Silent Hill f (2025): The Review

Overview

Silent Hill f moves the series forward with confidence, mixing the usual psychological horror with new ideas that confirms the franchise is well alive again. The story pulls you in, the visuals get under your skin, and the music sticks with you. It’s not flawless: forced fights and a few bugs drag it down, but the depth, different endings, and reason to replay make it a hard game to forget.

Score: 9,5 out of 10

The Positives ✅

Silent Hill f proves that the franchise still knows how to evolve without losing its identity. The setting alone, 1960s Japan, is a bold move, instantly refreshing the formula while keeping the series’ roots intact. The fictional town of Ebisugaoka feels grounded in tradition and culture, but also fragile, ready to collapse under the weight of its horrors. This contrast between calm normalcy and suffocating dread is classic Silent Hill, yet filtered through a completely new lens. From the moment the fog creeps in, you realize the series hasn’t just relocated, it’s reinvented itself while staying true to its DNA.

The story stands out as one of the game’s strongest elements. Written by Ryukishi07, it walks a razor-thin line between clarity and ambiguity. You’re never spoon-fed answers, but you’re given just enough to piece together meaning yourself. Hinako’s journey is tragic, messy, and complex, with themes of guilt, abuse, and identity twisting together into something both disturbing and strangely empathetic. The shifting roles of the characters and the branching endings push you to replay and reinterpret what you’ve seen, reinforcing that Silent Hill isn’t about neat resolutions, it’s about lingering questions that claw at you long after the credits roll.

Visually, the game is grotesque in the most purposeful way. The flower-covered monsters and red spider lilies aren’t just unsettling, they carry symbolic weight, drawing on cultural imagery while tapping into universal fears like trypophobia. The environments themselves, from abandoned shrines to streets swallowed by blossoms, double as storytelling devices. Every corner of Ebisugaoka feels like it’s trying to tell you something, whether through beauty, decay, or both at once. This isn’t gore for the sake of shock, it’s horror woven into metaphor, a reminder that Silent Hill has always been about more than what you see on the surface.

The sound design ties everything together. Akira Yamaoka’s music carries the familiar mix of melancholy and dread that fans expect, but it feels even more refined here. Tracks shift from suffocating despair to eerie calm, pulling you deeper into the fog with every note. The soundscape itself adds another layer: footsteps echoing differently in nightmare realms, whispers just out of reach, rustles that leave you second-guessing what’s real. Combined with strong voice acting that sells both fear and quiet resilience, the audio doesn’t just support the game, it defines it.

Finally, the gameplay loop is both familiar and new. You’re still exploring fog-choked streets, solving puzzles, and surviving encounters, but the addition of stamina, sanity, and shrine mechanics adds fresh layers of strategy. The puzzles remain cryptic in that classic Silent Hill way, but the journal system ensures they don’t become frustrating. Shrines act as both save points and moments of reprieve, letting you prepare for what’s next. It’s a rhythm that balances tension and relief, keeping the game engaging without sanding down its sharp edges. In short, Silent Hill f feels like Silent Hill, only sharper, stranger, and more confident in its evolution.

The Negatives ⚠️

For all its strengths, Silent Hill f stumbles in one major area: combat. The mechanics themselves aren’t bad, in fact, dodges, counters, and stamina-based attacks can feel tense and rewarding, but the sheer amount of fighting tips the balance away from what makes Silent Hill unique. Forced encounters slow the pacing, and locking progression behind clearing enemies undermines the series’ tradition of atmosphere-driven tension. When fear turns into routine monster-slaying, the horror naturally loses some of its impact.

Weapon durability only adds to the frustration. Carrying a maximum of three weapons is restrictive enough, but when they start breaking down and repair kits grow scarce, you end up worrying more about managing your arsenal than surviving the nightmare around you. Instead of amplifying tension, this system often feels like a chore, forcing players to hoard supplies instead of engaging naturally with the game. It’s an unnecessary layer of stress in a series already built on resource scarcity.

The glitches don’t help either. Input issues with the focus mechanic, sanity triggering at random, and combat commands queuing long after a fight has ended all break immersion. One particularly bad chase sequence, where movement locked up because all weapons happened to be sledgehammers, turned a terrifying moment into unintentional comedy. Silent Hill thrives on pulling you into its world, so when the systems falter, it snaps you right back out. That’s a big blow in a game where atmosphere is everything.

Even when combat works mechanically, its frequency creates tonal whiplash. Silent Hill’s best moments are often quiet, wandering empty streets, hearing something in the distance, and questioning whether you even want to find out what’s waiting. In Silent Hill f, those silences are too often interrupted by mandatory fights. Instead of building unease, the rhythm shifts into action-horror, which might satisfy players looking for intensity but alienates those who cherish the franchise’s slower, more psychological roots.

None of these issues ruin the game outright, but they do keep it from reaching the perfection its other elements strive for. It’s frustrating because you can see how close Silent Hill f comes to greatness in every other department, story, atmosphere, sound, visuals, only for the combat-heavy design and technical hiccups to drag it down a notch. With some balancing and a few patches, it could easily fix these problems, but in its current form, the rough edges stand out all the more against the brilliance surrounding them.

The Experience 🎮

Playing Silent Hill f wasn’t just another horror game for me, it was personal. I’ve grown up with Silent Hill, from being too terrified to finish Shattered Memories as a kid to replaying the classics as an adult. The opening chase in Silent Hill f hit me hard because it echoed that childhood memory, only this time I pushed through. Surviving that sequence felt like a full-circle moment, like I’d finally conquered a piece of the series that had haunted me for years. That’s the kind of emotional pull Silent Hill can have when it’s done right.

Exploring Ebisugaoka felt like stepping into a living nightmare. The foggy streets, the candy shop turned uncanny, the blossoms twisting into grotesque forms, it all carried a weight that felt more symbolic than literal. Every corner of the town forced me to stop and think about what it represented, not just what it looked like. That’s what I’ve always loved about Silent Hill: it doesn’t just scare you, it makes you interpret the fear. And Silent Hill f delivers that in spades.

Hinako’s journey stuck with me in particular. The way the game blurred the lines between victim and monster, guilt and innocence, made me constantly reevaluate what I thought I knew about her. There were times I felt empathy, times I felt disturbed, and times I wasn’t sure whether I wanted her to succeed. That ambiguity isn’t easy to pull off, but it’s what makes the narrative linger. I left with more questions than answers, and in Silent Hill, that’s exactly the point.

Of course, the experience wasn’t flawless. The combat-heavy stretches wore me down, turning moments of dread into routine, and the glitches definitely pulled me out of the world more than once. I remember laughing in frustration during a chase that glitched so badly I barely survived by chance. It broke the immersion, and for a game that thrives on pulling you into its atmosphere, that stung. Still, those frustrations faded compared to the bigger picture of what the game accomplished.

When I look back on my time with Silent Hill f, what I remember isn’t the bugs or the weapon durability, it’s the atmosphere, the sound, the sense of being swallowed by something bigger than myself. It’s the flowers consuming everything in sight, the music that crawled into my bones, and the sense that Silent Hill wasn’t just a place but a mirror. For me, the game wasn’t just a revival of a beloved series, it was another step in a lifelong conversation between player and town. That conversation isn’t always comfortable, but it’s why Silent Hill has always mattered to me, and why Silent Hill f will stick in my head for years to come.