Silent Hill f

• Genre: Survival Horror
• Spoiler Free Review: No, all the parts I want to talk about are spoilers, and the more I go on, the more overtly spoilery it'll get.
• Time Played: ~40 Hours, kind of hard to tell because PlayStation timer and in-game timer are dramatically different. I don't feel I left the game idle too long, but I noticed the game doesn't actually count any time spent in menus, reading the journal and documents and such, which in my perspective, is actually a large part of the game, that I do count.
• Too Short/Long: Too long if you really wanna delve into the story, that is, play it multiple times. I was looking at closer to 15 hours for a single playthrough. They don't do enough to mix things up or shorten replays. There was an option to skip one section that takes a few minutes in subsequent playthroughs, but it doesn't do much to shave off time overall. Apparently it was added later, maybe people just complained that part was tedious? But I found running through corridors to do the same sections over and over again more tedious.
• Did I cry: No.
• Soundtrack: Perfectly eerie where it needs to be, great outros, and while a bit of a shift from standard Silent Hill fare, it's still pretty good and even makes children chanting a banger.
• Why I played: I'd never otherwise work up the courage to play a Silent Hill game if it weren't for seeing some of the cool stuff in this game while my wife was playing. She played it when it came out, but after giving Resident Evil requiem a shot, I felt up to the task.
• Jank: It's got some time where responses don't seem to go perfectly and it's controls are a bit clunky at times, but both of these complaints are minor, it's not really that janky.
• Difficulty: It's difficult in the way a horror game is meant to be, like it's scary, and things can more or less kill you right away if you're not ready for it, but it's not punishing at all, and on the standard difficulties isn't that hard overall.
• Pleased/Disappointed: I'm actually very pleased with this. I still found it harder to play than an average game due to the horror element more than anything else. The paranoia I have, having to check every corner, concerned something is going to get me every step of the way. It definitely hinders the experience for me a bit, but I still enjoyed it.
• Recommend to others: I definitely would, especially if you have any interest in the mid-20th century rural Japanese aesthetic, or Japanese folklore, or Japanese style horror. It nails them all. I'm also sure that anyone who gets any enjoyment out of the horror elements would find a lot more to love here.
  

Since I tanked Resident Evil Requiem, and was still in a bit of a rut of what I personally wanted to play, I figured I'd maybe try tackling Silent Hill f as well. I of course had already seen a good bit of gameplay when Alice played it and saw some pretty cool stuff. Had I not seen the cool stuff, I probably still wouldn't have ever considered touching this.

Compared to Resident Evil, I would say that some of the more tense moments in Resident Evil were actually more tense - because of what it has you do and the fact you could instantly die, and you legitimately were against things you couldn't kill, or you could more easily get overwhelmed. So Resident Evil was more tense from a gameplay perspective, for sure, and one thing it did have going for it in the horror aspect - for better or worse, was it had more "dark and scary" places. Obviously relying on the fear of what you can't see is something many if not most horror games do, and Resident Evil relies a bit more on dark - it has less of a supernatural element, whereas Silent Hill can just make things be there that weren't before. Or perhaps worse, make things just disappear all the same.

Silent Hill has almost entirely has better sound design when it comes to the atmosphere. It can be scary just hearing Silent Hill. When the hill isn't silent is when things are the most tense. Resident Evil pretty much didn't have a soundtrack during the game. It used sound effects here and there, but they were sparsely things you couldn't see. Silent Hill had a different sound effect for every type of terrain you walk on, and multiple for them. They had "trick" sound effects, where you making one step makes several sounds, maybe it's because of a moved floor board, something below, or maybe they just decided stepping in x spot makes y sound trigger, just for fun. The music that would play featured spine chilling effects, and as someone who strongly beliefs a good soundtrack goes a long way in the feel of a game, I felt the impact of it in Silent Hill. Every sound in Silent Hill adds to the suspense, and all that achieved without even relying on putting you in the dark... most of the time.

There are a couple dimly lit locales, and even a couple dark areas, but even at it's darkest, and the only point you're given a light source to carry, it's not oppressive, you can still kinda see without any light, it just makes it easier. 

Silent Hill f was also much easier from a gameplay perspective than Resident Evil, at least for me. It was melee attacking, with counters and dodges, and a stamina bar. I hate to make the comparison but very souls-like, and that's something I'm pretty familiar with. I only ever died a small handful of times in Silent Hill and half of those times were just because I gave up mid fight because I just wanted to do it better from the start. Despite the intense atmosphere, the game wasn't that hard. The fact it managed to keep that intense atmosphere even in areas I visited dozens of times throughout multiple playthroughs, I feel is the real testament to it's design. I never felt fully confident, I never felt relaxed, even though I had every reason to with my dozen bandages, handful of first aid kits and nine repair kits at any given time past the first couple hours of the game.

I may not have been able to keep pushing if not for one key aspects of the game, arguably what truly piqued my interest to begin with.

Silent Hill f has you play as two-sides of Hinako, one side - which is killing off her attachments to life outside of wedlock, which despite being essentially the bad/wrong side, is also the badass side that is super cool to get to play as. I'm sure it's not the first time Silent Hill as made the point from what I hear about it, but in this the protagonist truly is the monster, and so that is how I played. Alice made note of it as I did, but yeah, the best way to fight your fears is to... literally fight your fears. I was the monster. It helped.

I'm not quite sure Alice and I align on how interpretation of the game, but she has said something before about "All endings are canon", and I feel if that's true, you could make an argument for "all interpretations are canon". I may not be correct because I have played other Silent Hill games - all of which as far as I am aware take place chronologically after this game, and many which may be more tied into the phenomena as part of the core of their story, so my perspective is taking solely the information as provided by this game.

I personally feel like none of the game was real, so to speak, but not like in a "it was all a dream", more like it was all a hallucinogenic trip. Many of these events were "real" but they were being interpreted through the lens of Hinako's memories, fears, perceptions, etc. Of course that may not explain how she - thus the player, would have some of the more meta-knowledge to even have the perception that this was a hallucinogenic trip - with the lightheartedness of... all of the endings? Except for maybe the first which was left ambiguous, the remaining endings were almost a whiplash of tonal shift, and not just the more or less "joke UFO ending"(also canon? - but also, stuff was definitely happening with UFOs - maybe this is the MOST canon). 

Not that I ever finished a Silent Hill game before, let alone got multiple endings, but with what I know about the games, I did find it interesting how not-grim all the endings were, and maybe that's why I interpret things the way I do. Hard to end on these notes so consistently if these characters just experiences such extreme trauma, and it wasn't just a trip, or even just representations of inner turmoil type stuff. Like "The Ritual" was just Hinako meeting her new family, and preparing for the wedding, and with all that preparing her to severe her ties with her previous life, and in that she had to become the monster that would "kill them". In Hinako's mind marriage=death, death of that version of you, death of your dreams, death of choice, death of your autonomy, you get married, you don't have a life, it is death. All the women she sees appear to be miserable in their marriages. Any allusion to missing/dead women are just women who got married. Her sister looks like corpse because she got married(maybe the only character I can actually be convinced is actually dead), her friends refer to her as "already being dead" as she is about to get married, a sign even declares her as one of the "missing" girls.

She's also wearing a shiromoku, an all white wedding attire, which doesn't sound atypical, but Japanese people often associate all-white imagery like that with death and apparently the garb has even more significance of representing a bride becoming what she needs for her new family - essentially leaving her past self behind. There may even be further cultural implications I may not entirely understand without that inherent knowledge.

Stepping back from interpretations and getting back to what is actually in the game - there are a few things I wanted for. For her friends, I would have liked to have seen a bit more build up of them showing their actual friendship, and them actually getting along and doing stuff together before everything went to hell. Some of the characters are just so immediately reprehensible that it's hard to feel anything for them until the final hours of the game after you've read dozens of notes about them/from them. I do like that a couple of the scenes make more sense as you know more about the plot, but I feel like you could have still had some of those scenes in there.

I also want for - having not had to replay as much as you do to get everything out of the game. It's just a tad grueling after doing some of these things several times, and I even cut corners by having a split save file where I could, as opposed to having all endings on my same safe file. I was just approaching that point where it was too much, so if I had to play just a few more hours - which I would have if I kept all endings on same save, I would have thought much less of the game coming out of it. I have a certain tolerance for replaying games over to get the real ending, but my patience isn't infinite.

Otherwise I just want to say I really liked it and am glad I played it, even if it was tough, even if it was scary. I can't soon see myself playing any other horror games though. I'll need a good solid break after that ordeal.