountain village in 1960s Japan. This is accompanied by a creepy ass, sombre tune sung by children.
We're introduced to the main character Hinako who's in the middle of a family feud. After she makes her exit we gain control and the adventure begins.
*Run from the fog monster*...
CUTSCENES (4)
Silent Hill f had some really impressive cutscenes with creative camera work and great editing. They were particularly unsettling and downright disturbing at times. Overall really well done, though.
WORLD BUILDING (3)
There's a pretty strong display of environmental storytelling through props and set pieces, and of course a heavy use of notes and letters that you collect throughout the game.
I was initially intrigued when I found out the game was going to be set in the 60s but overall disappointed in the presentation. Besides the lack of electronics, there wasn't a lot going on that really gave it a cool creepy retro vibe like I was expecting...Missed opportunity for sure.
OVERALL STORY (1)
This is my biggest issue with the game by far. Silent Hill f never really got off its feet. After Hinako leaves her home she sets out to meet up with some friends at a local corner store in town. The end.
The game doesn't go anywhere. There's no direction. No sense of progression. No goal. No fucking purpose. It was baffling. I kept waiting and waiting for the game to actually start but it never did. There's no clear overall objective and as a result I was unable to invest myself in it in any meaningful way. The entire 10 hours I spent (yes this game is very short but we'll touch more on that later) I'm running around this small town rounding up my friends while weird shit is happening. That's the game. That's it.
In true Silent Hill fashion there's an alternate dream or dark world that you visit repeatedly but this only added further confusion to an already incomprehensible plot. It was such a mess.
Imagine you took Ganon out of Zelda. You're just running around Hyrule blowing up walls and smashing pots while the occasional enemy gets in your way. My god. I can't express just how frustrating and utterly pointless this game felt.
Underneath the non-existent plot theres some character progression - maybe - girls fighting over a boy; a teenager who hates her parents. Seriously?!
GRAPHICS — 12/15
CHARACTER MODELS (4)
While the game has a softer look that doesn't lean into ultra polished and detailed territory, I thought the character models looks really good. Moving the camera up close I could see veins in Hinakos eyeballs and the overall structure of faces and bodies was excellent.
ENVIRONMENTS (3)
Last years Silent Hill 2 Remake was a more impressive looking game. Silent Hill f was just really missing any wow factor.
Forests and foliage looked previous-gen and I can't recall stopping to marvel at any outstanding textures or set pieces.
The majority of the game takes place in back alleys and streets in the small fictional town of Ebisugaoka. There are homes you can enter and later a school but that was about it. Really underwhelming.
The set dressings and assets were alright for the most part but its just the sheer lack of variety and quantity of places to explore that hurt the game the most.
SPECIAL FX (4)
I feel like the lighting did a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to the games overall graphics. Obviously there's a ton of fog everywhere but dust and particle effects also gave old buildings some much needed depth.
AUDIO — 10/15
AMBIENCE (4)
There was some really good, atmospheric, nerve-racking audio in Silent Hill f. Even though playing the game felt pointless at least I was stressed out while I was doing it.
BOSS MUSIC (2)
There's no standout boss music in the game. The same dissonant, haunting audio that accompanies you throughout the game is used in the boss fights. I never felt like it picked up or elevate the moment.
SOUND DESIGN (4)
The game defaults to Japanese for the audio so that's what I stuck with. I don't speak the language but I could definitely feel the emotion in the acting.
The overall sound design with headphones on was awesome. I need to give the game props where its due. The impact of attacks really hit, the sonic textures that the ambience created was immersive and monsters and menu confirmation FX were really well done.
PERFORMANCE — 8/10
FRAME RATE (4)
You can prioritize graphics or performance mode and I played on the latter the entire time.
STABILITY (4)
I didn't encounter any glitches but did notice a handful of Blighttown moments where the frame rate really chugged.
GAMEPLAY — 21/40
CONTROLS (3)
Try and imagine playing Dark Souls but 90% of the game is cramped hallways and you're restricted to God of War 2018 controls. This will give you and idea of how bad it feels to play Silent Hill f. Later in the game when the number of enemies on screen at once increased it was utterly catastrophic. All I could do was laugh in ironic disbelief. It was unbelievable bad. I didn't see this adding to the chaos and stress I saw a game with an identity crisis that tried to emulate multiple different styles and failed on all accounts.
MECHANICS (2)
The Dark Souls comparisons don't end there because Silent Hill f comes with a stamina bar, a lock on function, a short parrying window, dodging more akin to Bloodborne and collectible items called omamori that act like rings do that give you enhanced abilities. There was very little original here.
In additional to health and stamina, Hinako has a sanity meter that which is Silent Hill f's defining mechanic. Using the sanity meter, Hinako can enter focus mode which allows her to slow down time or charge a special move.
This added a much needed layer to the combat that was otherwise a boring two button snoozefest.
Enemies don't actually reward you with anything at all so the risk reward is hardly ever worth it. You'll damage your weapons, most likely lose health and scream at your TV then leave empty handed. On occasion, the game forces you into mandatory encounters where the path forward will be blocked until you clear a group of enemies. This was just insulting.
In the alternate dream world, Hinako receives unique special abilities to that location but they were all dished out way too closely to each other and then barely given any time to actually use. This bring us perfectly to the game's other major flaw.
PACING (1)
Silent Hill f has the worst pacing of any game that I've played since Jimmy and I started doing this channel. It was beyond frustrating. It made the game a grind to get through and once again its an under 10 hour game.
Cutscene trigger zones were everywhere and felt like brick walls rather than speed bumps. The game was full of invisible walls that totally wrecked an already lacking sense of atmosphere or immersion. The sense of progression was almost non existent. The incredibly badly designed dream world felt like a chore every time I got transported to it. The sense of being stuck in this small town and never actually going anywhere physically or metaphorically. It was all so lame.
UI/UE (4)
One of the few things the game did well in my opinion. I really liked the UI for the most part, the menus were great and the item portraits brought a much needed sense of style and character to a very grey game.
BOSS QUALITY (2)
There's nothing special to talk about here. The Boss fights were few and far between and one especially climatic moment (if you can even call it that) featured a recycled mob as the Boss. I was actually screaming at my TV.
"Why! Why would you do that?!
It was such an unbelievably lazy move. Holy crap this game made some bad decisions.
ENEMY VARIETY (2)
There were some cool designs for sure but far too few of them and for a gave this short there's no excuse to have reskinned enemies. Also, every single enemy walks around; there were none that crawled on walls or flew around. Very one dimensional.
GAMEPLAY VARIETY (3)
Let me get these puzzles out of the way. I normally relish these moments in survival horror games. They're a way to break up the action, add lore to the game and test your big gamer brain. The puzzles in Silent Hill f were a huge letdown . There was no "oh that was cool" when I solved them. To be totally honest, for nearly all of them I actually sat there for a good 10 minutes playing with them before I said "I have no fucking idea. Not even close" and had to find the solution on youtube. The game lets you chose a difficulty setting for the main game and the puzzles separately and I chose hard for the puzzles. I still don't see how they could be this unintuitive and vague, though. This was another factor for me that contributed to the game's awful pacing. Most of the puzzles were just complete and utter roadblocks.
OK, maybe I lied a tiny bit about the sense of progression because the game does feature gradually better weapons as you move through it. The problem was they were all kind of the same. They were just melee and either one or two handed. I don't need guns in every game but what about letting Hinako throw bricks or give her a chain that has a long reach. Something other than just whacking dudes with baseball bats and steel pipes the entire game.
To make matters worse, theres a weapon degradation system here and the weapons were constantly breaking, even with the inclusion of a repair kit mechanic. Just like Breath of the Wild, I'd horde my best shit only to have it end up being the most fragile and lose it in a couple of fights.
REPLAYABILITY (3)
There are a total of 5 different endings in Silent Hill f but I had no desire to see any of them. Even with the game being this short I couldn't bring myself to play this thing any more than I had to.
BONUS — 1/3
Silent Hill f offer colourblind options.
OVERALL — 62/100
FAIR
Silent Hill f was an incredibly frustrating, confusing and difficult game to get through. Not difficult in a traditional "this is a hard game but I can get better at it if I keep trying", difficult because of its horrible pacing, insanely frustrating combat (oh Jesus, I didn't even mention the enemy grab moves) and just sheer lack of any driving narrative. The game was so stagnant. It had no flow. It made me sad, honestly. I was so emotionally drained just getting to the end of this mess.
As I was composting my closing argument for this review I had an epiphany. What if the director's goal was to make the player feel like a helpless teenager, confused about the future, combating emotions and with no clear goal in life? I for sure experienced all of this during my playthrough. I tried really hard to find any meaning in this game and see things from another perspective. What it really came down to though is that either way I looked at it, this was not an enjoyable experience. No matter how ironically I tried and see things. Mechanically the game is just so broken.
I really wanted to like it. I loved last years Silent Hill 2 remake and I'm a massive fan of the genre. I don't understand what the vision was here but it just fell so flat and hard on its face. I never felt like I belonged in the game's world or had a function in its universe. Nothing that I like about Silent Hill or survival horror for that matter was present in Silent Hill f. Its a game that has a major identity crisis and failed at everything that it tried to emulate.
It often veered too far away from the genre as well; the first mini boss you face is a giant blob covered in flowers. It wasn't scary or imposing, it was fantasy.
Silent Hill f took me just under 10 hours to complete. It felt more like a DLC than a full game and on top of that cost me 100 Canadian dollars. This ridiculous price tag only added insult to injury to a game that had little to no redeeming qualities. So what if it has multiple difficulty settings and alternate endings. Its just not a good enough game to revisit given any amount of bonus features.
PROS
✅ Good menu design and UI
✅ Ambience and soundtrack are on point
✅
✅
CONS
❌ Completely void of any objective or purpose
❌ Terrible pacing
❌ Frustrating combat
❌ Very short and too expensive
TLDR: 62/100 (FAIR) Silent Hill f is a visually unsettling yet deeply disappointing survival horror game that suffers from aimless storytelling, poor pacing, and clunky combat despite solid atmosphere and sound design. Set in 1960s Japan, it introduces intriguing ideas like a sanity mechanic and eerie dream worlds but fails to give players any sense of purpose or progression. While the haunting ambience and creative cutscenes occasionally shine, repetitive gameplay, frustrating controls, and dull environments make it feel more like a confusing, directionless experiment than a proper Silent Hill entry. Ultimately, it’s a short, stagnant experience that lacks both the terror and depth the series is known for.
PICK UP (GAME NAME) HERE:
PlayStation: https://www.playstation.com/en-ca/games/silent-hill-f/
Xbox: https://www.xbox.com/en-CA/games/store/silent-hill-f/9N5NFRQV2HQQ
PC: https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/2947440/
CHECK OUT OUR VIDEO REVIEW HERE
0 Comments