Silent Hill f
Konami, rated 18s
PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox Series X/S (played on PS5)
★★★★☆
Horror movies can deliver chills by the truckload, but when it comes to eliciting dread, video games are in a class of their own. No other gaming franchise comes close to the suffocating unease of the Silent Hill series, which, for more than 20 years, has combined surreal scares and bursts of nerve-shredding violence, like David Lynch making a slasher film.
Starting with 1999’s original Silent Hill, these games are, at one level, a masterpiece of psychological terror. Their trademark is a spiralling unease that gets into your pores and under your skin. But they can also make you shout out loud with fright – as I discovered playing the 2024 Silent Hill 2 remake when confronted by a baddy with a pyramid for a head hiding in a cupboard.
Until that remake, the franchise had been relatively dormant for the past decade. But it comes juddering back to life in earnest with the latest entry, Silent Hill f – a sequel that also marks a new beginning as it relocates the Silent Hill universe from the contemporary US to 1960s Japan.
Silent Hill has always been informed by Japanese horror – as you would expect of a series published by Tokyo-headquartered Konami. However, the connection is now made explicit. The player steps into the shoes of 16-year-old schoolgirl Hinkao Shimizu as she navigates the haunted (and fictional) town of Ebisugaoka. Welcome to a purgatorial neverwhere that feels like a cross between The Ring movies, the nightmarish work of cult manga writer Junji Ito, and Limerick Junction railway station in January.
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A Silent Hill game is never just about jump scares. The 1999 original tapped into the trauma a parent experiences over the disappearance of a child (the protagonist is searching the town of Silent Hill for his missing daughter). Meanwhile, in Silent Hill 2, the most dangerous demons are the figurative ones with which the main character wrestles after his wife has seemingly returned from the afterlife.
In Silent Hill f, Hinako must negotiate both a town full of hideous beasties and also an abusive home life, where she and her mother live in fear of Hinako’s domineering father. Her father is a monster – but Hinako has equally negative feelings towards her mother, whom she sees as a passive victim of her husband.
Hinako also has a complex relationship with her teenage friends as a budding love triangle takes a dark turn. Those traumas manifest in a variety of weird and surprising ways. As is the tradition in the franchises, Hinako must fight misshapen monstrosities seemingly stitched from the deepest recesses of her subconscious – horrors with limbs bent the wrong way and faces at disturbing angles.
These action scenes are where the game stumbles slightly. The combat is clumsy and unintuitive – and tricky, even in the supposedly more forgiving story mode. Better by far are the calmer puzzle sections, set in a ghostly realm steeped in Japanese mythology.
Monsters notwithstanding, Silent Hill f is a game where the terrors are often implied rather than shoved in your face – and all the scarier for it. In the pantheon of modern horror blockbusters, it is more of a slow-burner than the Lynchian carnival ride that was 2023’s Alan Wake 2 or the pulse-pounding Resident Evil 4 remake. And it lacks the sheer, throat-catching tension of zombie mega-smash The Last of Us.
However, it’s still fantastically unsettling – cranking up the dread to the point where it borders on unbearable. That it never entirely goes over the top is a testament to skilful pacing and tautly-scripted cutscenes by Ryukishi07 (the author best known for his visual novel video games, When They Cry). But even at its most unhinged, it is never less than brilliantly compelling – and a worthy addition to gaming’s creepiest canon.
