games / Reviews
Silent Hill F (PS5) Review
Image Credit: Konami
Loading...I have had a generally lukewarm to negative opinion of the Silent Hill franchise over the years. I haven’t played every one, in fact, I’ve probably only touched about three or four of them but I never liked them. I only played a demo of Silent Hill 1 and didn’t like it. I tried Silent Hill 3 on PC but it had some ghastly gamepad issues so I didn’t get very far. Silent Hill 4 made me physically nauseous. The third-person stuff was alright but the first-person “apartment” gameplay made me queasy due to its weird FOV. Lastly, I played about two hours of the Silent Hill 2 remake, got bored, and stopped. So, it’s with some surprise that I managed to stick with Silent Hill F and actually enjoyed most of it. I’ll give my thoughts below, hopefully without a ton of spoilers:
Silent Hill F has you playing the character Shimizu Hinako, a high school student in the sleepy town of Ebisugaoka, set around the 1960’s. Her family life is somewhat depressing with an alcoholic/failed father, a doormat for a mother and an older sister that she did get along with, but is now gone due to being married and having moved out. One day, she goes to meet up with her friends but wouldn’t you know it, a monster appears, along with a lot of fog and red flowers that seemingly bloom out of nowhere. Hinako gets separated from her friends and spends the rest of the game trying to find them, possibly find her folks, find out what happened to the town and then to escape it. So, it is the usual kind of survival horror trapping for this sort of survival game trope.
Combat in the game is kind of interesting; you have a normal attack and a strong attack. Either attack takes stamina, which is shown on screen as a bar that depletes when you do certain actions, so you can’t just wail away all the time. You can also dodge attacks, but this also takes a bit of stamina.
You also have a Focus mode, which doesn’t take stamina but sanity, which is another bar, but this time with a flower motif. You can enter Focus mode by holding down L2/LT, and this slows the game down, just a bit. You can then do a Focus attack if you let the circle bar fill up and do a more damaging attack with the heavy attack (R2/RT) button. However, if you get hit when charging up, both your health and sanity bar will be damaged. Health is restored via pickups and sanity as well, but sanity can also refill slowly on its own if not damaged.
Finally, you can do a counter attack if conditions are right. Enemies will occasionally do a “shimmer” attack, and if you time it right, you can counter the attack with your own. Holding down the focus button makes this a bit easier since you can time it better and have a bit wider window for this to occur.
Your main arsenal of weapons includes: steel pipes, baseball bats, sledgehammers, axes, etc. It’s all basic stuff that one would find in a dusty, 1960’s village, so don’t expect to find a Howa Type 64 rifle in the game, although it would be rad if you did. Weapons degrade over time so you’ll have to repair them every so often with toolkits or swap out for new weapons, with you being able to carry three.
You also start with a small inventory that can grow when you find additional inventory bags, adding more slots. Thankfully “key” items like gate keys, crests, etc. don’t go in here. Your inventory will mostly consist of various health, stamina, sanity and durability items to repair either yourself, or your gear. It’s not like Resident Evil 4 where you can “Tetris” items in an inventory case, it’s basically one item type per item slot, but some items can be grouped. You can carry three bandages per item slot, for example, so it’s not overwhelming, per se. Annoyingly, if you decide to “drop” an item for something else in the world, that item is then just gone/destroyed. However, you can also carry or donate some items for “Faith”.
Faith is a currency you can use at the save points. You primarily get it by donating excess inventory items, or donating certain inventory items that have no other use, they are just meant to be sacrificed. You spend Faith in one of two ways, you can use it to get a “random” Omamori, which is like a passive buff. Initially, you only have one Omamori slot, but you can unlock more eventually. The buffs are things like increasing your overall health or stamina, restoring health after a counter, restoring health after killing an enemy, decreasing enemy line of sight, etc. You can occasionally find Omamori in the town, usually by doing an optional puzzle or going off the beaten path, but you can also get them at the save point.
I put random in quotes for a reason though: it’s not actually random. As a test, I made a save, then drew an Omamori. I got it, then loaded up the game, drew another one, and it was the same one. I then quit out the game, loaded the save back up, drew one, same one. I did this about ten times actually, doing various things like restarting my PS5, completely powering it off, loading up another game, then going back to SHF, etc., it was always the same Omamori. So, I think it’s actually a predetermined set, and not a “random” one at all.
The other thing you can spend Faith on is by “Praying”, which nets you permanent upgrades to your character. You need a blank Ema tag, which you’ll occasionally find exploring around, but with enough faith and an Ema, you can increase your overall health, sanity or stamina meters. My advice: go with stamina, since that’s what you’re likely to run out of the most. You can also increase your Omamori slots here, in case you want to equip more of those.
Silent Hill F has a pretty interesting level structure. The game generally alternates between you being in the monster-infested Ebisugaoka town and then the next chapter will take place in a dark, nightmarish shrine or slight outdoor areas. Basically, if you’ve ever played Kuon, it is like those types of environments. Once you complete a chapter in one area, you either fall asleep or wake up and you are in the alternate zone.
I think I like this chapter structure more in horror games. I loved Alan Wake 1 back in the day, and even now, because it is a generally linear/narrative-driven game. There might be occasional bigger areas with some side stuff but it is usually going from A to B to C, which it usually very clear of where to go, so it’s not so annoying to get around.
Incidentally, this is why I didn’t like Alan Wake 2 nearly as much, because it is way more open-world, but there’s not a lot to actually do. It’s a much more meandering game and there isn’t a lot of narrative thrust to keep you going.
From my limited experience, most Silent Hill games are about you exploring the town and kind of stumbling from objective to objective, not knowing where to really go or do next. Silent Hill F, generally, tells you exactly where to go. It’s not a one-to-one map arrow or anything, but it will point out like “Hey, head back to your house” and there’s really only one main path to take. There is some side stuff to be sure, but you almost always know where to go or what to do, outside of the obvious puzzle sequences.
I won’t delve too deeply on the puzzles, most of them are decent. They are usually observational and follow guidelines of grabbing keys or specific items to progress to the next area. They aren’t anything overly deep but at least the first main one can be difficult due to the game not explaining it too well.
I’ll finish this review with two thoughts, one an observation and one a criticism. The observation is that this game really requires multiple playthroughs to get the most out of it. There’s at least four main endings and while none of them the usual canon “good” ending, each does have something to impart. They also explain what the hell is actually going on, which is kind of needed.
The criticism is that there are occasional balancing issues. Once or twice I would end a required fight with like half of one weapon and that’s it. I never really ran out of healing items but weapon durability and resources can be scarce. On the last boss fight I had two weapons that were perfect and one that had about 75% durability. After I finished the fight, I had one weapon left with about 20% durability. The game does tell you that you shouldn’t attack every enemy or that sometimes running away is the best way, and that is actually valid. But, sometimes, you do need to fight and it can be harrowing.
