Silent Hill f Review — CNET

I played Silent Hill for the first time on the original Playstation 26 years ago, and after having appreciated last year Remake Silent Hill 2I had great hopes for Silent Hill f. In the end, these hopes fell as flat as the monster children brandishing the knives of the original game.

Silent Hill F is a notable gap in previous entries in the franchise, unrelated to the city that stimulates the horror of the series. It looks like Konami may have slapped the name of the hill on an unrelated game, similar to online theory on Silent Hill 4: The Room of 2004.

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To put it simply, Silent Hill F does not have the same psychological thrill, the interesting tradition or even the sympathetic characters for which the series is known. Instead, this game presents itself as an anime of the early 2000s involving Japanese schoolchildren secretly hiding how they want to kill each other, which is logical considering that the writer of the story is Ryukishi07, the name of the pen of the author of The Higurashi: when they cry the series of visual novels, which concerns Japanese schoolchildren who kill each other. Just a little too much on the nose.

As far as I know, at least in my first game, Silent Hill F has no connection with the other Silent Hill games. There are three additional purposes in New Game Plus, which may have a link. Hell, I don’t even know what the “F” even refers to. However, it took me 10 hours to beat the game once, and I have no interest in starting again just to have a nugget of a connection with the other games.

Have I made jump fears? Of course. Did I appreciate some of the twists and turns in history? Absolutely. Have I noticed that female mechanical enemies who freeze in attractive poses when they are about to attack, are you a sign that developers are a little too excited? Of course I did it, but nevertheless, I did not spend a pleasant time with Silent Hill F.

I need a white claudia stroke

Silent Hill F follows Shimizu Hinako, a sports schoolgirl from a family in difficulty in a rural Japanese city in the 1960s. One day, her parents showed up in a big argument, so she will meet her friends. The city quickly becomes a nightmare while strange monsters appear, as well as a mysterious growth of red plants.

Throughout the match, Hinako fights monsters with a range of weapons such as a doe, a bat and an ax. Although there are no firearms generally visible in other silent matches, she finally obtains a special weapon later in the game which can decimate enemies.

Overall, the fight in Silent Hill F is not pleasant and feels obsolete. Hinako can use light and heavy attacks with her weapon, and she can use a focus attack by holding a button (L2 for the PS5) to load and press the light attack button inflicts a few additional damage to an enemy. The use of focus exhausts the Hinako mental health counter, and once empty, it can no longer focus, and enemies that can damage its mental health will remove parts of its health bar.

The combat loop revolves around the meters, that is to say when you use a strong attack when an enemy sparkles for a quick second. There is a timing to this, and once you lower it, the enemies are quite easy to handle.

Aside from Hinako having a rapid dodge, the fight, for the most part, seems to be from the PS2 era. It’s just very boring for most of the game, the only interesting fights being against the bosses – even then, it’s always not very exciting. Worse still, aggravating moments when Hinako’s major oscillations with certain weapons are interrupted by environmental objects which force him to be at right angles to win his attacks, especially in the nearby corridors. Enemies, however, do not have to worry about this same problem, because their attacks rush into the environment.

There are light game elements. Leveling occurs in sanctuaries using faith, won by offering objects. Enough of Hinako grants Hinako a wooden plate called EMA which stimulates health, endurance and mental health. There are also equipped charms called Omamours, which improve attributes or damage.

Beyond the dull fight, the user interface and the game puzzles are frustrating. The newspaper, intended for tradition, is poorly organized, with letters and documents dispersed under collectibles, which makes it difficult to monitor older notes. It is 2025, and the interfaces should not be so annoying.

Second, and it really bothers me, the management of game articles – in particular, how the elements break. Like other survival horror games, there are healing objects to pick up. They are quite rare, but the elements also have different battery sizes: the bandages have a maximum of three paragraphs per inventory, while a first aid kit can only have it. If you bring together, say, seven bandages and two first aid kits, it will take five locations in your inventory, which begins with only eight locations. This could be more logical if the number of items held was based on the size of the articles in the bag, similar to Resident Evil 4. Throughout the game, I had to leave many items because I did not have enough space.

The puzzles, which, in the previous Hill Silent Games, make you catch your brain to understand the intelligent puzzles, often had no meaning. For example, a puzzle involves a box that has sliding nods that discover an image of a type of food, such as oranges, apples, strawberries, pumpkin, etc. The index says that the answer is linked to a cake that someone ate that had sweet and tangy fruits, but this description of “sweet and tangy” does not help me understand how many fruits I must reveal to solve the puzzle. The answer was five years, and as I am not a scholar of Japanese culture, putting grapes on cakes was not obvious. There were other puzzles that lacked the same way as the same charm found in other silent games and was more frustrating due to certain cultural differences.

Bring me back to real silent hill

Boring fight I can (mainly) neglect. Frustrating interface, I can manage. However, I draw the line when a silent hill game does not give me silent vibrations. There is simply no suspicion of them here.

Silent Hill Games generally divides their progress between a normal world and another nightmarish world. Silent Hill F replaces the dark sanctuary as its nightmare, which is devoid of this landscape of horror of splashed blood and rusty metal floors which echo the stages of enemies that approach. It was just repetitive. In fact, it seems that half of the game simply go back and forth in the city, repeating your steps, with only one school and two big houses to really explore.

In addition, I understand that Hill F’s silent development team wanted to give the franchise a game more focused on Japanese, but there are problems for players who do not know Japan. A big blatant problem is the lack of translation in the environmental text. There were so many times that Japanese words were splashed on the blood walls, and I had no idea what they said. So now I have to wait until Youtuber Lore translates everything for me after the game.

Cultural references are also lost in the translation. The fox is a leading figure throughout the game and has links with Japanese folklore, but its cultural meaning is not really explained. Although I do not need to reach out, it seems that some contexts were missing on the reasons why certain events occurred in the game.

In fact, there is only one lack of coherent tradition for Silent Hill f. As I mentioned earlier, I only got one end, and I don’t even know what’s going on. It is a silent game, so there is a psychological trauma which takes place in a supernatural way which must be dissected. But I was still completely confused about the end of the end, because the mi-roll credits scene implies what you need to do to get one of the other ends. There is also almost nothing giving an atmosphere of the 60s to the game other than the lack of electronics.

The game is colorful and artistic but visually bland, with trivial characters and forgetful music, despite the long -standing composer of Silent Hill, Akira Yamaoka, working on the game.

To say that I am disappointed with Silent Hill F is an understatement, but I am not surprised either. When I saw the first trailer for the game, I didn’t feel anything that reminded me of the Silent Hill franchise that I love, and these feelings found themselves. You could give this game a totally different name, and it would only be a passable survival horror game. Putting this name “Silent Hill” above is downright offensive for fans of the series invested in traditions and vibrations that have been built for decades of the franchise games.