Silent Hill f Returns the Series To What It Always Should Have Been: An Anthology

By Elijah Gonzalez | October 17, 2025 | 2:00pm

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Silent Hill f Returns the Series To What It Always Should Have Been: An Anthology

When Silent Hill 2 was released in 2001, it etched many of the series’ defining qualities into stone, building on its predecessor while also reintroducing several key elements. It doubled down on a particular brand of psychological horror, which uses monsters as stand-ins for the protagonist’s specific fears, traumas, and anxieties. It delivered another otherworldly soundtrack from Akira Yamaoka that acted as a gateway into these characters’ suffering. And of course, it brought back this town’s signature rolling fog, which obscures future nightmares waiting to burst from the haze.

However, while Silent Hill 2 has a lot in common with its predecessor in terms of both its survival horror gameplay, disquieting tone, and its broad premise—people lured to a sleepy New England town only to find their worst fears made flesh—as far as sequels go, it’s sort of doing its own thing. It largely abandoned the plot specifics of the previous game, with a new protagonist and little to no mention of the enigmatic cult, The Order, which would become a constant throughout much of the rest of the series. Yamaoka’s soundtrack was frightening, but it didn’t seek to emulate the churning industrial noise of its predecessor. James was searching for someone like Harry Mason was before him, but instead of being driven by an unbreakable familial bond, he’s pushed on by something much darker. Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2 are bound by a number of threads, but ultimately, they spin their own unique yarns.

And then, the rest of the Silent Hill games came out. While Silent Hill 3 is beloved by many, it’s a fairly direct continuation of the first game, following a character born in that title’s true ending. Silent Hill 4 is a bit more disconnected in some ways, but even more referential in others, with its protagonist and antagonist being minor characters referenced in the margins of those previous games—the game’s big bad is a random serial killer mentioned in Silent Hill 2’s newspaper clippings. And most of all, going forward, the series would become entirely obsessed with the enigmatic particulars of the original game’s doomsday cult.

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When development changed hands from Team Silent to the many other studios Konami brought in to chase the original games’ fleeting magic, this is when the self-referential nostalgia and reverence for lore became unbearable. Eventually, it culminated in Silent Hill: Homecoming infamously bringing back Pyramid Head, the iconic nemesis written specifically to reflect James Sunderland’s tortured subconscious, in the most bald-faced nostalgia play the sinking series had made yet. The blatant recycling of that foe in particular eventually caused its creator, Masahiro Ito, to write, “I wish I hadn’t designed fxxkin Pyramid Head” on social media.

In short, Silent Hill went the way most series do eventually, with its past eventually becoming its future as it became trapped in a maze of rehashed plot points: referencing pre-made lore and existing signifiers became more important than trying anything new. It’s part of what killed the series.

But thankfully, Silent Hill didn’t stay dead, and eventually, it got the chance to do something fresh again with this year’s excellent Silent Hill f. Set in Japan instead of the United States, the game has very little direct plot or lore overlap with its predecessors, maintaining only what’s necessary. Namely, it keeps those three pillars mentioned earlier: psychological horror with a focus on symbolism, a chilling soundtrack from Akira Yamaoka, and lots of fog. Much like Silent Hill 2, it acts more like the next installment in an anthology series than a direct sequel, reinventing instead of regurgitating. It’s little surprise, then, that it may be the best game in the series since that particular all-timer.

Silent Hill f follows Hinako, a high schooler living in the rural Japanese village of Ebisugaoka in the ‘60s. While different on the outside, we come to find that this place is very much our protagonist’s equivalent of Silent Hill, a hell tailored to her specific woes. As in series tradition, virtually every creature has a specific symbolic purpose (it’s very funny that the use of literary devices has become a central “feature” for the series when in reality this is just a quality of good writing, but hey, I’m definitely not complaining).

There are the feminine, puppet-like Kashimashi, a stand-in for Hinako’s fears of losing her agency in a strictly patriarchal society that routinely sidelines women and treats them like dolls. There are walking lumps of flesh wielding giant blades, creatures that represent both toxic masculine rage in general and a very specific familial trauma. A recurring motif among many of these monsters, including the shiromuku-wearing fog beast that hounds Hinako throughout the game, is that they lack faces: just like how Hinako fears losing her identity due to the pivotal choice that looms over the narrative, the monsters that hound her have lost any sense of self.

We slowly learn the specifics of this setting and the meaning of this imagery, as we become intimately familiar with every corner of Ebisugaoka. Its architecture and particulars capture the specifics of this time and place, a backdrop that is integral to a story about the horrors borne from a culture of misogyny and forced conformity. This particular setting isn’t just important, but positively integral to the story being told here.

We also learn this town’s backstory as we dig deeper: it’s heavily implied that it was a hidden haven for the disgraced Taira clan, a real-life ruling family whose downfall was dramatized in the famous Japanese epic, The Tale of the Heike. This explains both why this community is so isolated and why its denizens have long held a tradition of taking special care of their tools, as they were forced to be self-sufficient to survive in hiding. It’s no mistake that, in terms of gameplay, there’s a heavy emphasis on taking care of your weapons, which degrade with use, something that’s new for this installment. We learn how this tradition of taking care of your things evolved into a local religion, one that eventually melded with another rival belief system—I won’t spoil the specifics, but this all ends up becoming important as you learn the whole truth of what is very literally “happening” to this place amid the metaphors and fog.

I bring all this up because none of these specific elements are present in previous entries in the series; they all take place in America, and I guarantee that James Sunderland has not read The Tale of the Heike. In plucking us from the US of A and transplanting us to an entirely different historical period with its own belief structure and religion, we’re forced to rediscover the logic of our surroundings, where the Order and Red Pyramid Thing are nowhere to be found. This process of discovering the metaphysics of how Silent Hill works and what the hell is going on more broadly are integral to what made the first two games in the series so interesting. It’s something that was largely lost as these games settled into the familiar, and the answers to a given problem usually had to do with the same old cult being up to no good.

Strangely enough, though, Silent Hill f manages to do this while actually still having a lot in common with the original game: both feature a red medicine (which is implied to literally be derived from the same exact Claudia flower) that ties into the specifics of how Silent Hill manifests, and both prominently feature gods and higher powers.

But in changing its setting, finding new symbols, and altering what its central character is after, Silent Hill f makes all of this feel fresh and new. Its setting, a rural community in 1960s Japan, is leveraged to tell a deeply personal story about the anxieties and unfair gender essentialist expectations that Hinako is forced to endure as a woman, as the narrative leverages these cultural particulars to hammer home the horror of her circumstances. It’s all specific and tailored to a personal journey where marriage is used as a symbol of cultural obedience, as the forces of traditionalism (i.e., literal gods) rush our heroine to the “death” of her old self. It’s a new story told from a new perspective.

And it’s only able to be that because writer Ryukishi07 and NeoBards Entertainment were given the leverage to tell a tale that wasn’t about the Masons, or the Order, or even the town in the series’ title, but instead about a different community in a different decade altogether. And in doing so, the game leaves its own mark while still retaining the core essence of what makes Silent Hill what it is.

On the one hand, I’m not sure I expect the success of Silent Hill f to move the needle on how games, or how the media landscape in general, tends to treat sequels; that is, as a means to reheat the same meal. This series can only pull it off because Silent Hill 2 was so dang good that it overrode that “bad experience with a high school English teacher” that seems to convince so many people that stories don’t have themes and that “it’s not that deep, bro.” And even in Silent Hill’s case, that magic only lasted two games before it veered off into a self-referential ouroboros of cultists and repeated imagery. But at least, the series has finally come back home.

In an interview with IGN Japan, series producer Motoi Okamoto said that they plan on continuing to mix things up with the series going forward, and that they don’t want every game to be exactly like Silent Hill f or previous installments. “We want to keep experimenting and be ambitious, both in terms of gameplay design and storytelling.” Basically, it’s unclear what the future holds. I couldn’t be more excited for that to be the case.

Elijah Gonzalez is an associate editor for Endless Mode. In addition to playing the latest, he also loves anime, movies, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Bluesky @elijahgonzalez.bsky.social.