Silent Hill F Review: Trauma, Fog, And Blood-Red Lilies In 1960s Japan

You don’t often see a long-running horror series gamble everything on a setting and a character so far removed from its history, but Silent Hill f does exactly that, and it does so with a kind of unflinching confidence. NeoBards Entertainment plants its entire story in the fictional 1960s Japanese village of Ebisugaoka, leaving behind the American fog town that has been synonymous with the series for decades. And rather than the brooding, middle-aged men who usually headline Silent Hill, I found myself living through the eyes of Hinako Shimizu, a high school student, the black sheep of her family, and the daughter of an abusive, alcoholic father with a mother who chooses silence over protection – it’s the game’s spine, because her trauma leaks into every street, every monster, and every puzzle until the whole village feels like a physical manifestation of her pain.

The atmosphere grips you long before the horror even fully arrives. I walked along muddy rice fields, the ground sucking at my shoes, passed ramune bottles clinking on shop shelves, then puzzled my way through riddles steeped in Japanese folklore. At one point, I had to pause and search for what a kudzu plant even looked like, because without that knowledge, I could not progress. The setting felt alien in the right way, not out of place but out of reach, reminding me constantly that this was not the Silent Hill I knew, and yet it absolutely was. Then the fog rolled in. Spider lilies, blood red and suffocating, burst through the ground and walls, veiny tendrils wrapped the town like diseased muscle, and the lanterns strung above the market streets turned into sinister reminders that something had shifted permanently. Konami’s “beauty in terror” tagline, corny as it sounds, makes perfect sense here.

Hinako’s personal struggles are not background material to be skimmed over, but they are the very core of the experience. Ryukishi07, the writer behind Higurashi and Umineko, pushes Silent Hill into darker corners than I expected, confronting gender discrimination, child abuse, bullying, drug dependency, and trauma without flinching. Letters from Hinako’s school friends drip clues about her fractured relationships, and the monsters that hunt me down are physical metaphors of her fears and self-loathing. The knife-wielding mannequins lurking in the mist are creepy enough, but it’s the scarecrows, frozen in their school uniforms until I turn away, that made my skin crawl. Later, I stumbled across slack-jawed, swollen horrors, covered in bulging bellies like clusters of rotting grapes, birthing smaller demons from their putrid flesh. I thought I’d seen grotesque Silent Hill designs before, but these went beyond unsettling—they were disgusting in a way that stuck with me long after I shut the console off. And yes, there’s a sequence so gruesome it makes Heavy Rain’s notorious pinky-severing look like a papercut, and that’s not an exaggeration.

For all the atmosphere and all the writing, the combat became my biggest frustration. Silent Hill f strips out firearms entirely, which makes sense for a mountainside Japanese village in the 1960s, but it leaves Hinako to fend for herself with whatever she finds—pipes, crowbars, baseball bats, a sledgehammer—all of which break under strain. She can only carry three at a time. Attacks drain her tiny stamina bar, Focus abilities chew through her sanity, and blocks or heavy swings are a risk every time. I had to keep track of health, stamina, sanity, and weapon durability all at once, which sounds like a test of skill, but often it felt like an unnecessary struggle. Perfect dodges rewarded me with stamina boosts, but Hinako would frequently freeze between swings, as if the buttons didn’t register, and I found myself furiously pressing attack while she stubbornly stood there waiting for an opening that never came.

The real problem, though, is that combat never paid me back for my trouble. Unlike Resident Evil 4, where every dead enemy might leave a healing herb or ammunition, or Dark Souls, where every fight inches you toward new strength, here I often lost health, broke a weapon, and received nothing. The game never gives you the satisfaction of profit after a risky brawl. At first, I avoided most encounters, slipping past enemies with quick dodges and breaking the line of sight until they lost track of me, like babies who hadn’t quite figured out object permanence. It worked for a while, but then the later sections forced me into arena fights where I had no choice but to grind down every monster before moving forward. Those sections were slow, repetitive, and frustrating, as if all the momentum the story built was suddenly shackled to Hinako’s fragile stamina bar.

But then the shrine realm changes everything. Hinako drifts into this otherworld repeatedly, and there she meets Fox Mask, a morally ambiguous figure who becomes her guide of sorts. In this realm, she gains indestructible weapons—a dagger and a polearm—and eventually the supernatural ability to siphon the souls of fallen enemies, transforming into an unstoppable force for a short burst. On the one hand, this was liberating, because I could finally swing without worrying about weapons splintering into useless shards. On the other hand, it tipped the scale too far in the other direction. Survival horror thrives on vulnerability, but in these moments, I felt less like prey and more like the wolf. Boss fights in the shrine realm, though, were undeniably spectacular, from the apparition that filled arenas with red mist and struck with a spiked flail, to grotesque enemies that grabbed Hinako and tried to gnaw on her face. These encounters had weight and spectacle missing from standard combat, and they reminded me why I was still playing even when other fights wore me down.

Interestingly, Silent Hill f leans into puzzles as storytelling devices. Switch mazes, treasure hunts, and cryptic riddles slowed the pace in the best way possible. One of the most memorable moments had me collecting torn calendar pages scattered across Hinako’s home and using them to travel across different time periods, confronting the ghosts of her past in a sequence that was as clever as it was chilling. The school chapter was another highlight, weaving together locker combinations, decoding notes passed between girls, and unraveling petty student dramas, all while delivering world-building that explained the school’s history and the town’s industries. Playing on Hard puzzle difficulty forced me to pore over Hinako’s journal, which records notes and sketches in detail, and the satisfaction of piecing together a solution felt genuinely earned.

My first run took about nine hours, and when the credits rolled, I thought I was done. But Silent Hill f pulled me back in with a New Game+ that felt like a reward. On my second playthrough, I found new interiors to explore, fresh documents that recontextualized characters, extended cutscenes, and even at least a couple of new bosses I had never encountered before. There’s also a treasure hunt across Ebisugaoka that eventually unlocks a powerful new weapon, and of course, four additional endings to chase. Replay value isn’t lip service here; it’s real, and I’m already knee-deep in my third run.

That doesn’t mean the systems outside combat always worked smoothly. Inventory management was a headache. Hinako’s limited space meant items didn’t always stack, and discarding a bandage for a bigger kit meant losing that bandage forever. Toolkits were valuable in the village because they repaired weapons, but in the shrine realm, they were useless dead weight, eating up slots I desperately needed. Shrines themselves let me save, enshrine offerings to build Faith, and pray to secure upgrades for health, stamina, and sanity. But upgrades also required ema plaques, which were rare enough that I often sat on a mountain of Faith with no way to spend it. Consumables ranged from bandages and first aid kits to divine water, which fully restored sanity, and ramune, which raised maximum sanity, but managing them mid-battle was clumsy thanks to the tiny pop-up icons.

Presentation, though, is where Silent Hill f earns its place in the series. The soundtrack, with contributions from Akira Yamaoka, doesn’t lean heavily on the familiar Silent Hill sound, but the atmosphere it creates is unsettling in new ways. The ambient audio—distant drones, creaks, and whispers—had me on edge constantly. Visually, the game is stunning in a grotesque way: spider lilies sprouting from walls, stitched monsters slumping like bags of rotting meat, shrine corridors lit with an eerie, warm glow. It may not look like the Silent Hill of old with its rusted metal and radio static, but it feels every bit as suffocating.

Accessibility is surprisingly strong for a horror game. There are colorblind options with adjustable intensity, subtitles that can be resized, recolored, or tagged with speaker names, and separate sliders for voice, SFX, music, and system audio. Running can be toggled, cameras inverted, vibration switched off, and the difficulty system splits into three modes for action—Story, Hard, and Lost in Fog—and two for puzzles, Story and Hard. The default recommendation pairs Story for action with Hard for puzzles, which is exactly how I played.

By the time I finished Silent Hill f, I was left torn between admiration and frustration. The writing and atmosphere are among the strongest the series has ever delivered. Hinako’s journey through trauma feels raw, and the village of Ebisugaoka is unforgettable, with every rice field, shrine, and alleyway dripping with symbolic menace. The puzzles are some of the smartest and most integrated in the franchise, and New Game+ makes replaying worthwhile with real additions instead of recycled content. But the combat, the heart of survival horror gameplay, undercuts much of that brilliance. Swinging pipes and bats that snap too soon, stamina and sanity meters that feel restrictive rather than tense, and rewards that never justify the risk all pile together into a system that frustrated me far more often than it scared me.

And yet, despite every broken pipe, every missed swing, and every tedious gauntlet, I kept playing. Because Silent Hill f is not safe, it is not predictable, and it is not easy to shake off. It left me unsettled, disturbed, and eager to dive back in to see another ending, even if I had to suffer through clunky fights to get there. It may not be a flawless revival, but it’s bold, and in a series defined by confronting fear, that feels like the truest step forward Silent Hill has taken in years.