I'm already obsessed with Silent Hill f after 5 hours thanks to its incredible story and atmosphere, but I'm anxious about the parry-heavy combat

The creepy, twitchy monsters in Silent Hill f are captivating. Even as they infect Hinako's hometown, the parasitic red spider lilies are pretty even as they transform every surface, from buildings to residents. These blooming creatures are simultaneously gorgeous to look at and fleshy bags of pain that make me retch a little bit. The whole game is soaked in an incredible atmosphere that highlights the "beauty in terror" approach Konami is aiming for. Yet, despite being vulnerable herself, Hinako can perhaps be a bit too proficient at combat as she fights the foes formed by cursed flowers, even in the scariest of situations throughout my five hour hands-on with Silent Hill f.

In one instance, transported to an endless foggy field littered with Hinako's friends twisted into masked scarecrows, one wrong move as I solve a riddle will see them lurch to life, blades spinning. Silent Hill f is set in rural Ebisugaoka in 1960s Japan, meaning the only real option Hinako has for self-defense are destructible melee items she stumbles upon – pipes, sickles, kitchen knives. The only way to fight back is to be uncomfortably close to enemies.

Yet, even with these scarecrows I quickly learn their patterns. There's the lunge I can dodge at the last second to activate a perfect slowdown. And there's its chain attack – one, two, three, four – then they glow with a chromatic aura, meaning I can hit them with a heavy attack to counter, opening them up to massive damage. For the most part, Silent Hill f is soaked in impeccable vibes that make me more excited for the series' future than ever, but I'm a bit baffled at why combat is like this.

F 'em up

Introducing the game in a chilled room in Konami's Tokyo headquarters, developer Neobards does offer some explanation – Hinako's sudden moments of prowess fighting back against monsters convey "adrenaline", explaining aspects like getting a full replenish of stamina after a well-timed dodged. After all, taking Silent Hill f to Japan instead of America means narrower pathways compared to the extremely wide roads of the US, meaning it's not as easy to avoid danger. Hinako, series producer Motoi Okamoto says, "has no choice but to confront fears head-on".

Don't get me wrong, I don't think I'd ever call Silent Hill combat good. The series' history of scuffles veer from downright awful to functional at best. But it can be evocative, effective in its bursts of clunky violence. The best Silent Hill games seem to understand this well. On paper, Silent Hill f may have the most well-crafted combat system in the series to date, but in so doing somehow feels less effective at creating a horror atmosphere. Perfect dodges, counter attacks, and special focus moves give Silent Hill f more combat systems than any other, but in the build I play it can end up feeling a bit overengineered.

I feel like a hack comparing it to Dark Souls, but the main boss fight in my demo – a teeth-heavy shrine maiden wreathed in red fog – is a dodge-heavy affair on a big bridge that has me finding gaps in lengthy attack animations to dish out cautious poke damage. Getting my cursed monkey paw mitts on the PS5 controller, I'm well aware of which muscle memory I'm drawing on as I bob, weave, and throw out combinations of light and heavy attacks. As weird as it is to say there is overlap. It's not bad per se. Call it Fog Souls and maybe we're cooking – NeoBards even highlights that 'posture' is a consideration for enemies, meaning you can stagger them with enough damage.

Though Silent Hill f ended up thrusting me into a few too many straight encounters trading blows with enemies, there's still a lot of situations in which evasion is encouraged – and these stand out as more horror tinged affairs. The game's opening sequences where, defenseless, I have to run through a labyrinthine maze of alleys (known as 'kinkotsu' in Japan – literally 'muscle and sinew') avoiding deadly enemies has already become a series high-point for me. I genuinely feel turned around and on edge during these chases, and verticality really makes these tiny streets criss-crossing across one of the town's small rivers feel like they keep branching out from one another.

Another situation has me searching for ema – small picture tablets hung at Japanese shrines – while pursued by a sound-detecting enemy that, though Hinako can bust its head in with a pipe, will always regenerate after enough time has passed. Like fighting the scarecrows, the idea of Hinako perfectly parrying these nightmarish foes into pulp is quite funny, but having these fights simply add pressure to a broader objective is a smart way of balancing both. Even perfect combat play won't 'solve' a lot of encounters without using your noggin too.

Another sequence has a hulking knife-wielding foe bear down on me, though the only way to progress is scramble for a key that's fallen down a well in order to escape, either keeping it busy or taking it out of action for just enough time to nab it. The balance only really shifts during in-between portions in regular encounters where the combat just feels more rote and unevenly paced.

Some shrine-set sections ramp up danger, starting with no enemies before drip-feeding you more as you search for a key to progress, then devolving into an outright chase as you desperately flee for safety, with no chance to fight back. As you might expect, Silent Hill f is at its best when you feel very much on the backfoot. Neobards game director Al Yang says this is ultimately the goal: "You're not quite sure what's around the corner, but you're also not quite sure if you're prepared to deal with it at the same time".

Fs in chat

Still, this new approach to combat is perhaps the only time Silent Hill f feels off balance across my five hours with the game. In every other aspect, Silent Hill f feels remarkably confident and self-assured, and with good reason. Hinako Shimizu is having a rough day even before her rural hometown Ebisugaoka is submerged in the mysterious fog that brings with it bizarre red flowery growths that are as beautiful as they are deadly. A girl has already disappeared, and strange sightings near the town have some thinking the town's guardian spirits may be unhappy. Leaving her house as Hinako's parents argue once again, she meets up with a group of school friends who seem to jump erratically between being happy she's around to calling her a "traitor".

Before Hinako can get a real sense of the situation, things only get worse when the fog descends and they're separated trying to escape from the eerie presence. The growths that come along with it transform Hinako's hometown into a maze of streets she must desperately dart down, but beyond the familiar becoming otherwise she's also thrust into a strange otherworld realm after a near-death experience – a massive, twisting shrine that seems to stretch far into the distance, filled with strange puzzles that seal each gate forward. Far from the industrial labyrinths of US-set Silent Hill, the shrine realm really gives Silent Hill f its own unique identity.

Though Silent Hill f's story and setting feels fresh, there's more than enough recognizable elements for this Japan-set chapter to still feel very Silent Hill. So far, the structure sees Hinako having to follow in the footsteps of her friends as she pushes her way through new slices of the town that become increasingly more dangerous over time. Reaching those locations then requires more dense exploration combining taxing puzzle solving with enemy evasion, whether that's buildings in town like the local school, or entering the strange shrine realm.

It's a loop that those who played the Silent Hill 2 remake last year will be familiar with, and while Okamoto says they've tried to avoid "repurposing Silent Hill 2 too closely", he does say Silent Hill 2 is perhaps the biggest source of inspirations Silent Hill f draws from within the series.

While some of these jaunts through town are perhaps a bit more linear given the narrower Japanese streets, there's still reason enough to go off the beaten track to stuff her pockets with lore notes and, of course, recovery items – from pills to recognizable treats like ramune soda. Some of these can even be given at checkpoint shrines as offerings to build a faith currency. (We're told "some actions require faith" by the developers – a line that just goes incredibly hard as far as I'm concerned.) It makes deciding what to keep for yourself a risk-reward consideration, aided by the fact Hinako's pockets can only contain so many items. Faith can be traded in to restore sanity and the like, or for upgrades and gear – random omori can be drawn that give Hinako buffs such as enhancing defense or reducing enemy line of sight.

Each excursion so far feels like it reveals a bit more about Hinako's friends, and their relationships. To dig deeper into the scarecrow riddles I mentioned before, each section revolves around a note about how a character perceives Hinako, leaving you to track down the posed scarecrow the text relates to. For example, one is about putting on a "polite smile", meaning you need to look at the masks to discern the correct one, which will then point you towards the next set of posed enemies.

Scriptwriter Ryukishi07, known for his cult classic indie horror games Higurashi and Umineko, has been involved in all the deepest details of Silent Hill f's writing, including these puzzles. The series' best puzzles are more than abstract brainteasers, revealing more about each entry's themes. The same goes for Silent Hill f, where Ryukishi07 has ensured just about every puzzle you need to solve is also putting in the work narratively.

The school that caps off my hands-on exemplifies this excellently with a whole web of conundrums to solve that tell me about the tapestry of relationships between the children and teachers that once filled the empty halls – from pulling apart origami messages that spout horrible curses towards rivals in affection, to unravelling 'girl code' secret notes to find out locker combinations.

Thematic forte

The 1960s backdrop isn't just for the aesthetic (though series veteran composer Akira Yamaoka has created a gorgeous soundscape for it), but is being used as a jumping off point to explore gender dynamics of the era – quite simply the pressures around growing up as a girl in that era. At one point Hinako wonders if they're being cursed because they "just want to keep playing Space Wars", and another character notes that she speaks like a boy when hanging out with her male friend, Shu. To which he responds "I've never treated her like a girl."

It's a constant refrain. The character glossary notes that Hinako's sister "left to get married" as a woman should and hasn't been around since. Pick-ups like girls mags have headlines like "a woman is only complete when she's loved" and radios say things like "what good is a woman who can't even cook properly?" Silent Hill characters often have to fight through a hellish world twisted to reflect their nightmares. It's pretty clear that societal pressures for Hinako to grow up are what Silent Hill f will be all about.

"When it comes to exploring time periods, if you go too far back in time it obviously becomes so detached from our familiar reality that it basically becomes a fantasy, whereas the present, of course, is very much grounded in reality and there's really no room for interpretation, because everything is very clear cut," Ryukishi07 tells me, discussing how his previous game Higurashi was set in a small Japanese town in the '80s, and Silent Hill f likewise but in the '60s.

"I've grown very fond and mesmerized by the possibilities that arise from the period in between the past and present, where those two ideas of fantasy and reality will intersect," he continues. "When it comes to Silent Hill f [for] the types of themes that I was exploring, I believe that that crossroads landed right around the 1960s." It's making the most of the setting, from nostalgic throwbacks like the design of the town's local sweet shop to deeper issues.

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Clear ideas don't necessarily mean Silent Hill f is simple. Far from it. Promising multiple endings, the first playthrough will be the same, but subsequent playthroughs will offer new areas, bosses, and branching paths. So far, strange messages Hinako can find even make me wonder if multiple routes are part of the core narrative itself. The odd way Hinako's friends act around her – sometimes quite dismissively – constantly have me questioning what's going on, and that's even before getting into all the strange events and notes you can find in the otherworld shrine realm that hint that larger forces may be at work.

Ryukishi07's most famous games have extremely complicated plots – but, crucially, all ones that make sense once the mysteries become revealed. The fact I could so easily begin to sort the puzzle pieces and begin to come up with ideas for what it all might mean after just one demo session is already a massive plus for me, even with the knowledge I may never be truly certain.

It sounds like Silent Hill f will strike a balance. Each ending, after all, will apparently be unclear if they are good or bad in series tradition. But there's already plenty within the opening five hours of the game that have me theory crafting, underlining and circling words in my notebook. I may be wobbly on the combat feeling a bit overbaked, but there's still time before launch for this to be tweaked and, to be honest, much of it can be dealt with in the usual Silent Hill way of bashing and hoping for the best. But when it comes to vibes and atmosphere, Silent Hill f is luxurious – I can't wait to wade deeper into the fog and try my best to figure out what it all means.

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