The director of the next mainline Silent Hill game, Silent Hill f, wants to know what you think that mysterious "f" stands for.
In a tweet posted over the weekend, Al Yang - studio creative director at NeoBards, which is currently busy developing Silent Hill f – pondered: "Curious what everyone thinks the F in SILENT HILL F stands for".
"Also, I have a running bet at work at what the fans think it is," he added.
Curious what everyone thinks the F in SILENT HILL F stands for... (also I have a running bet at work at what the fans think it is)February 25, 2023
The responses? As you may well expect, the answers range from the brilliant to the brain-boggling and include guesses such as forte, five, flower, festival, forbidden, fear, faith, frame, fragment, fungus, feudal, and fierce.
Other less serious responses include Florida, Fortnite, fajita, and "finally-a-good-one".
My bet's on forte – the stylized "F" certainly looks like the "play it loud" musical notation, and it would play on the "Silent" part of Silent Hill – but I reckon flower, fungus, and five are all good shouts, too. What do you think?
Silent Hill f is "an entirely new story" set in 1960s Japan. It's been written by acclaimed visual novelist Ryukishi07, a name that's already generating serious buzz within the Silent Hill community.
Talking of which: Silent Hill fans have stumbled on secret messages hidden within the audio that accompanies a teaser trailer for one of the other upcoming Silent Hill games, Silent Hill: Townfall, a new game developed by Stories Untold developer No Code.
As we reported at its announcement, the reveal trailer focuses on a transmission received on a small, portable television, with someone warning that punishment and judgment are on the way. There are numerous quick clips of unsettling images and some footage that suggests a seaside setting.
Since then, however, someone's extracted the Townfall trailer audio, converted it to an MP3, and discovered that "there's text in the spectrogram".
It turns out that the teaser was hiding the thoroughly unsettling statement: "Whatever heart this town had has now stopped".
And if you're wondering if you're imagining that Silent Hill 2 Remake's James is looking a little older this time around, you're not wrong - Silent Hill 2 producer Motoi Okamoto has revealed that he's indeed a little older because we are, too.
"This is in part because fans from 20 years ago are older now," Okamoto said at the time. "The average age of people who play video games has risen too. We want to depict a James who has had to suffer through more in his life as an adult. So yes, we did raise his age, though only by a bit."
Horror isn't just for Halloween, you know - here are our tips for the very best horror games.
