Is It Accurate to Call Silent Hill f a “Soulslike”?

By Grace Benfell | October 2, 2025 | 2:45pm

Video Games Features silent hill f

Is It Accurate to Call Silent Hill f a “Soulslike”?

Since Dark Souls altered the entire video game market in 2011, referring to something as “like Dark Souls” has become a foundational cliché of games criticism. As the genre has become further entrenched as a mainstream staple (encoded with the clumsy nomenclature Soulslike), this tendency has now hardened. It’s been used to describe games as diverse as Jedi: Fallen Order, Hollow Knight, and now Silent Hill f. Reviews from GameSpot, TheGamer, and IGN make at least passing mentions of “soulslikes” and the term has shaped more casual discussions of the game. Fundamentally, this shorthand relies on a slight and shallow idea of what a “soulslike” is and an urge to generalize how Silent Hill f works (and how it makes meaning) in detail. In fairness, more than a few reviews disregard the comparison or don’t mention it at all. But no reviews I’ve read dig into the comparison, exploring its validity or even just where it comes from. So let’s be specific and clinical. In what ways does Silent Hill f resembles a soulslike? How it is different? And if it isn’t a soulslike, what it is?

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Several hallmarks of the soulslike can be found in Silent Hill f. Protagonist Hinako can attack in two ways, light and heavy, mapped by default to the right bumber and trigger respectively. You can’t cancel attacks if you realize you’ve made a mistake; every button press locks you into an animation. Attacking, dodging, and running take chunks out of a stamina bar, and if you run out, you’ll have to wait until it charges before you can act again. The world is dotted with shrines, where you can spend currency to improve your stats and sell items. And hitting a button at the right time during an enemy’s attack can result in an ultra-effective attack.

Silent Hill f diverges from the soulslike formula in several crucial ways, though. The game autosaves frequently; you will not always be teleported back to the shrines upon death. Enemies don’t drop currency or items when you kill them. You don’t lose anything when you die except forward progress. Defeated enemies don’t respawn when you rest at a checkpoint. There is no “default” healing item which you can upgrade, and you must find all healing items out in the world. You need an additional item to upgrade your stats, as the main currency is not enough on its own. Your inventory is limited, and you cannot carry everything all at once. And weapons degrade with every attack, eventually breaking.

It’s safe to say, given these points, that the comparison doesn’t come from nowhere. You can even frame Dark Souls and Silent Hill as having a shared linage. From Software’s oeuvre since Demon’s Souls has always had horror elements. The games rely on some level of resource management. In both survival horror and From’s action RPGs, enemies are powerful and combat should sometimes be avoided. However, this eludes a fundamental difference between the two designs: in Dark Souls, you are meant to feel powerful.

This is best illustrated by the game’s fundamental RPG nature. Dark Souls is expressive. You pick a class, find more powerful armors, unlock the new magic and abilities of your choice. You have a great deal of freedom in how your character develops and can even change your strategy to combat an especially difficult boss. In contrast, Silent Hill f’s improvements serve entirely as ways of lowering the margins of error. You can’t push Hinako into different builds or specialize in the use of specific weapons. You can only make her able to dodge one more time before her stamina depletes or boost her health or sanity so that she can withstand a powerful blow. Though it shares some structural similarities with a Souls game, it serves the same purpose any such upgrades would in other survival horror games.

The designation of “soulslike” has always leaned harder on the genre’s action elements. Even the “git gud” framework of its fan culture can hinge on a narrow interpretation of the best way to play, namely using mostly light attacks and dodge rolls to vanquish enemies. A game like Jedi: Fallen Order cannot seriously be described as an RPG. But because it has light and heavy attacks, re-spawning enemies, and an upgradable healing item, the comparison prevails. (For the record, the Jedi games most resemble the series of Tomb Raider reboots). Dark Souls offers ample means of expression and a ready-built way of feeling powerful. These are things that Silent Hill has never offered.

In the original four Silent Hill games, fighting is a chore. Without a firearm, enemies take many hits to bring down. If you want to conserve ammo, you will have to spend a lot of your time bashing in heads. Furthermore, it is difficult (though not impossible) to dodge attacks. The controls made turning laborious and there was no dedicated button for getting away quickly from enemies. Fighting an enemy meant you were (most likely) locked in to taking damage. It is a key part of Silent Hill that it feels grueling to fight. You cannot move with efficiency or grace. You must wade through corpses to get to the end.

Silent Hill f does take a different tack. At first glance, it is more directly an action game. You can regain stamina by dodging at the right time and swiftly dispatch foes with good timing. Hinako can quickly get distance from foes to heal. However, more than a little of the original games’ brutal DNA is present. Like past Silent Hills, combat is arduous, fraught, and costly. In one baffling moment in IGN‘s review, Tristan Oglive points out that “winning a battle in Silent Hill f means likely losing some of your health bar and definitely doing some damage to your annoyingly brittle weapons.” This is by design. When combat is difficult and wins you nothing, you are more likely to be scared at the prospect of it and to avoid it when it comes up. But the game’s narrow corridors and alleyways will lock you in. That tension, between the narrowing possibility space of the level design and the certainty of harm, is unnerving.

In Dark Souls, you have ample means of mitigating that tension. In Silent Hill f, you don’t. Whatever the superficial similarities, that is a gulf wide enough to encompass genre itself. And so it’s worth taking Silent Hill f on its own terms, and not forcing inelegant comparisons upon it.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.