Silent Hill f review: "The legendary horror series' most unsettling atmosphere and writing to date butts heads with combat that's more irritating than scary"

Trading smalltown America for a 1960s rural Japan works well for Silent Hill f. Recognizably the same brand of horror, this is still Silent Hill as you know it, from its twitchy body horror monster designs to how it blends literal frights with the psychological. The new setting allows for some gorgeous stomach-churning visuals as the fog brings with it sprouting blood red spider lilies that begin to take over the town, transforming it into something altogether fleshier. Criss-crossing lanterns in the market street begin to give way to strands of, well, something else entirely. "Beauty in terror" is the pitch Konami gave for this revamp, and Silent Hill f nails the landing by whacking said nail with a hammer and watching it gush.

So too do the fears of schoolgirl Hinako Shimazu, dealing with the pressures of likewise encroaching womanhood, provide new avenues of horror for the series to explore. Blending those anxieties into a mix where you become uncertain of what's real and what isn't the more you play, the unease dialling up to match and drilling down into the animal part of your brain that stops you from caring about the distinction – the horror becoming manifest regardless. Without a doubt, the incredible foggy atmosphere of Hinako's hometown, Ebisugaoka, and the mysterious Dark Shrine she also finds herself transported to, is some of the best Silent Hill has to offer.

With well-realized themes that really stare down and wrestle with Hinako's trauma, plus terrific writing across cutscenes as well as heaps of lore notes, this is the best written Silent Hill has ever been (scriptwriter Ryukishi has a background in cult classic horror visual novels, such as Higurashi and Umineko – and you can feel his experience at work in every facet of Silent Hill f). As Silent Hill has already given us some of the best horror games ever made, it's no small feat that Silent Hill f doesn't just live up to its legacy, but surpasses it.

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Fogged up

It's a shame then that Silent Hill f, which has my favorite writing and atmosphere in the series, also has the most annoying combat. I know, I know – Silent Hill as a series has never had particularly good combat. But no entry has combat encounters at the forefront as much as Silent Hill f does. Almost every pickup from restorative items to equippable omamori charms revolves around how they affect combat, from straightforward buffs to health, stamina, or sanity, to more complex effects like altering the properties of counterattacks, dodges, or your stun damage. The deeper you get into Silent Hill f, the more plentiful enemies become, throwing several combat gauntlets your way in the closing hours.

James Sunderland's survival skills in Silent Hill 2 remake look downright placid compared to what Hinako can pull off. Where James' brawls were tight, intense clashes of whacking and hoping for the best while trying to side-step threats, Hinako feels like she's thirty years early to mixing it up on fighting games in the local arcade.

She can mash out combos of light and heavy attacks on the triggers. Hold another trigger, and she can charge up her Focus to deplete Sanity (same, girl) to deliver an even stronger weapon-specific strike that has a degree of super armor. Though attacking uses up stamina, Hinako can perform a perfect dodge to twist out of the way of oncoming enemy attacks to restore it, continuing to bash out damage. Alternatively, when an enemy flashes with a chromatic aura, Hinako's able to rush towards them, stunning them with a counterattack and opening her foe up to even more damage.

Combat is a lot, and there's a lot of it to match. Completely melee focused (weapons break as well after too much use), it feels like just about every close-quarters combat mechanic you can think of is in here. Even in the best cases where I'm able to perform well in dicey dust-ups with the creepiest monsters haunting Ebisugaoka, I can't help but feel the fighting system is simply overengineered in a way that's counterintuitive to creating a horror atmosphere. When Hinako is able to perfectly pull off all the moves at her fingertips, she can feel almost comically unstoppable.

But, all too often, you definitely aren't. Fights are a little too clunky for that, leading to situations where multiple enemies descend on Hinako and it ends up feeling more irritating than terrifying. Counterattack windows for enemies are a little few and far between, with the input for them – a heavy attack – often locking Hinako into a long, winding animation if you mistime it, meaning she's likely to just get pummeled (so often that I just dodge instead).

Frequent grab attacks wrestle control from you too, locking Hinako into a long recovery animation after the little scene plays out. Lots of attacks feel like they take control away from you in a way that's just frustrating. Later sections in the game even lampshade this a little bit by making combat a bit more responsive in certain sections only – an interesting juxtaposition, but not one that lessens how annoyed I sometimes felt getting corner stomped.

You could try to run – and for about half of Silent Hill f there's often a nice dynamic with picking your battles. But without the wide streets of America, Ebisugaoka frequently has you in claustrophobic alleyways, small houses, or narrow mountain trails where you're likely just to get pinned against a wall. Not to mention quite a few enemies are extremely fast in their pursuit of you with attacks that cross vaster distances than you might expect. Getting them off your back can be a pain, especially as most enemies feel like massive damage sponges that take loads of hits to fell.

Silent Hill f defaults to suggesting you play with Action difficulty set to Story, and Puzzles set to Hard. Oddly, there's only three difficulties at all: Story, Hard, and Lost in Fog (a sort of extreme mode). I played with the default settings for the most part, as I usually do, though I did try some Action on Hard as well, and it's playing on Story that gave me all the above issues.

I made it through without too much hassle, but squaring off against enemies is often just grueling, constantly trying to dodge out of the way to avoid getting stunlocked by groups of foes and mashing attack again and again and again. One seemingly completely regular enemy on Story mode I counterattacked, and then had to use seven heavy attacks (admittedly with a lightweight knife weapon) before I killed it.

Oddly boss fights completely avoid this feeling. While I had a tough time in my early hands-on a few months ago, they're now perfectly pitched. These hulking boss fights have some truly gnarly, standout designs that are series all-timers, with each one playing a major role in Hinako's emotional journey as she tries desperately to escape whatever foggy hell has come to Ebisugaoka.

From haunting dialogue that often occurs as flesh flies in these encounters, to the mechanics of how each boss attacks, they all contribute massively to the grander narrative. So why, even on easier modes, do I enjoy these clashes with near Eldritch-like nightmare boss enemies so much more than a couple of knife-limbed mannequins in a hallway? It feels like the tuning is simply off somewhere.

Back at it again in Ebisugaoka

And yet, for as many times as I'll end up waiting for Hinako to recover from stun animations and going 'golly, why does this have to be so annoying?', I've never wanted to put the controller down and walk away. Silent Hill f is an intoxicating horror experience that I always want to dive back into. Even though I think the final few hours are drawn out and saturated with far too many enemies, I've already finished the game three times with no break in between. I'm not allowed to say much about subsequent playthroughs, nor would I want to spoil anything, but there's plenty more to unravel about Hinako's story post-credits, and no Silent Hill has felt as rewarding to revisit as this one.

All roads in Ebisugaoka point right back to Hinako, and the way the 1960s Japan setting has stacked the odds against her for all her life. Whether it's looking through diary entry documents from major characters, reading the headlines for girls' mags that sport things like 'a girl is only complete when she's loved', or thumbing through Hinako's own observations of each monster in her frequently updated journal, it's clear that her life is one of many horrors – even without all the fog and spider lilies added to the mix. Certain monster designs may be terrifying to look at when first introduced, but as you learn more about them and piece together journal entries to learn what it is they truly represent, the implications make your stomach churn even more.

Silent Hill f is fantastic at evolving that sense of unease and vagueness that's so defined the series in the past, and matching it with really smart writing that knows just when to give you details and when to leave the player to fill in the blanks. Silent Hill f has the best capital 'W' Writing in the series to date, creating a dense weave of story across small, digestible chunks you unravel as you explore – but it's also the way the narrative is delivered as you slowly poke around the streets of Ebisugaoka and the strange Dark Shrine realm that add to it. The latter space serves a similar function to classic Silent Hill's industrial, rusty Otherworlds, but here with a fitting spiritual twist that embraces Japanese folklore and religion.

So too do the puzzles contribute – and they can get quite tricky (I played these on Hard, which is, as I mentioned, weirdly the middle difficulty). Silent Hill f is usually paced out so different areas spotlight different styles of play more, and it's the slower, more exploration focused ones featuring more puzzles that I like the best. The school is a particular highlight, mixing together puzzle boxes, looking for keys, and unravelling a whole 'girl code' to discover locker combinations in order to progress.

Narrative is entwined with puzzle design in Silent Hill f even more than in favorites like Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3 – and in the school that involves piecing together scraps of information about student drama, from souring friendships to budding relationships, or even the vice principal's hobbies. All while learning more about how the school was founded and the history of the town's exports, naturally. Everything is there to prop up the horror story being told.

Every part of Silent Hill f is a piece of a jigsaw, and those jigsaws, once completed, are bigger jigsaw pieces of an even larger jigsaw puzzle. And once you get a sense of what the jigsaw picture is, even with pieces still missing, you begin to feel a little unwell. Which is why I'm a little disappointed that uneven combat encounter design threatens to pull me out of it, and makes it hard to recommend for those who may find the easiest settings too irritating to push through. But those horror highs raise the bar for the genre. Standing on its own, Silent Hill f is a great place for newcomers to get into the series.

I've never been more excited about the future of Silent Hill. Visually, Silent Hill f is stunning, from the uneasy beauty of a small town being choked by gorgeous red spider lilies, to gnarly monster designs that are some of the best Japanese horror games have to offer. But that initial visual hit is just the start, the terror lying beneath the fog as you explore more about a world hostile to Hinako in every sense of the word – supernatural or otherwise – that Silent Hill f becomes even more horrifying.

Craving more foggy fear? Check out our best Silent Hill games ranking!