Since the Edo period, samurai have gathered to watch macabre kabuki theatre in Japan’s sweatiest summer months, trading chilling ghost stories to cool down. As Japanese folklore tells it, the sweltering temperatures allow the dead to cross over into the realm of the living, turning the heat of summer into Japan’s equivalent of Halloween. Thankfully for me, as I play SILENT HILL f on a 35 degree Celsius day in Tokyo, publisher Konami Digital Entertainment (KONAMI）hasn’t just relied on scares to chill my suncream-drenched skin – it’s mercifully cranked up the aircon.

SILENT HILL f is a daring and refreshingly original take on a beloved franchise. It has a strong message, lofty themes, and a setting that feels like few other virtual locales in video games. Yet perhaps the most surprising thing about SILENT HILL f is that it exists at all.
It feels somewhat fitting that I’m playing SILENT HILL f during Obon – the summer festival where the souls of the dead return home, as for many years, it looked like SILENT HILL was gone for good, too. With KONAMI pulling away from video games almost entirely for years, SILENT HILL fans were left fearing the worst. Luckily, that all changed last year.

SILENT HILL: The Short Message kicked off the storied series' revamp in early 2024, and the well-received SILENT HILL 2 remake later that year proved that the love for the series was still strong among fans, with Polish developer Bloober Team imbuing new life into a PS2 classic. Now, with fan interest reignited, SILENT HILL f is daring to take the seminal horror franchise in a bold new direction – Eastward.

In a series-first, KONAMI and developer NeoBards have dared to move SILENT HILL out of the series’ eponymous U.S. town and into rural Japan. Swapping the scenic resort land of Maine for a declining Japanese mountain town, SILENT HILL f turns the clock back to the 1960s, putting players in the shoes of troubled teenage girl Shimizu Hinako, as she struggles to find her place in the inexplicably fog-laden Ebisugaoka, a town that grows more disturbing by the day.

“SILENT HILL traditionally took place in the eponymous town of Silent Hill, but as we tried to create a new project, we concluded that if the storyline shared similarities, the gameplay shared similarities, and the settings shared similarities, things will start getting bland,” explains series producer Motoi Okamoto. “So, my motivation to change the setting was to try and freshen things up.”

It's a move that has undoubtedly paid off. The fictional town of Ebisugaoka is a gorgeous and utterly unique virtual locale. Inspired by a real Japanese town called Kanayama, the game’s creators wanted to recreate its labyrinthine streets and alleyways, dialling up the claustrophobic nature of these spaces for maximum tension. Despite video games’ storied and long-standing ties to Japan, there are few games that let players explore contemporary rural recreations of it. Where we’ve recently spent hours carving up ronin in Western-made samurai capers like Assassin’s Creed Shadows and Ghost of Tsushima, AAA Japanese games set in Japan are a rarity – let alone ones set in a rural town in the 1960s.
“While Japanese horror games may have waned, on the contrary, I believe that games that take place in a Japanese setting have definitely seen a rise in popularity over the last couple of years,” agrees Okamoto, “horror games from Japan and based in Japan have not seen major releases over the last decade, so that was definitely a risk, but a risk and an opportunity are two sides of the same coin…So we decided to go all out on the Japanese horror aspect.”

Even in cinema, Japanese horror is no longer the driving force it once was. Where the Yakuza games see players goofily fighting thugs in neon-drenched recreations of Osaka, there’s a tangible sense of stillness and character to this lavishly rendered 1960s town. SILENT HILL f is a strikingly beautiful game, effortlessly capturing a mood and sense of place like few other titles in recent memory. I’m immediately compelled to look around every quiet street corner, finding myself visiting every Inari Shrine, reading every beautifully written piece of kanji, and checking each eerily quiet building’s pristine sliding doors.

It’s not long, however, before I leave that eerie beauty behind and Hinako’s terrifying walk through town becomes a fight for her life. As a horrible fog descends on the once quiet town, marionette-like beings shudder and jerk their way towards Hinako with heart-wrenching malice. With the town’s adults nowhere to be found and Hinako and her friends discovering monsters at every turn, Ebisugaoka slowly becomes infested with red plants – their captivating crimson flowers spreading across the streets like tendrils, attempting to wrap around Hinako’s legs and tie her in place.

In keeping with the game’s move out of the U.S., there are no guns to be found in SILENT HILL f. Instead, our heroine defends herself with whatever weapons she can find lying around – daggers, baseball bats, steel pipes, and farm scythes. As I dash out of the way of a knife blade and counter an attack just in the nick of time, there’s more than a touch of From Software’s Dark Souls to the tense melee combat.

Yet according to the gameplay lead at the developer, the main inspiration for f’s combat wasn’t a nod to Hidetaka Miyazaki - it was actually derived from the series’ past. “Because this is a fresh take on SILENT HILL, we went back and took a look at all of the older SILENT HILLs,” says Al Yang, game director at the studio developing the game with KONAMI, NeoBards. “ For me and the team, the two strongest influencers were SILENT HILL 1 and SILENT HILL 4, in terms of gameplay. SILENT HILL 4 is a very melee-centric game, so we wanted to replicate that tension and pacing that you have there, but make it feel more modern.”
SILENT HILL f, then, is a game where stress is built into every system. In addition to resource management, players’ weapons have a durability meter, ensuring they must be mindful of finding a toolkit to repair their armaments before they break. Poor Hinako also has a sanity meter to worry about. As she encounters increasingly nightmarish creatures and watches her home descend into darkness, it’s up to players to track Hinako’s mental state carefully. Using the sanity meter can allow her to slow down attacks and pull off life-saving focus attacks – but getting hit while in focus mode sends Hinako into a health-depleting panic.

“A lot of people say they really enjoy being scared by horror games,” says Yang, “but I think sometimes what they mean is they enjoy the tension you get out of horror games. So resources are a very big deal for us. You can see durability on the weapons, your health bar, that's a really big thing, seeing how close you are to not having these important resources, and, again, limited inventory space. So you're aware of the threat, but you're also very aware of your own limitations, of how close you are to dying, how close you are to running out of resources, and that, to us, is what creates tension. You might predict what circles around the corner, but you're not quite sure if you're prepared to deal with it.”

Early levels consist of vertical labyrinthine layouts known in Japanese as kinkotsu, adding a claustrophobic feeling as Hinako desperately attempts to flee the town. As Ebisugaoka gets increasingly subsumed by fog, each step brings unknown dangers, such as flowers and marionette monstrosities. Tightly-knit village streets give way to foggy rice fields, creepy classrooms, and eerily abandoned shrines. A section where you must remove syringes from a field full of scythe-brandishing scarecrows is particularly chilling, never sure which of the static scarecrows will lurch to life and attack you, and which will remain staring at you, dead-eyed.
Mercifully, there is one place that Hinako can always catch a breather. Littered throughout overgrown paths and cobbled streets alike are a smattering of Inari Shrines. These aren’t just visual decorations in Ebisugaoka, they’re also your sanctuary. Players can stop and save their games at any miniature Shinto shrine (Hokora), finding a moment to catch their breath while also leaving their own holy offerings. As well as being a fun narrative touch, leaving offerings also helps improve Hinako’s chances of survival. For every healing and stamina-replenishing item you discover, you have the option to either keep them in your inventory to use in the heat of battle or to exchange them at shrines for faith points. These faith points can be used to purchase equippable Omamori charms, which help to boost certain stats. You will also discover carefully hidden wooden Ema charms throughout your journey, which, combined with faith points, allow players to unlock extra ability slots.

While Neobards was the driving force behind SILENT HILL f’s tension-seeped gameplay mechanics, KONAMI reached out to renowned Japanese horror author Ryukishi07 to pen SILENT HILL f’s intriguing script. “We’re very fortunate to have a very talented horror writer -Ryukishi07 -on board,” says Okamoto.

Like any great piece of horror, SILENT HILL f’s tale of terror is steeped in rich, relatable themes. Taking place in the 1960s, themes of gender are littered throughout SILENT HILL f, with the date matching the rise of the women’s rights movements germinating in Japan. As Hinako flees her drunk and abusive father and is ridiculed by her classmates for not being feminine enough, a dark undercurrent of misogyny, rage, and jealousy ripples under SILENT HILL f’s fantasy horror surface.

“Gender is a big part of what the story is about, we can't really elaborate too much, because it will probably give the plot away…,” adds Okamoto, “But it’s a theme that Ryukishi07 wanted to bring in, and we can say that focusing on Hinako and focusing on gender is a very conscious decision.”
Known for writing visual novels like Higurashi and Umineko When They Cry, Ryukishi07's works have long blended macabre horror with a human touch. A self proclaimed lifelong gamer, his pen name is even inspired by his love of Final Fantasy, with “Ryukishi” referring to Dragoon and 07 referring to the character Lenna from Final Fantasy V. When Ryukishi07 first learned that SILENT HILL f would be taking place in Japan, he tells me that it took him a while to unlearn everything that he knew about SILENT HILL. What is a SILENT HILL game if players aren’t actually in the town of Silent Hill?

“I had to reevaluate my thoughts about what makes SILENT HILL a SILENT HILL game, and so from there, I decided to latch onto the fear that characters will harbour in their minds,” explains Ryukishi07, “I felt that as long as those elements are taken care of, and as long as you stay true to those psychological aspects, whether it is in Japan or in the past, any environment can feel like SILENT HILL.”

While Hinako and her friends slowly watch their home become subsumed by darkness, at certain moments in the story, Hinako also finds herself transported to a surreal, magical realm. Guided by a mysterious man in a fox mask, this Otherworld sees Hinako completely alone. As she travels through abandoned shrines and ancient buildings, these sections dial up the horror, with a childhood doll regularly appearing to offer Hinako grave warnings, anchoring her back to reality. SILENT HILL f deftly weaves between the surreal and the relatable, with horrific boss fights in the nightmare world reflecting the tension between Hinako’s friends and family life in the world.

“Any starting point that I went from when drafting this game script is that I tried my best to try to work off of ubiquitous experiences, something that any person will be able to experience as they go through,” adds Ryukishi07, “I cannot reveal my main inspirations for the story without giving anything away, but this is probably something that will become more apparent for each player as they play.”
While players uncover the grisly details about Hinako’s past and the events that have led up to the corrupting of her home, even the puzzles you solve reflect the psychology of the characters and the setting. From a school box puzzle that delves deep into Hinako’s insecurity, to an early journey through Omamori charms that reflect her hometown’s uneasy relationship with religion, SILENT HILL f’s puzzles are intriguingly abstract. Hinako also scribbles in a journal throughout. Every time you learn about a new character, place, or piece of history, these character profiles and information are recorded via beautifully illustrated entries in your journal.

It's a move that helps bring every facet of Ebisugaoka convincingly to life – selling the town’s longstanding history and the complex relationships of those who live there. For Okamoto, it was essential that the town became almost a character in itself. “Being a SILENT HILL game, the game will obviously have to focus on the psyche of one specific character, which is why the game is so themed and relevant towards Hinako,” Okamoto explains, “Yet in this game, you could see that it's not just Hinako that's being assaulted by the monsters, but these monsters and these changes are also corroding her hometown environment. So this is a figurative way of saying how the monsters are not only attacking Hinako, but they're also attacking a part of her hometown, a part of her life.”
Speaking of monsters, the foes that you face in SILENT HILL f are an unsettling mix of living nightmares. Alongside the aforementioned marionettes, Hinako finds herself battling sentient scarecrows, hulking sword-wielding monstrosities, and even goo-oozing bipedal creatures made up from a collection of human faces. These nightmarish creations are all the work of Japanese artist kera. Known for her designs on visual novel Spirit Hunter and Square Enix games like Romancing SaGa and Lord of Vermillion, her discomforting designs help elevate SILENT HILL f’s surreal horror into something as arty as it is disturbing. As the evil further grips this once quiet town, the macabre creatures you encounter morph into increasingly hideous forms and remain uniquely and consistently disturbing throughout.

“We're very fortunate to be able to have a cooperative effort with kera, who was in charge of the character and monster design,“ explains Okamoto. “Her concepts, along with the work that we had, resulted in a very distinct type of contradictory juxtaposition of beauty and horror. I think that's one of the themes that you see prevalent in Japanese horror, where you take two contrary, opposing elements, and you somehow pair them together. In this case, we were able to take the elements of beauty and the more gruesome and grotesque, and we're able to fuse those two together to make a very distinct and uncanny type of beauty.”

Like its predecessors, SILENT HILL f is a game built for multiple playthroughs, with each new trip through Hinako’s nightmarish journey revealing new story snippets, helping her macabre mystery to slowly unfold. Fans will be pleased to learn that SILENT HILL f has five different endings, including the series’ absurdist signature UFO ending. Writer Ryukishi07 tells me that he wanted players to play through SILENT HILL f multiple times, intentionally avoiding black and white morality, to ensure that there are no clear-cut good or bad endings to Hinako’s tale. Much like the fog that subsumes Hinako’s home, SILENT HILL f ultimately paints its morality in thick shades of grey.
In order to keep each new playthrough engaging on each subsequent return to Ebisugaoka, Hinako's actions and choices will lead to different boss battles as well as unveiling additional pieces of collectable lore, branching paths, and unearthing entirely new storylines.

It’s all part of a wider move to keep the pacing consistent. For both Yang and Ryukishi07 they believe that true terror is built on tension and surprise, rather than just cheap jump scares. “If everything's the same, nothing stands out,” reflects Yang, “That's one of the big things that we looked at. J horror is a bit more of a slow burn and more about atmosphere. It's not like there's no action in there, but for us, the top priority was to really focus on that sense of dread - that beauty and terror. This is one of the big reasons that we decided to try to slow things down a bit and give players that slow burn.”

It's a sentiment that you can hear in SILENT HILL f’s masterful score. While most people working on SILENT HILL f are newcomers to the series, the soundtrack is scored by SILENT HILL veteran Akira Yamaoka and a newcomer to the series, Kensuke Inage. Yamaoka scores the Fog World, while the Otherworld is scored by Inage.  With two separate composers working on the game, it underscores the contract between the two worlds.

Yamaoka has written music for SILENT HILL since 1999, but now, for the first time, he was given the opportunity to pen a more overtly Japanese-sounding score.

“From my perspective, I hope that the music for SILENT HILL has always had a strong Japanese influence,“ says Yamaoka, “only with previous games, the Japanese taste in music has been crafted and tweaked into a way that can be more easily absorbed and perceived by Western audiences. But for SILENT HILL f, I took away all of those adjustments, and I took this into a purely Japanese perspective, so it's more of a pure experience compared to what I've been doing previously. I have added a few instruments this time around, but for the most part, they haven't changed. It's not so much the instruments that are used, as it is the pacing and the flavour of Japanese musicianship.”

With this score, Yamaoka explains that he wanted to capture that Japanese quality of wabi-sabi – the feel of focusing on the quiet and solace of an environment. It was important to amplify both the silence and tension, setting the anxiety-laden tone for this reflective, 1960s tale. It’s a vibe that you can immediately hear, if not immediately pinpoint. From the game’s opening scene, the score is immediately atmospheric, with melancholic guitar, rumbling traditional drums, and flutes blend with a sombre refrain from a children's choir, setting the eerie tone perfectly, with long drawn out notes that sow intrigue before bubbling up to a disquieting crescendo. Much like SILENT HILL f’s balance of tension and heartfelt storytelling, the balance of eerie silence and all-encompassing audio is one that’s perfectly struck.

For many gamers, SILENT HILL is a series defined by its seminal second entry. With Bloober Team’s remake receiving critical and commercial success, the shadow cast by SILENT HILL 2 looms ever larger over the franchise – a legacy and challenge that Okamoto is all too aware of. “As the producer for the SILENT HILL series, I explored all the past titles before moving forward, and personally, I do feel that SILENT HILL 2 is a major benchmark when it comes to the content of the story. But simply repurposing SILENT HILL 2 clones will quickly lead players to get bored with the project. So rather than simply repeating, we try our best to make it more versatile. In the case of SILENT HILL f, this is the reason why we decided to go with Ryukishi07 as the script writer. By trying new things and trying to imbue the series with new ideas, we're trying our best to make sure we provide a fresh take on SILENT HILL.”
It's not just Hinako’s attacks taking a big swing – as much like its underdog heroine, KONAMI has entrusted the fate of SILENT HILL f to relative newcomers. Formed in 2017 by a team of games industry veterans, NeoBards swiftly established themselves as a reliable port and support studio, working with Capcom on Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster and Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection and playing a supporting role on Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Yet SILENT HILL f is their first big-budget game as a lead developer – and with an 86 score on Metacritic as of writing, it looks like this collaboration has paid off.

“As the first traditional horror game developed at NeoBards, we are humbled by both the incredible positive and critical feedback, and strive to carry these lessons in our hearts for the future,” said Yang, following the game’s pre-release reviews. “We especially thank KONAMI for trusting in us to help contribute to such a legendary series.”
It's a sentiment shared by Okamoto, who joined KONAMI as SILENT HILL’s custodian in 2019. Now, six years later, the resurrection of SILENT HILL has been beyond many fans' wildest dreams.

“We’re very pleased to be where we are, and how fans have responded,” says Okamoto with a smile, “We could have just launched a remake, and that would definitely bring in some old-time fans, and that could have been the extent of it. Instead, what I wanted to focus on was a more long-term vision. I wanted to make this not just a one-off opportunity, but a linear progression where you have more things coming down the line. Which is why, three years ago, I had the opportunity to announce multiple projects."

More recently, we've teased the idea of a SILENT HILL 1 remake. So I think fans now have more trust that SILENT HILL is not just back, but that things will keep coming."