Silent Hill f – Review

LIGHT STORY AND MECHANICAL SPOILERS

I try to play more horror games around this time of year. I’m corny like that. Last year, I treated myself to my first ever foray into the world of Silent Hill by picking up the remaster of Silent Hill 2. What I found was not exactly what I hoped for, but in spite of my complaints I had a pretty great time with a classic of the genre, updated for popular modern tastes. I was familiar with the fan narrative of the franchise’s history: that the first couple games were good, but things spun off the rails after SH4: The Room, and with the cancellation of Del Toro and Kojima’s Silent Hills, people assumed the franchise was basically dead or at most treading water. With the renewed interest and the success of the remake, it made sense when Konami announced they were developing a brand-new entry in the series, one that would take a major aesthetic and thematic swing by being set not in America, but Japan, and 1960’s Japan to boot.

I was intrigued.

As soon as the game released, I was there. Lights off, headphones on. Here we go. Give me thrills and chills!

And this game, my second Silent Hill experience… left me kind of cold.

There are times when a piece of art makes us feel disappointed in ways we don’t really understand at first. We have to spend time talking about and thinking through our experience to fully grasp our feelings toward it, to figure out what didn’t work for us and why. With Silent Hill f, there was no mystery.

It’s the combat. And by that I mean: it’s stupid. There are all of these mechanics to juggle: stamina meter, weapon durability, attack animation timings, range, speed, counters, dodges that feel like protagonist Hinako has learned Instant Transmission, perfect dodges resulting in slow-motion, a focus meter that lets you unleash a powerful special move, and a mountain of different items that have different effects on your health, stamina and sanity meters that are all kind of hard to distinguish as someone not immersed in Japanese culture. Hell, late in the game there’s an ultimate meter which builds to a transformation ability where you go berserk and become immune to damage while you unleash a flurry of unblockable strikes.

Why is this here?

Thematically, Silent Hill f is a game about gender and oppressive traditions, the ways we deny ourselves autonomy with strict adherence to custom. It’s a game about a young woman struggling desperately to carve her own path, beset on all sides by friends who harbor animosity towards her, abusive parents, and an older sister who she feels betrayed by ever since she went off and got married.

So the combination of a dark, adult story with an objectively goofy, arcade-y combat system is so baffling as a design choice that it actively hurt my experience with the game throughout my entire playthrough.

Since finishing the game, I’ve even felt the desire to return and finish the debatably mandatory New Game Plus content and get the other endings, but the thought of slogging through the sluggish and awkward combat, including boss fights that feel more in line with something from a From Software game, fills me with more dread than any of the horror in the game ever could.

Ultimately, this dissonance between the story and gameplay (some might call this ludo-narrative dissonance) is irreparably harmful to the game, and leaves me puzzled as to why it was implemented this way. Did two separate studios develop these aspects of the game? Did no one talk? Is this somehow thematically relevant? Are we, like Hinako, torn between two realities and psychically torn in two by societal expectations, resulting in a game that is at times brilliant and at others so wildly atonal?

The story content is intriguing, some of the set-pieces and scares are genuinely impressive, and the game is visually remarkable. The music which accompanies the wonky combat is chilling and distressing, deeply effective and it would be even more so if the combat weren’t so actively unenjoyable. It’s been over a week and I keep watching let’s plays, reading about the game and thinking through its story and visuals over and over. There is a scene in the game (for those of you who have played it, I’m referring to “The Ritual”) that is so disturbing and so stomach churningly dark that my eyes felt like they were about to leap from my skull and run for cover under my bed.

And yet, I came away from Silent Hill f liking it, and wishing I’d loved it, but knowing that I simply could not have. While I think it’s worth playing, and at the very least worth watching someone else play, the frustrations I have with the combat simply cannot be ignored. If there are going to be more SH games in the near future, I’ll more than likely try them. Perhaps only to see if Konami, like me, wishes they’d gone another direction.