So beautiful and disgusting that you want to escape as soon as possible. Impressions after 4 hours of Silent Hill f

Silent Hill f is being developed by the Taiwanese studio NeoBards Entertainment. A studio, that practically has no major previous achievements - nothing that could vouch for them - yet after about 4 hours with the game, I had the impression as if I was dealing with a title from a fairly experienced developer, who had already worked on the Silent Hill series. Atmosphere, anxiety, fear, regret, incredibly and even caricaturally strange characters are present here, which fans will definitely appreciate, but there are also strange design decisions that forced me to avoid certain things.

That's not how you spell "Silent Hill"

Silent Hill f takes us on a trip to Japan in the 60s of the last century, to the small town of Ebisugaoka. There we meet Hinako, a high school student with serious problems - one of them is a lack of acceptance in her family and a feeling of alienation. When the player takes control over her, she is just running away from home to meet her peers and find some understanding among them. Soon a sinister fog and the flowers of the red spider lily appear, forcing everyone to flee. This is when the horror begins.

Ebisugaoka is a dense city, full of narrow passages and extremely claustrophobic streets. This has a significant importance, for example during a fight, because we have to position Hinako in such a way that our weapon does not hit a wall or some railing, which has happened to me more than once. Usually such a mistake cost me the loss of most of my health bar, but more on that in a moment. The passages and all sorts of shortcuts have been well designed, but it's also easy to get lost in them, which further increases anxiety. For fans of the series, it will be no news that we will often revisit paths we have already taken, although each time they will visually differ drastically from each other. The city itself enchants with details and a sense of desolation, incredibly unsettling even before the fog appears.

I played the demo on the base PS5, in performance mode, and while the buildings and interiors looked very good, unfortunately the textures were not fully loading in some places. It's probably a very small issue that will be fixed before the release. Fortunately, I didn't experience any frame drops, which could be significant during a fight.

Silent Souls

Right, the combat, something I have the most problems with in the new Silent Hill. Let's start with the fact that the demo offered a choice of two difficulty levels: story and balanced. At first, I thought that a balanced level must mean "normal", but that's not the case at all. Silent Hill f at this difficulty level is one of the hardest games I've ever played - and I have experience in soulslikes and other games that are generally considered challenging. There is a lot of fighting here, and the monsters, whose design and unexpected movements are as impressive as they are disturbing, inflict massive damage. Two mistakes during a fight often mean that we will soon see a "game over" screen.

We have a light and heavy attack at our disposal. Strong blows stun enemies and give us a moment to inflict greater damage, but we need to know exactly when we can hit harder, because Hinako has a stamina bar and each hit dealt to the enemy is a significant cost that we must manage wisely - and decide on the fly whether we want to attack, or dodge (with an animation that the Hunter from Bloodborne would not be ashamed of). However, if we completely deplete the stamina bar during the fight, we should expect really big trouble.

My biggest problem with the combat comes from the fact that opponents do not react to our blows, which can give the impression that we are hitting a wall. Even though most of the opponents I've met are dolls, not living creatures, but I was missing the feeling here that I'm fighting an opponent who feels something. During my adventure with Silent Hill 2 Remake, sometimes I just felt sorry for my enemies because of the way they behaved and the sounds they made when they were getting hurt. You won't find that in Silent Hill f. And that's why I often didn't even want to fight, I preferred to simply avoid the opponents; the game itself didn't punish me for such a choice either.

During the fight, we can also perform counterattacks and special attacks, depending on the type of weapon we are currently wielding. Counters involve the enemies performing visually signaled strikes at certain moments - they simply light up. When that happens, we have a chance to launch a counterattack that will stun our enemy and give us time to attack. My main strategy was just waiting for the moment when I could use a counterattack - it was simply very powerful and satisfying. The mechanic that is associated with performing special attacks is sanity. This is another, third bar next to health and stamina, which you need to pay attention to. It works in the following way: this bar burns out like a fuse when Hinako is scared or during attacks of some enemies, and when it burns out, we start to lose life. But we can also use it to enter focus mode and perform a special attack; it came in particularly handy during the confrontation with the main boss of the demo, whom I fought using a naginata. This fight made me realize the most that the developers were inspired by soulslike games.

Hinako can use not only naginatas, but also sickles, hammers, knives, gas pipes, and probably many other weapons that I didn't get a chance to see. We can carry three weapons in our equipment at the same time, which wear out after some use. You can repair them, but I admit that I did it rarely, because it was quite easy to come across a new weapon. I would also like to add that I did not come across any firearms, which somewhat fits into the time and the setting. During the gameplay, I came across altars that serve as save points and offer several other options - for example, the possibility of exchanging items we found for a special currency: faith. With it, and one more item, we can increase Hinako's health, stamina, or sanity bar. While exploring, you can also come across Omamori, a talisman that provides a specific perk; I happened to find one that increased the speed of charging focus.

Overcoming nightmares

Silent Hill f brilliantly builds tension and unease, without resorting to jump scares, but rather with sound and suggestive imagery. It combines beauty with such disgust that you want to escape from Ebisugaoki as soon as possible. You can see the influences of Junji Ito's work here. Of course, all of this is thematically connected with the main motif, because regret and lack of acceptance - common problems in Japanese society - play the main role here. I have actually grown fond of Hinako during these 4 hours, and I even started to sympathize with her.

An important element of every game in the Silent Hill series are also puzzles, which of course are not missing in the work of NeoBards Entertainment. These puzzles are not particularly demanding, but they can deliberately confuse, for example by rewarding us for their solution with a key that absolutely does not fit the obvious doors. In such moments, I had to think and figure things out. The game also didn't treat me like an idiot and didn't make Hinako repeat hints over and over again.

Despite my complaints about the combat, and especially the lack of satisfying feedback, I really would like to see Hinako's story through to the end. A small town, puzzles, and above all, nightmares that the main heroine struggles with, give an image of Silent Hill with potential, a game that is aware of what this series is about - although at the same time it wants to fit a bit too much into the 2025 gameplay trends.

Silent Hill f

September 25, 2025

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