Year: 2025
Platform: PlayStation 5
Publisher: Konami
Developer: Neobards
Genre: Horror
Review Date: 2/7/26
Rating: ****

"Fine... I'll keep doing this... I'll paint this place red with your blood!"

Shimizu Hinako is a high school student living in the rural Japanese town of Ebisugaoka during the 1960s. After an argument with her abusive father, she leaves the house and goes into town to meet up with her three best friends. But something is off and they all treat her a bit oddly... Soon, a horrible monster shows up and covers the town in thick fog and red foliage. Twisted creatures roam the streets and Hinako tries to reunite with her friends, with limited success. During bouts of unconsciousness, Hinako finds herself in an alternate reality known as The Dark Shrine, where she meets a creepy man in a fox mask as well as other tortured spirits. Fox Mask slowly saps Hinako's will and prepares her to be his bride, while the conscious Hinako continues to fight the encroaching fog and red flowers.

It's a story shrouded in mystery and symbolism. Is Hinako a sane and reliable narrator? Is everything in her imagination or is it all a drug-induced hallucination? Or has Hinako been spirited away? Are there actually two Hinakos, and what role do cults, drugs, cursed bloodlines, and old gods play in the proceedings? The first playthrough of the game results in a fixed ending of self-destruction and a huge case of WTF?!? It leaves you with way more questions than answers, and additional playthroughs make things even more confusing by introducing alternate conversations and cutscenes, supernatural lore, and other traditional "Silent Hill" themes. There are four additional endings you can get, which are the good, bad, true, and traditional UFO endings. As of this writing, I haven't had the fortitude to play through the game a second time. Not due to lack of interest, but mostly due to lack of time. It's also a lot to mentally and emotionally deal with, and revisiting that world can be nerve wracking.

First of all, before you even launch the game, the music is outstanding and sounds like it came straight out of a 1960s movie. The graphics are absolutely stunning and Ebisugaoka is brilliantly realized. Wandering around and soaking up the beauty of the environment is shear delight. The Dark Shrine incorporates more traditional shrine architecture and has a very creepy "Fatal Frame" look and feel. In classic "Silent Hill" fashion, the map is fantastic and very useful - except for the handful of times when you're simply in an "unknown area." The production values are top-notch and the presentation is superb. The character animation is excellent and the Japanese voice actors are outstanding. The music by Akira Yamaoka and Kensuke Inage is also appropriately unsettling.

The controls are simple and responsive, although I found it difficult to consume items during combat and I would also tend to spaz out on the circle and square buttons while fighting. There are numerous combat options, including normal and heavy weapons, light and heavy attacks, focused attacks, charged attacks, blocks, dodges, and counters, but I found all of that to be overly complicated and just stuck to light attacks with a spider onamori equipped so that my weapon wouldn't degrade as quickly.

Speaking of difficulty, let's face a few facts. I'm almost 60 years old and my prime gaming days are LONG behind me. Additionally, the hardcore fan base is probably skewed towards older middle aged folks in their 40s and 50s, whose gaming habits and reflexes have slowed down a lot with age. The game initially offered two difficulty settings, Story and Hard, but then added an easier Casual setting as a post-launch patch. I'm thankful for that, because that's how I played the game. It was still challenging and stressful, but not enough for me to want to give up. That said, in true "Silent Hill" fashion, many of the puzzles are completely impenetrable, even with the "easy" puzzle setting. I found myself having to look up solutions online for nearly everything because the clues literally made no sense at all.

Gameplay-wise, it actually took me a couple hours to warm up to the game. At first, Hinako is completely defenseless, and the first action scene has you running through unfamiliar territory trying to escape the fog monster. I'm not a fan of being chased, and this brought back bad memories of playing "Shattered Memories." Shortly after this, you encounter more hostiles and your only option is to run away, which robbed me of my chances to explore. However, once Hinako gets her hands on a steel pipe and can defend herself, then it truly feels like a genuine "Silent Hill" game and I really started enjoying it.

Thematically, it's squarely in the "Silent Hill" wheelhouse of psychological horror, trauma, dealing with inner demons, supernatural forces, and other nasty stuff. There's a content warning that shows up at the beginning of the game that I casually dismissed, but things become truly horrific and terrifying about halfway through the game, which left me very disturbed and distraught. Hinako is a wonderful protagonist, and it's great to see the series take on a complex female story. But there's a lot to culturally unpack. We're dealing with the sexist attitudes of the 60s, alcoholism, abuse, drug addiction, gender discrimination, social pressure and expectations, subservience, religion, torture, and arranged marriages, and that's just on the surface.

As the first "Silent Hill" game since 2012's "Downpour", it's a great return to form and second only to the definitive "Silent Hill 2" (2001). And what does the "f" in the title mean? Nobody knows and Konami's not saying. It's just another part of the mystery that you have to interpret for yourself. While the early "Silent Hill" games took place in America, the storytelling always had a weird Japanese sensibility that I loved, and it's great to see that again in this story. I also love the use of Japanese folklore, which is creepy and cool in its own right, and again reminiscent of "Fatal Frame", which is another series that I love. It's exciting to see Konami revive the franchise, and I can't wait to see what they come up with next.