By Donovan Erskine

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While Silent Hill f isn’t the first game to move the series away from its eponymous foggy town, it breaks new ground by finally giving fans a story set in Japan. Silent Hill f redefines what a Silent Hill game can be, while still delivering the mix of horror and mystery that we expect from this franchise.

F is for friends

Silent Hill f is set in the fictional Japanese town of Ebisugaoka and follows a young woman named Hinako who searches for answers after her town becomes engulfed in a mysterious fog. Set in the 1960s, there are parallels and direct references to World War 2 and how its conclusion devastated Japan for the decades that followed. It not only informs the game’s visual style, but factors into the motivations of its characters.

On its surface, Silent Hill f seems like a major departure for the franchise. While the blend of western and eastern influences made Silent Hill stand out among the crowd, Silent Hill f ditches the former for an authentically Japanese story. Still, it’s undeniably Silent Hill, with plenty of fog, creepy enemies, puzzles, and dark themes.

Hinako immediately makes her mark as one of the more likable Silent Hill protagonists. As a young woman who grew up in Ebisugaoka, the majority of her backstory revolves around childhood memories at school, in her home, and around the neighborhood. For her, the stakes are as simple as wanting to make sure the people she cares about are okay. It’s hard not to root for her and easy to imagine yourself in her shoes as she adjusts to this unbelievably bleak new reality.

As the story rolls on, the plot threads of Silent Hill f unravel in a way only this franchise can do. Revelations about the world and characters caused me to stop dead in my tracks on multiple occasions, forcing me to rethink earlier segments of the game.

If fans had any concern that Silent Hill f would stray from the series’ thematic roots, they should fear not. Silent Hill f presents a deeply mature narrative with themes of abuse, bullying, and self-harm. It’s heavy stuff, and worth an extra moment of consideration if any of those topics could be triggering for you.

Pray for salvation

As you walk the foggy streets of Ebisugaoka, you’ll find yourself face-to-face with the unsightly monsters that now inhabit this town. The first (and most frequent) enemies you’ll encounter are fleshy mannequin-like creatures who contort their body as they walk and sprint disjointedly. I hope that description does their freakiness justice, because I never got used to seeing them.

Luckily, Hinako can take up arms by using weapons she finds around town, like lead pipes and bladed objects. It’s a fairly straightforward combat setup, with standard and heavy attacks that can be used in tandem to dispatch enemies. Hinako can also dodge and even counter enemy attacks if the player triggers a heavy attack during a visual cue.

Once you get the grasp of how combat works, there are a couple of elements that shake things up. Most notably, Silent Hill f features weapon durability. This means that the quality of your gear will degrade and eventually break after enough use. There are toolkits that you can use to repair weapons, though they aren’t incredibly easy to come by.

Silent Hill f also features a sanity meter that players must manage in addition to health and stamina. Sanity can be depleted by incoming damage as well as environmental hazards. If your sanity runs out, Hinako will lose health instead. There are items that can replenish health and/or sanity to varying degrees, though they can also serve separate functions at Hokoras.

Hokoras are essentially checkpoints, where you can save your game and upgrade Hinako. This is primarily done through the Faith system. Faith is a currency that you can earn from enshrining items that you find during your journey. Faith can then be exchanged for health, stamina, and sanity upgrades. You can also spend Faith to draw a random Omamori, which are special items that provide passive bonuses to Hinako during exploration and combat. You can increase the amount of Omamori that Hinako can hold at once using Faith.

This system creates a dynamic where you’re constantly juggling items, determining what’s worth holding onto, and what should be enshrined. It’s a survival game, so you’ll inevitably run into scenarios when you’re low on healing items during an important fight, or are light on toolkits with a wave of enemies in front of you. Still, it’s not always best to hoard items, either, as you’ll end up having to pass on other items and stunt Hinako’s progression in the process.

Fear tactics

As a horror game, Silent Hill f wouldn’t be a true success unless it brought the scares. Let me make it absolutely clear that this game is scary as hell. The developers craft scares not through a reliance on jump-scares (although they’re here!), but by using the atmosphere to create a constant feeling of dread. I carefully turned corners and walked into buildings, afraid that something was about to pop out at me. Sometimes it did. But, more often than not, nothing happened, and my heart rate went up anyway. To me, that’s the mark of a good horror game.

I mentioned earlier that the creatures of Silent Hill f are hard to look at. Well, the only thing worse than seeing them, is hearing them. The sound design in Silent Hill f is among some of the best I’ve experienced in a horror game. The sounds of Hinako breathing through her nose as wooden planks creaked beneath her feet only exacerbated my own stress as I walked through the quiet buildings of Ebisugaoka. The mechanical twisting and turning of the mannequin-like enemies is etched into my mind. In one puzzle sequence that I won’t spoil, I realized that enemies were sneaking up on me when I turned away from them, as I could hear them shuffling across the ground behind me. I almost threw my headset off when I realized it.

Despite being this far into the franchise’s history, Silent Hill f still manages to deliver unique scares primarily thanks to the new setting and infusion of Japanese horror elements. Fans will recognize some references to previous games, but I loved how fresh the horror felt in Silent Hill f.

There are plenty of cutscenes in Silent Hill f that are used to stitch the story together between gameplay segments, and it’s where a lot of the game’s voice acting shines. While I liked watching them, it does feel like these cutscenes pop up a bit frequently at times, especially early in the game. It can disrupt the pacing and give players a reprieve when they should be feeling the opposite. I also noticed that cutscenes are capped at 30 FPS on PC, which is hard to ignore when the rest of the game can run at more than quadruple that.

Seeing through the fog

Silent Hill f enjoys getting under your skin. It’s a game that gives you objectives like “go on ahead” and “escape.” Every jump that the game elicited from me was usually followed by a wide grin. I loved the unique challenges that combat posed as I made my way from puzzle to puzzle, and the story’s overarching mystery is one worthy of the Silent Hill name.

This review is based on a Steam code provided by the publisher. Silent Hill f launches on September 25, 2025, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.