Silent Hill f Review

Silent Hill f is another addition to the Silent Hill franchise. Developed by NeoBards and published by Konami, Silent Hill f offers players an adventure filled with horror and massacre. Thanks to Konami, we got a chance to try this game before it’s official launch and I will share every detail about the game with my experience.

Welcome to Ebisugaoka, Our Foggy Town

Silent Hill f offers a story evolving around Ebisugaoka, our new foggy town besides Silent Hill. This town suddenly surrounded by fog and our main character, Shimizu Hinako has to fight against this fog and survive. In the story, we encounter the past of our character, Hinako. She is student, teenager, and she has to fight against the enemies she encounters and try to escape that twisted world.

We have another characters in the story, such as Hinako’s parents, along with her friends, Shu, Rinko, Sakuko. Sakuko disappears in the first minutes of story and that’s where things go south in our story. We are searching for Sakuko along with Shu, Rinko. In the meantime, we also learn the story of Hinako, the mystery behind this fog and all.

Fight Against These Enemies with Close Encounter Weapons, Not with Gun

Silent Hill f has play style similar to souls like games. In the game, you have to fight against enemies with close encounter weapons such as steal pipe, baseball bat and other sharp items such as kitchen knife. You have stamina bar to control your movements, each swing you make, sprinting or dodging consumes your stamina. Especially if you are against multiple enemies, it’s important to control your stamina otherwise enemies might grab you and deal a lot of damage. Since you can’t use guns, you have to face enemies closely, because of that, dodging in perfect time is important. There is a mechanic called Perfect Dodge, if you parry your enemies exact time they try to hit you, you gain a lot of time to deal much more damage to your opponent. As far as I experienced, there are multiple enemy attacks you can Perfect Dodge and gain a lot of time to kill them faster. After defeating few of same enemy type, you learn their moveset and dodge their attacks better. Some enemies have continues attack pattern, which means they can stun lock you with their attacks. This happened to me few times and it’s annoying to get stun locked by enemies. Some enemies have simple attack pattern, on the other hand, some of them are complicated, especially large enemies. On my playthrough, in the first two hours of game, I had bad experience while fighting with enemies, I died quickly, stuck on walls easily, my stamina run out quickly because I wasn’t controlling my stamina well but after two hours, I got used to every movement and that time, I started to enjoy the game. I think every player should give time to game around two hours in order to learn everything because Silent Hill f is not straight forward game, you have to learn some tactics and shape your playthrough around that.

Puzzles are the most part of Silent Hill f, I played the game on Story difficulty and even in that difficulty, I spent a lot of time solving these puzzles. In my experience, puzzles are decent but feels repetitive after a while, especially the ones which we have to find 3 pieces and put them in the same order with journal. First one is okay, the second one is enough, but the third and forward are too much. I wish we could see more puzzle variants. For me, it felt like I’m solving the same puzzle over and over again. Don’t get me wrong, I like this kind of puzzles, but if we encounter the same type of puzzle in the game more than two times, then it feels repetitive. But in general, puzzles are fine, I just would love to see more variants.

Upgrade Yourself, Feel More Powerfull

During playthrough, we can upgrade ourself such as increasing our health, stamina and sanity bar. In order to do that, we need to get Faith points. There is only one option to get Faith points and it’s the offering special items. If you look around carefully, you can find special items to offer in the save points. You can also offer your health items to gain Faith point, but I don’t think it’s a good idea because you can’t stay away from enemies, you have to fight them in close encounter. This way, you have to use a lot of health items, at least that’s what I was doing in my playthrough. Aside from health items, there are some other items which allows you to restore your Sanity, Stamina or even prevent your Sanity, Stamina comsumption for a duration. If you don’t have a lot of space and you keep finding them but not using it a lot, you can offer them in order to gain Faith points. Sanity items felt useless for me, not exactly sure but my Sanity was full always during my playthrough. Only one time I had to refill my Sanity and used that item. If you are curious about Sanity, in some situations, your Sanity drops instantly and you can’t fight enemies affectively. That’s why you need to keep your Sanity at full, also keep that in mind that if you use Focus mode, you focus on one enemy and your Sanity drops faster. But I don’t think focusing on enemy is necessary. You can just dodge and attack your enemies normally. It won’t be a problem.

Another upgrade you can do yourself is using the right Omamori. First of all, you can find multiple Omamori’s, there are lots of Omamori’s to choose from, it’s important to know what you need exactly. For me, I was having hard time defeating my enemies, that’s why I used Wolf Omamori, which increases the damage you deal while you have weapon with high durability and that passive was active most of time because I always kept my weapons at high durability. The opposite type of this Omamori is that it’s not affecting the alternative world we are playing. But you have to defeat more enemies in real world and in there, you have weapon durability, so it’s active and I think it’s the best Omamori you can use. My playthrough got easier once I equiped that Omamori. You can also increase your Omamori slot, in base game, you can only use one Omamori, but if you upgrade, you can equip more.

The Alternative World We Are Experiencing is Unique

Every Silent Hill game has alternative world. Most of them are opposite side of the world we are playing, but in the Silent Hill f, the alternative world is offering brand new experience for players. First of all, your weapon doesn’t have durability here, which means you don’t have to worry about finding toolkit or new weapons to use and there are different weapon types to use. But your health items and other items are common so you have to use them carefully still.

If you passed the half of the game, Hinako’s one arm will turn into fox arm, which makes the combat more enjoyable. Once that happened, I enjoyed playing alternative world more. What’s good about this arm is that it deals more damage to enemies and it has areal attack that affects all enemies nearby you. Witch means you can kill multiple enemies at once or even stun lock them better since it’s so much powerful than other close encounter weapons. That’s why I liked the Silent Hill f’s alternative world. This world is different from main world, not the opposite side of the game. I also love Japanese theme, this world is full of Japanese atmosphere. Developers did amazing job with this alternative world. It’s also gruesome in some way. Some cutscenes such as rituel ones was actually realistic than I thought. I found myself disgusted most of the scenes and that’s what the make his horror experience memorable.

Bringing The Old Silent Hill Experience, But More Complicated Way

I played old Silent Hill games and loved most of them. I like how Silent Hill franchise offers players an adventure with complicated world and story. Silent Hill f accomplished that mission and left some questions behind once it’s finished or even theories we can discuss about. I like to mention that Silent Hill f also features multiple endings. In order to see these endings, you have to do some required things. Once you finish the game, endings and required things are visible in the main menu section. Which is quite good addition to the game.

I finished the Silent Hill f around 17 hours. Some puzzles were too hard that I spent almost a hour on it. Sometimes the journal is not enough to solve these puzzles, or even it’s confusing. Of course there are some puzzles you can solve in minutes but most of them are hard puzzles, even in Story difficulty. But I like challenging experiences, as long as it’s not impossible to do it. It makes you feel accomplished something and that’s what we love about games.

Silent Hill f’s world is complicated, map design might look too complex, especially if you are trying to navigate yourself and trying to find your objective. Some areas doesn’t have map, some of them are too complex that you have hard time guiding your way, even if you have map in your hand.

Last thing I want to mention about Silent Hill f is optimization. Even if my PC is enough to run the game and I have installed the game on SSD, most of the time textures were loading late when I was playing. My FPS was fine but that texture problem was really annoying. Developers definitely will fix this issue in the first day patch, but I was playing before launch and having this problem affected my experience while playing it. Also it wasn’t in the one scene, most of the time textures were loading late in my game. But I can understand that most of them game issues are solved in the first day patch, so I’m pretty sure that launch version of the game will be much better.

Last Words Regarding Silent Hill f

Silent Hill f is a great horror game for Silent Hill franchise fans. It’s much more complicated experience for players, with puzzles, world, atmosphere. If you are a horror game fan, you should definitely give it a try and feel that experience. But don’t rush, because it will be a long experience.

Once again I want to thank Konami for giving us a chance to try this game before launch. I’m looking forward to see more games from Konami.

You can buy Silent Hill f from Steam here.

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