Silent Hill f Review: A beautiful, blooming nightmare
Playing Silent Hill f left me with more feelings than I expected. Not just fear, but sadness, fascination, and yet a strange kind of peace. It’s rare for a horror game to be this quiet, this beautiful, and still this unsettling.
Set in 1960s Japan, it feels like a reawakening for the Silent Hill series: familiar in spirit, but braver in what it chooses to say.
At the center of it all is Hinako Shimizu, a teenage girl trapped in a world that feels both fragile and cruel. Her story unfolds slowly, pulling you through loneliness, expectation, and decay. The town she inhabits isn’t just haunted by monsters, but by the pressure to stay perfect, polite, and quiet.
That’s what makes Silent Hill f so unnerving. It’s horror born from beauty and restraint.
Feminine Horror and Expectation
I’ve always felt that horror has had a complicated relationship with women. It’s a genre that can be cruel and empowering at the same time, a space that both punishes and protects them. You see it everywhere: the “final girl,” the femme fatale, the women who survive because they have to, not because they’re safe.
Silent Hill has always lived in that tension, from Alessa and Lisa to Heather and Angela, whose identities are rarely reduced to being eye candy or damsels in distress.
What makes Silent Hill f stand out to me is how it continues that legacy while finally giving it a sharper focus. It’s set in 1960s Showa era Japan, where being a woman means living under constant expectation to be polite, to obey, to marry, to endure.
The game doesn’t romanticize that world, it shows how exhausting it is to exist inside it. Hinako’s journey isn’t just a descent into horror, it’s a slow unraveling of what happens when someone tries to define your worth for you.
I’ve seen people call Silent Hill f “too woke” with its messaging, but honestly, I think it has to be. Sometimes subtlety just lets people look away. When a game is this direct about what women are forced to endure, that bluntness becomes part of the horror. It’s not elegant, but it’s honest.
As a queer man, I found myself relating to that in a way I didn’t expect. I’ll never understand the full experience of womanhood in that time or culture, but I recognize the feeling of being told who you’re allowed to be, of performing the version of yourself that makes others comfortable, of staying likable even when you’re breaking. That quiet exhaustion is something this game captures perfectly.
That’s what makes this story so powerful to me. Beneath the floral dread and psychological decay, it’s a game about identity and what happens when the world decides who you are before you ever get the chance to. The monsters might be born from misogyny, but the fear they represent, the fear of losing yourself, resonates far beyond gender.
Gameplay and Atmosphere
But how does the game actually play? I know, I’ve spent the last few paragraphs unpacking feminine horror, identity, and societal repression, but let’s be real, you probably want to know if it’s fun to play.
The good news? It feels great. I played on story mode, which let me soak in the atmosphere and focus on the world, but even then, Silent Hill f surprised me with how dynamic its combat felt.
One of the early jokes floating around before release was that Silent Hill f looked like it had “Dark Souls” combat, and honestly, they weren’t entirely wrong. The game’s fights are more active and precise than you’d expect from a Silent Hill title. Hinako can dodge, parry, and even counterattack if your timing’s right, and when you pull off a perfect dodge, it feels incredible. It’s not fast or flashy, it’s deliberate, patient, and punishes panic. And trust me, I panicked!
The boss fights are where it really shines. Each one feels distinct, equal parts puzzle and sweaty, with that perfect mix of tension and satisfaction. Even in story mode, I still found myself clutching my controller like my life depended on it.
Outside of combat, the game’s pacing is slow and methodical in the best way. Every hallway feels purposeful, every sound carefully placed. The atmosphere is heavy, not because of constant danger, but because of how much the silence makes you expect it. It’s that signature Silent Hill unease, the dread that creeps up on you when nothing is happening at all.
A Blooming Future for Silent Hill
Without spoiling too much, Silent Hill f has multiple endings, and that alone hooked me. I didn’t expect the game to leave me so curious. After finishing my first run on stream, chat and I just sat there in silence, trying to process what we had seen.
We ended up looking up the other endings right after, needing to piece together the full picture. Each one adds something new, a twist, an answer, or sometimes just another question. It’s not about chasing a “true” ending; it’s about seeing how many ways this story can hurt, heal, and transform itself. And yes, there’s definitely a weird one.
I would not call Silent Hill f a reinvention of the series, but it feels like a new kind of confidence for it, one that is emotional, introspective, and unafraid to slow down. It takes what the franchise is known for and blooms it into something strange and beautiful. It is not trying to be Silent Hill 2 again. It is trying to be something else, and it succeeds. If this is the direction Silent Hill keeps going, I am in. It is horror that lingers, horror that thinks, horror that blooms.
Maybe it is too early to call this my Game of the Year, but Silent Hill f is definitely living rent free in my head. I hope you will give it a shot so it can haunt yours too. And yes, before you ask, I did play the whole thing wearing the pink rabbit outfit in-game while actually wearing a Japanese schoolgirl outfit on stream. No regrets!
Score: 9/10
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