The first image unveiled from Silent Hill f showed a schoolgirl wearing a blue sailor uniform and traditional sandals, surrounded by pale pink cherry blossoms.
It was unmistakably Japanese, and it sent a clear message to fans of the survival horror franchise: prepare for a significant departure from the typical Silent Hill game.
The original Silent Hill, released in 1999, was a typical American horror story that unfolded in a fictitious seaside town in Maine, US, shrouded in a thick blanket of ominous fog. Team Silent, a Tokyo studio, spent two weeks in Chicago and also drew inspiration from Stephen King and David Lynch, whose depictions of nightmarish Americana helped inform the game’s eerie, dreamlike atmosphere.
Silent Hill f is instead an unabashed work of J-horror, the subgenre popularised by turn-of-the-century films like Ju-On: The Grudge and Ringu.
During a preview of Silent Hill f, series producer Motoi Okamoto said that while the series had always “fused the essence of Western horror and Japanese horror”, its upcoming game was an attempt to lean fully into Japanese motifs.
Trailers for the game show environments steeped in Japanese culture and heritage, including torii, the traditional gates at the entrance to shrines, and spider lilies, which are associated with the fall equinox. Indoor settings are divided by latticed screens and decorated with traditional hanging scrolls. A Shinto deity worshiped by village residents is prominently featured, and in addition to the franchise’s traditional steel pipes and crowbars, players can also wield more Japan-specific items such as a polearm, known as a naginata.
Silent Hill f’s writer, a Japanese manga author who goes by the pseudonym Ryukishi07, has said that he initially assumed the game would be set in the US like the franchise’s other mainline entries. “I had some ideas of the stereotypical American thing with cops and doughnuts and girls running away into hospitals and all that,” he said.
Essential to the franchise’s lasting appeal has been its somewhat off-kilter point-of-view, in which mundane fixtures of Smalltown, US, were regarded at a curious remove. The tone and style of the early games — slow and deliberate, relying on mood rather than jump scares — felt very Japanese and notably distinct from the survival-horror landscape at the time, especially games like Resident Evil, which were more action-oriented and propulsive.
Clayton Purdom, a founder of the tech and culture consultancy EX Research, said that early Silent Hill games “refracted J-horror in a really interesting way, situating that tradition in an American location that worked because of its off-ness.” He pointed to some of the strange cultural miscellanea that bled into the games. A school locale in the first Silent Hill was based on one in the film Kindergarten Cop; a central character in Silent Hill 2 was inspired by Christina Aguilera.
Silent Hill f is set in Showa-era Japan, which Ryukishi07 has called “the era where fantasy mythology seems to reside”. The developers at NeoBards Entertainment meticulously recreated the 1960s setting, adding authentic period details in the style of architecture and production design that add a depth of realism to the paranormal atmosphere. The choices were made in part to set Silent Hill f apart from other games in the series. “We believed that this would allow us to depart from the preestablished canon and discover more of the lore,” Okamoto said in a recent presentation on the game.
Silent Hill f also makes at least one major departure in terms of gameplay. The first few Silent Hill games had famously poor combat. Players were armed with baseball bats and small guns, but they were clumsy and slow, so difficult to use effectively that it was often easier to flee enemies than to fight them. (Indeed, this was part of the games’ charm.) Silent Hill f’s combat is more precise, built around carefully timed blocks and parries — more like the combat in games such as Dark Souls and Elden Ring, which are known for their difficulty.
“Challenging action games are gaining popularity among younger players nowadays,” Toyama, the creator of Silent Hill, said this summer. “So I believed that if we implemented such elements into the game, it would resonate well even with people who are new to the series.”
NYTNS