I'm on the record as having said that I think From Software would've been a good candidate to develop a Silent Hill game (or a pure horror game in general). But I also said that I would not want such a game to be a "Souls-like". Instead, I think FromSoft is well suited to the Silent Hill IP because they make games that are rich in oppressive atmosphere, are good at developing rich mythologies, and which share many common themes with Silent Hill (such as corrupt religious authorities). Also, FromSoft makes games other than Souls-likes. They made Déraciné, which I loved! And which might actually be there 3rd or 4th best game.
Well, I didn't get a FromSoft Silent Hill game, but I did apparently get the "Silent Hill Souls-like" that I very explicitly did not want. Thankfully, it did not turn out as bad as I feared it would be.
Poorly-labeled difficulty options
Do yourself a favor, and do not try starting this game on the "Hard" difficulty! It's a shame that the developers chose to label the difficulty levels like they did: "Story" and "Hard". There's no "Normal" or "Medium" difficulty option. Typically, when I see a "Story" difficulty option, I assume that it's a mode that is stripped of all challenge and friction such as to allow the player to basically just walk through the game un-molested.
Don't get me wrong! I approve of games having accessible difficulty settings, even if I choose not to use them. Such stripped-down "Story Modes" are perfectly fine to include in an action or adventure game -- especially one that is narrative driven, like Silent Hill f is.
I gave up on the Hard mode after the first major boss.
This "Story" difficulty doesn't quite go to that extreme, but it is pretty easy (outside of a handful of tougher setpieces), and it renders many of the game's advanced mechanics moot. For example, you don't really have to manage Sanity or Focus at all in this difficulty level, as Sanity is automatically refilled at every save point. Stamina is still meaningful, but one-on-one encounters can almost always be defeated without depleting the sanity bar.
Almost all the consumable pick-ups, thus, can be safely ignored or sold at save points in exchange for permanent buffs (which just make the combat even easier!), since you'll rarely (if ever) need to use consumables on the Story difficulty. This has many knock-on effects for the rest of the game, such as making exploration largely pointless. Going out of your way to explore, only to find a reward of an extra item or 2 that recovers or buffs your Sanity simply has little-to-no value. Truly valuable rewards, such as inventory upgrades or a useful omamori, are few and far between. In fact, I often had to run back to a nearby save point to sell consumeables because my inventory would be too full to pick up any new ones.
I started on the aptly-named "Hard" mode, which is actually quite hard! Enemies are relentlessly aggressive, frequently stun-locking the player, and resources have to be constantly consumed to re-fill your depleting Sanity bar and to boost your stamina so that you can continue to dodge the flurries of enemy attack combos. I gave up at the first major boss (about 3 hours in), which was basically a Dark Souls boss -- a combination of Adjudicator from Demon's Souls and The Rotten from Dark Souls 2, but with cheaper, more broken hitboxes. The clincher wasn't even the boss itself; the clincher that made me reduce the difficulty was the presence of mob enemies alongside the boss.
I sold almost all of the consumables I picked up on Story Mode because I didn't need them.
Worse yet, even though the game offers to lower the difficulty level if you die too many times, it will not let you increase the difficulty level once you get a better feel for the combat, animations, and enemy attack tells. If you lowered the difficulty to Story in order to get past a difficult stretch, you cannot go back to Hard unless you either restart the game, or go back to an older save from before you lowered the difficulty.
Since launch, Konami has re-tuned the difficulty levels, but instead of adding a "Medium" difficulty, they added a "Casual", which is even easier than "Story" mode -- as if the naming of the difficulty levels weren't already confusing enough. They also toned down the difficulty of the game across the board, including in the already-easy Story Mode. Personally, I think this was the wrong direction to go. What the game really needs is a middle-ground difficulty level, in which Sanity, Focus, and consumables are more meaningful, and have to be managed, but in which enemies are less aggressive and hit for less damage.
Silent Hill Souls-like?
So what makes the combat mechanics feel so wrong on the Hard difficulty? The movement and attack rhythm feels weird, uncomfortable, and out-of-sync. Every attack feels delayed. Enemy attack tells and dodge windows feel wrong. Input-buffering is unreliable, and the game seems to drop some of my inputs. Enemies will jump out and ambush you from around corners or by literally smashing through walls. And hitboxes are just atrocious. It's really hard to judge the range of an attack, and know if I'll hit an enemy or not. And even when the enemy target lock-on is enabled, the character (and camera) doesn't point directly at the enemy, which makes me unsure if I'm lined up correctly to hit it (yes, the character will pivot during the attack animation to correctly line up the strike -- most of the time).
Combat feels uncomfortable and is full of ambushes.
The quick inventory is also hard to use because the icons are small, and it's hard to remember which items do what. You also can't use items directly from the pause menu. I'm constantly stopping combat to pause the game in order to look through all my consumables to remind myself of which one does what and of which quick-key its assigned to. Then I have to un-pause (because I can't use the items from the pause menu) in order to open up the quick inventory and use the correct item, and hope that I don't get hit by the enemy during the animation.
That being said, I do think these systems are thoughtfully designed for a an action-horror game. The player must juggle multiple resources and act very deliberately. If fighting seems too risky (or annoying), you can always run away. But running away is limited by stamina, and will frequently mean running into the unknown, which is potentially scarier than the scariest monster.
There aren't any ranged weapons, but the inclusion of weapon durability -- and the occasional "Repair Kit" to restore durability -- takes the place of ammunition. If you fight unnecessarily, you might loose your only weapon and be literally defenseless. And if one of my favorite lore YouTubers is correct, then there's actually a very good cultural reason why all these weapons are already on the verge of breaking when you find them.
Resource limitations force fight-or-flight decisions.
If you do choose to fight (which you will do often), the difficult timing of dodges and counters can be mitigated by using Focus, which will highlight the enemy when its about to attack. However, using Focus drains Sanity, and if you are attacked while focusing, it will deal additional damage to Sanity. This will leave you vulnerable to enemies that deal psychic (or "spiritual") damage, since once your Sanity is depleted, these monsters will start draining health. This is why I wish that there were a difficulty level that requires more long-term management of Sanity, but in which the fights aren't such relentless grinds. Or just make a separate setting for whether Sanity automatically recharges or not, that is independent of the rest of the game's action difficulty.
There is a robust set of action game mechanics here, and they do actually work within the horror contexts of the game. The monsters are just threatening enough that seeing one at the end of a hallway will cause anxiety, and being surrounded by multiple enemies is genuinely panic-inducing. The player always feels vulnerable, and resources always feel limited -- even if those resources happen to mostly be a stamina and sanity bar, rather than ammo and health kits. These systems just don't feel properly-tuned for the default difficulty levels that were available at release.
Lost in Translation?
The puzzles are a lot more playable on the "Hard" puzzle difficulty (I didn't play the "Story" puzzle difficulty to compare), but are still full of their own occasional jank (regardless of difficulty). Many "puzzles" are straightforward "find the key" puzzles where you just have to find a key item in one room and use it at the lock in another room. These don't even require finding multiple items and combining them, the way that you would often do in the original Silent Hill games.
There were also a lot of instances of exploration, navigation, combat, and other routine activities being turned into puzzles. This really helped to prevent the game from getting repetitive or tedious. Even if I was doing a thing that I had done half a dozen times before, there always seemed to be some new twist or gimmick that kept me from getting bored.
The better the puzzle, the more likely the game is to just give away the solution.
The puzzles that require written clues, however, are where things get really hit-or-miss. Many work quite well, and others just seem strangely esoteric and difficult to understand. One of the biggest offenders is the [rapidly becoming infamous] wasabi field scarecrow puzzle. This puzzle requires the player to intuit facial expressions and body language from stationary scarecrow enemies, and pick the right one based on a clue. Then repeat this 4 times with different clues and differently-posed scarecrows.
The problem is that the clues don't really make any sense, and the differences between the scarecrows that the player is expected to notice can be exceedingly subtle. I've read some people on Reddit suggesting that the written clues are "lost in translation", and that they make more sense in Japanese, and in the context of commonly-understood Japanese cultural norms. The "polite smile" clue an excellent case in point here. In the actual puzzle, there are multiple scarecrows smiling, so it's not really clear to me (or many other players) which smiling scarecrow is the correct one.
Later on, the player is expected to find another smiling scarecrow among multiple smiling scarecrows. But this time, the correct scarecrow actually has its head pointing straight down to the ground with its hair blocking its face. So in order to even see its smile, the player has to stand in the correct position and angle the camera straight up to hopefully get the scarecrow's face in-frame and in-focus.
The scarecrow puzzle is infamously obtuse.
Of the 4 parts of this puzzle, I was only able to correctly deduce 1 of the correct answers. I had to look the others up online because I either didn't understand what the clue was trying to say, or I was on the right track with the clue, but mis-read the intention of the posing of the scarecrows.
But then again, I was playing on the "Hard" puzzle difficulty, and it isn't like the classic Silent Hill games didn't have some esoteric puzzles like this. The Shakespeare puzzle in Silent Hill 3 comes to mind as something that non-English-speaking players may have seriously struggled with, for similar reasons. So I'm not going to be too hard on this game for having hard puzzles in "Hard" mode. At least the puzzles mechanically make sense; unlike the combat.
And there are also some really good puzzles here too. The locker puzzles in the middle school are great, multi-stage puzzles that have very well-written clues. In fact, the entire middle school level in this game is fantastic, and stands up with almost any level in any Silent Hill game. It's just too bad that the game kind of just gives away the solution if you find all the hint memos.
Shinto occultism
Complaints with the action focus and difficulty options aside, I really enjoyed the setting and theme of the game. Unlike previous third-party developers of Silent Hill games, NeoBards did not feel like slaves to the original games' aesthetic and setting. Moving the series out of Silent Hill -- and out of America entirely -- might have been one of the best decisions that could have been done with this series. Everything from the visuals, to the characters, to the level design, and even the monsters and the Otherworld all feel fresh, and it even manages to inject a little bit of mystery back into a mythology that was feeling stale.
This is the most unique and visually interesting Otherworld since Silent Hill 3!
Just like how the original Silent Hill games integrated European occult and alchemical mythology into its story, Silent Hill f integrates Japanese folklore and mythology. The town of Ebisugaoka may be fictional, and some of its local traditions and folklore are made up, but it all feels very authentic -- at least to me, being a white American who has never been to Japan and doesn't speak Japanese. In any case, the lore and mythology behind Ebisugaoka is believable (whether or not its realistic) in a way that much of the lore and backstory of the later Silent Hill games just weren't.
This Otherworld feels more sinister and creeping. It's not as uncanny as the Otherworld in [original] Silent Hill 2, but its organic and flowery nature means that it doesn't feel outright evil -- more like a misunderstood force of nature.
Connections to the original games are tenuous,
and explicitly validate old fan theories.
Links to the original games are, however, pretty thin and tenuous. I kept waiting for a big reveal that would tie this game in more directly to the original games, but it just never happened. Instead, there were a handful of hand-wavy memos that relate to background details of the original games, while also putting a Japanese spin on them. Rather than tie directly into the original canon, Silent Hill f is content to corroborate certain fan theories regarding the first game, but never bothers to fully commit to any direct connection.
Honestly, this game could have just been a new IP called "Ebisugaoka", and very little (if anything) would have to change. I probably also would have liked it a lot better if it didn't come with the baggage and expectations of a Silent Hill game.
Teenage love triangle
I'm less keen on the teenage love-triangle that lies at the center of the story. In the game's defense, at least it's an original take on story-telling within the Silent Hill mythos that doesn't rely on some stupid plot twist involving the protagonist having repressed the memory of the death of a loved one. So kudos to NeoBards for not beating that wanna-be Silent Hill 2 dead horse the way all the other 3rd-party Silent Hill developers did. It's especially welcome considering this game's release being right off the heels of the remake of Silent Hill 2.
Most of the story is predicated on an awkward love triangle.
Silent Hill f and The Short Message seem intent on pivoting the Silent Hill mythos away from both occultism and from shamelessly ripping off Silent Hill 2's themes of personal guilt. Instead, these 2 games seem to be redefining Silent Hill, as a series, to be about the personal insecurities of teenage girls -- basically taking the things that were background details in Silent Hill 3, and making them the focus of these new stories. So maybe Konami is graduating from giving us knock-offs of Silent Hill 2, and now we're going to spend a decade getting nothing but knock-offs of Silent Hill 3?
That could be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. Personally, I feel like one of the reasons that Silent Hill 3 works as well as it does is that a player can enjoy the main plot without necessarily having to relate to (or even understand) all of Heather's uniquely feminine themes. In Silent Hill f, however, those feminine themes are the main plot. If you don't care or relate to a teenage girl struggling with her discomfort with Japan's strictly-enforced gender roles, or with the soap opera drama of a teen love triangle, then there isn't a whole lot else here for you.
On the upside, both games have retained some subtle hints and references to the occultism of the first game, so it seems that Konami isn't abandoning the original games' narrative threads entirely. But on the other hand, both games have leaned 100% into the idea of Silent Hill (as a game series and as a setting) being a personal purgatory, in which absolutely nothing that happens can be taken literally or at face value. So Silent Hill 2 is still the primary influence here, by a long shot. That being said, even though Silent Hill 2 is, by far, the most metaphorical of the original 4 games, its events still literally happened. There is no [non-joke] ending, in which the events of Silent Hill 2 were all just a dream, or in which James was in a mental institution the whole time, or anything like that.
In the end though, I felt completely unsatisfied by the ending of Silent Hill f. Honestly, I didn't really understand what was going on -- and I sure as hell didn't get any proper closure. I think I understand all of the family and relationship drama, and the idea of different parts of Hinako's identity fighting against each other.
By the end of my first playthrough, I still didn't understand who or what Fox Mask is supposed to be.
By the end of a first playthrough, I'm still not sure who or what the Fox Mask guy is, or what he was trying to accomplish with Hinako. And I also started finding notes in the second half of the game about a strict mom forcing her son to move away, and then something else about a trust fund heir having a bastard child before abandoning the baby-mamma in favor of an arranged political marriage. And all throughout the game, there were bits and pieces of information about a missing girl, which was never paid off in that first playthrough. I have no idea what any of that stuff is about, or how it might all connect to each other, or to the other characters in the story. And then there's the mid-credits stinger, which made absolutely no sense, and only served to confuse me even more. My best guess is that there is something nefarious going on with Hinako's sister's marriage?
Maybe I missed some documents that explained these things further? Or maybe it's all stuff that you only learn more about by playing through the game again to get the alternate endings?
Financial and creative freedom
I was going to praise this game for not being as bloated and drawn out as the Silent Hill 2 remake, but it's just bloated and drawn out in a different way. Unlike Silent Hill 2, there aren't different endings available in a first playthrough (even though notes in Silent Hill f hint at how your behaviors might affect the ending). Instead, the first playthrough always earns the same ending, and you have to play the game 3 or 4 more times to see the additional endings, and get more of the story. And that first playthrough still ended up taking me 18 hours (compared to the 26 hours it took to finish Silent Hill 2 remake) -- which is still a lot longer than the 8-12 hour sweet spot for a horror game.
All that being said, it's clear that Konami actually invested into this game. It has high production quality, and doesn't feel like the cheap cash-in that previous Silent Hill games felt like. NeoBards definitely knows what they are doing and were given enough creative freedom and financial support to realize their vision. As such Silent Hill f is a much more competently put-together game, compared to what companies like Double Helix, Climax, and Vatra were able to do with the resources and corporate direction they were given, and f is easily the best Silent Hill game since Silent Hill 4.
Despite teasing alternate endings in notes in a first playthrough,
the alternate endings can only be unlocked on repeat playthroughs.