Halloween 2025: Silent Hill f

Written by Jonathan Wojcik



  Silent Hill never did stop being one of the most influential names in horror gaming...not even after it appeared all but dead by the middle of the 2010's, with only seven or eight games at the time and only three or four that anybody really liked. For a long time, the poor battered property's last gasp had been pachinko machines, followed by 2015's infamous Silent Hills; a playable teaser for a project that would have brought together Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del toro before Konami inexplicably pulled the plug. That was the same year I spent a Halloween season reviewing almost each and every monster from almost each and every Silent Hill title at the time, which unfortunately meant leaving off on the low note that was Silent Hill: Downpour.


...But ten years later, Silent Hill has risen from the ashes with multiple new games that include an excellent remake of Silent Hill 2, a short game entitled The Short Message and the wildly anticipated Silent Hill f; a brand new, full length entry that actually leaves behind the titular town of Silent Hill to tell a story set in rural Japan. What's more, Silent Hill f does something I always thought the series should have done from the get-go: we knew as of Silent Hill 2 that everyone experiences the Silent Hill "Phenomena" in their own unique way, but game after game kept going back to the same aesthetics of a rusty metal hellscape. Now, at long last, we get a "Silent Hill" with a bit more of its own aesthetic identity, through the eyes of a teenage girl, Hinako.

   What is Hinako's personal "Silent Hill" like? And why? Let's explore that together here, monster by monster!



THE FLORA

  First, we'll have to talk about what actually replaces that "rusty metal hellscape" aesthetic. In this Silent Hill, the encroachment of the alternate nightmare-reality is represented by intensely crimson botanical biomass that includes blood red spider lilies, ivy, vines, mosses, blobs of pulsating pinkish flesh and waving, meaty roots. There's no official term for this that I'm aware of, an it's not officially acknowledged as an "enemy" or "monster," but you'll encounter encumbering, damaging patches of the roots as a regular hazard, and there are chase sequences in which you'll have to run from the rapid overgrowth or be ensnared and infested to death instantly.

   This is a manifestation of a living thing, and it is hostile. That's 100% a monster! The first monster in the game and the most important throughout!



KASHIMASHI

  ...But I suppose this is the game's first "enemy," in the traditional sense; a jointed lady mannequins just a bit too leathery and too bloody to be made out of plastic. The eyes are also completely covered over by scar tissue, there's a serene smile, long whispy hair and massive, bulging hip joints that look a lot like oversized butt cheeks. I guess some would say they're actually fairly "generic" as Silent Hill enemies, but it's their animation that really gives them personality, bent backwards as they stagger around in contorted poses as though jerked around by the strings of some careless puppeteer. Their faces can also fall off, like masks, revealing a pulsing honeycomb of flesh underneath, and you'll find their discarded faces already strewn about some of the scenery.

There are more variations on the Kashimashi as you progress further, including some bloodier, more scarred, or completely overgrown with floral material. Hinako's in-game journal calls attention to the brutal look of the Kashimashi's various wounds, and posits that they're driven to hurt her the same way they've been hurt.

   She herself grapples with a past full of domestic abuse by her father, sexist treatment by older men and betrayal from her friends, but her own notes and journals show an all too common state of denialism; she doesn't want to think of herself as a victim (who does?) and views other victims with something between pity and revulsion; something ugly and damaged that she refuses to believe she has anything in common with. The Kashimashi is a caricature of a reflection that she doesn't want to face, but it seems the otherworld is determined to throw that reflection in front of her, literally shoving it screaming into her face, as many times as it takes for her to accept her reality.

And you will definitely, definitely get tired of fighting these things.



AYAKAKASHI

  These are uncannily life-like "scarecrows" resembling different students from Hinako's school. Their gimmick is that they stand deathly still, and not all of them are "alive," but if they are, they'll move when you aren't looking and attack when they're close enough. Obviously there's a lot of horror movie scare factor to these, but they're physically just a reskinning of the Kashimashi, and they're lacking that any "creature factor" that feels special to Silent Hill; you could have told me these were from just about any old horror game with any old ghastlies or ghosties in it.

  I'd have improved these by ensuring they can't possibly just be human bodies, maybe just by having them distort more as they move, their heads stretching and sagging like they're stuffed with something soft, their bodies deflating postmortem as they ooze weird fluids.



ARA-ABARE

  Now THIS is more of a Silent Hill Creature. A huge, blobby humanoid lump of cancerous meat with no discernible head, erupting all over with various flowers that only evoke bursting pustules in this unnatural context. The perfectly normal, relatively tiny human feet are a nice touch, and there appears to be a giant octopus tentacle wrapped around one arm, though it's difficult to tell if it isn't just a strip of gum tissue with human teeth, rather than suckers. It can, of course, stretch its boneless tentacle arm to grab you from a distance, and its other arm carries a gigantic knife!

  Ara-Abare has one more fun surprise, too; a gigantic mouth in its stomach! I'm glad they went with a more human-like tongue and blocky teeth, rather than a more predatory or alien maw. It's both goofier and creepier this way, more in line with the game's yokai motifs.   Though it looks like it's smiling at most angles, this monster's defining personality trait is supposed to be blind rage. Literally, since I'm pretty sure it loses track of you if you're still and quiet enough. There's just a handful of them in the whole game, rarely more than one at a time in a large area, and it's usually possible to avoid them without fighting, though you'll eventually have to defeat a boss version representing your violent, alcoholic father. This particular specimen is accompanied by a kashimashi-like manifestation of your mother, and both of them will speak throughout the battle to verbally demean and guilt-trip their daughter.   It's clear, by then, that Ara-Abare always represented your father's rage, but it still feels a little cheap that such an important confrontation is represented by an enemy you've already encountered so unceremoniously. Maybe they could have built up to it a bit more dramatically, framed this as a more unique monster you cross paths with under tenser circumstances, rather than a lumbering beast you can usually run right past while you're out hunting for all those damnable keys.

Sometimes that feels like the real villain of these kinds of games. Keys I mean. Bastards.



KOTOYUKI

  We're looking at entities in roughly their order of introduction, and here's where "F" really veers off in a different direction than previous installments, as Hinako experiences what are perhaps several more layers of Silent Hillitude than her predecessors. First there's the foggy and largely empty version of her hometown, which is just what we expect from Silent Hill. Then there's the more nightmarish, more monster-riddled, flower-choked landscape that serves the same role as the rot and oxidization we crawled through as James, Heather and so many others. But at key points in her journey, Hinako loses consciousness and awakens in more of a Japanese fairy-tale environment; a beautiful Eastern style palace during what seems a lot like a perpetual Obon festival.   This is where Hinako meets Kotoyuki, a silver-haired man with glowing canine eyes behind his fox mask who guides Hinako through various trials with an initially ambiguous purpose. Some of you are reading this with only cursory knowledge of Silent Hill as a series, so let me clarify that no, a magical kitsune boyfriend is not something anybody expected to see in a Silent Hill game. More thoughts on that later.


THE DOLL

  I'm counting basically every entity manifested by the "phenomenon" as a "monster" here, and you'll eventually see why this little doll qualifies anyway. You'll encounter it here and there near scribbled warnings, as though it scratched them into surfaces itself when you weren't looking, and above all, it doesn't seem to want Hinako to listen to her fox boyfriend.



HARAI

  These are the main enemies of the Japanese palace-world, and...a bit repetitive, unfortunately, though there is a reason that these are basically another dressed-up Kashimashi, this time with greyer skin, a serene white mask with tangly, twiggy hair, and legs that taper into blades instead of feet. They're seemingly the same sort of monster manifesting into a different reality, one where they represent something a little different, apparently the conflict between Hinako's childhood innocence and her adulthood.



KAMUGARA

  Another that's unfortunately a bit bland in my book, a corpsey man with shackles and chains and crooked iron nails impaled through his limbs and a ripped-open chest and a face that's been scooped out into one big, blackened cavity. It's another that could have been a generic "undead" in anything from Dark Souls to Resident Evil. Far too human and far too "ferocious" to convey the sort of "what the hell IS that?" of series darlings like the Lying Figure or the Closer. They seem to represent people suffering divine punishment, which ties in to the otherworld's connection to ancient gods and to Hinako's struggle against what is traditionally demanded of her.



IROHIHI

  This monster uses the Kamugara as its base, but they're evidently not meant to be all that related. It's certainly a step up, in any case; the stomach is big and bloated, and the arms are rancid with some of that red vegetation. The head is like a constantly grinning old man, but everything from the upper jaw on up has been replaced with a burst of luminous red and yellow tendrils, like an otherworldly flower blossom, and then there's the tongue. An awful, swollen, bulbous thing that permanently dangles from the mouth, tipped with a fringe of hairy red cilia.

  The floppy, phallic quality to that tongue is just as intentional as you might have been hoping it wasn't; this monster represents the way Hinako feels objectified by older men, memories of being leered at or harassed. It attacks, unfortunately, by licking all over your face like an overly friendly dog, and if she survives, because of course that also damages you, Hinako will even take a second to wipe the grody monster spit off her mouth.

  It's all perhaps a bit over the top, completely lacking in subtlety, and it looks more like something out of Bloodborne, but the skeeviness angle makes this one more interesting than just another murderous ghoulie, which is a little more in line with the psychological horror Silent Hill is ostensibly all about. The first one in the game even stalks you for quite some time before actually being seen, but you'll hear it from somewhere, just before it runs off at the last moment. You'll also find disturbing journals written by what sounds like a serial killer, talking about one of his captives as if he loves her and intends to protect her from something.

It's important to point out, too, that this enemy's appearance lifts directly from the hungry "ghosts" in Buddhism; people who lived a life of selfishness or vice, though they aren't truly "ghosts" or "spirits" in an "afterlife;" they're traditionally understood to have reincarnated into an alternate living world, overlaying our own, where they suffer from perpetual famine and thirst until their sins are cleansed and their next incarnation is, hopefully, a better one.



OI-OMOI

  This is easily my favorite, definitely the breakout star of the F-Bestiary; Oi-omoi stands atop two maneqquin legs with a cute little skirt and shoes, but from the waist up it's nothing but a jumbled mass of plastic doll arms and doll heads with the same black bob cut, arranged in kind of a Christmas-tree shape. What I love about this one isn't just a weird design, though, but a more nuanced personality than the mindless hostility of its fellow manifestations. Oi-omoi hops and skips around like a carefree child, more or less minding its own business, only really swiping at you defensively. It wouldn't be a problem at all if it didn't also barf so much...and wherever it barfs, another patch of those flesh-boring red vines spring up instantly!

  I love when any video game monster poses a more interesting problem than just trying to kill you, and I love them most of all in horror games, where they can really break up the monotony. Frankly, every horror game should have some less aggressive or even totally unaggressive monsters. Monsters that make you feel a little worse when you finally have to cave their little heads in.

  There's a variation on the Oi-omoi, too. It's treated as a different monster, with its own journal entry, but of course it's clearly built on the same skeleton and this one even behaves exactly the same, as near as I can tell. It's by far the most disturbing looking being in F or out of many Silent Hill installments, swapping the doll parts for a grisly mass of diseased pinkish tissue and around a dozen different human heads. These heads are almost perfectly normal, neither distorted into monsters nor decaying like corpses, which makes them all the more distressing half-buried in the surrounding cystic flesh. All have their eyes closed, and all have their mouths covered. This is of course the version encountered more in Hinako's hometown, while the "cleaner" plastic doll version is encountered more in the dream-palace. I do like how the same monsters take nastier, fleshier forms outside the more idealized fantasy realm.


DRUMMING MONSTER

  Another example of this is the dream palace counterpart to Ara-Abare. Its official name isn't known, but it looks like a mass of gnarled wood and tree roots entangled around old drums, including one massive drum in its toothless but root-fringed mouth. As it drums, puppet strings force nearby enemies to move in tune with the beat, arguably making them more predictable and a bit easier to fight, so while the Ara-abare represents the temperamental violence of men like Hinako's father, this version apparently represents their controlling, dominant presence. This is all very interesting and cool to know, but unfortunately the combat in-game was just chaotic enough that we never, ever noticed the drum beat gimmick or the puppet strings.


BIRTHING MONSTER

   ...Can I even really show this? I mean, a major game shows this, you can see it in any video or walkthrough guide, so, I guess we're cool enough as a society now that it's okay to put a huge mountain of jiggling monstrous breasts in a major studio video game. Neat! This is one enemy that really, truly makes you think "Silent Hill" even in a vacuum. This positively UNWHOLESOME beast consists of a humanoid lying on her back, her face ingrown into a malformed toothless orifice, and her body bloated into a huge berry-like mass of what equally evoke many swollen breasts and many pregnant bellies that cascade down to the ground, the largest of which will actually spurt forth fleshy globs that hatch into other enemy types. EUGH!! AUGH!!! The whole figure crawls around on multiple arms and legs, and there seems to be an entire second body under the first, painfully clutching at a head that droops like a meaty, floppy stalagmite. I reiterate, AUGH!!! That is all supremely unseemly. Another that throws any subtlety out the window, yes, but not all that much moreso than Silent Hill 2's Abstract Daddy, really.

  Hinako grew up witnessing the utter misery of her own mother, and as we learn a little after this point in the game, she was also pressured by her father to agree to an arranged marriage. No wonder this monster is both perpetually pregnant and faceless; it's a mad caricature of her worst possible future, losing all autonomy, identity and purpose other than to continue a bloodline.


SAKUKO MONSTER

  The first few bosses in the game are distortions of Hinako's closest friends, who...honestly could have been fleshed out a little bit more. I still don't really have their personalities down, or exactly what it was they did to all end up secretly hating one another. This friend group consisted of one guy and three girls who all kind of wanted said guy, so we get a good enough idea, but I feel like we still aren't given enough detail.

  Sakuko is the friend with the sweetest exterior personality, and in fact had a childhood dream of owning a candy store, though she eventually began training to become a shrine maiden, or something like that. In typical Silent Hill fashion, she isn't really present in Hinako's journey, but rather an otherworldly imitation of her that eventually reveals its true nature. This mostly just gives her a corpse-like appearance, but her head tilts back and her mouth stretches open into a dark orifice lined with many centipede-like legs. I do like the running motif of faces becoming empty holes or pits in Hinako's "otherworld," representing the fear of losing one's identity or personhood.

   Back in Silent Hill 2, James Sunderland's monsters were the opposite kind of "faceless," all their orifices and features covered over and suffocated. This symbolized the actions that lead to James's overwhelming guilt, but faceless monsters became an ongoing theme in subsequent games without any special context. This time, it's a different esthetic with a different rationale, like every entry should have aimed for.


RINKO MONSTER

     Hinako's other jealous friend was also aiming to become a priestess, because there kind of weren't that many different aspirations a girl could hope for in small-town 1960's Japan that wouldn't disappoint their parents. In False Rinko's Monster Mode, the face is caving in as it melts down into dripping lava, her robes encrusted with an armor-like layer of congealed half-molten rock. Or maybe the idea is that she's like a waxy human candle?

   I'm a little split on how I feel about these boss designs. They're in some ways subtler than the weirder creatures of previous titles, but in other ways they're more horror-movie outrageous, if you get what I mean? They still have a surreal quality, for sure, but edgier and more ferocious than the haunting, alien properties of my old favorites. It's a matter of personal preference, but I am still glad they did something different, and I hope the next core title will be even more different.


FOX HINAKO

  As Hinako advances through the trials of the dream world, it becomes increasingly clear that she's being prepped as fox boy's bride; a darker, escapist distortion of the marriage arranged for her in the real world. In a series of grisly rituals, the dream form of Hinako saws off her own arm, her back is seared with an enormous brand, and she finally skins her own face, all instantly the three most brutal things ever depicted in this very series.

  But don't worry! She gets a new face in the form of a fox mask, just like her dreamboat's...and a new arm, of course. A giant, grey-furred werewolf-esque fox-monster arm, obviously, which replaces her dreamworld weapons and turns combat from a difficult, tedious slog into admittedly a much more fun and satisfying bloodbath.

  This is much, much, much more fantastical, more action-adventure and more out-there than anything previously in Silent Hill, and tends to be a point at which the game loses some devoted fans. It is only in the deeper dream-world, though, and it all makes sense in context, honest.

  By the time "Hinako" takes this form, however, she's no longer the same person as the one we control in the quasi-waking world, but has seemingly split off into a separate entity with its own desires. Depending on your in-game actions, the two Hinako may either team up or fight one another.


TSUKUMOGAMI

  This is just one of a few possible final bosses, a multi-armed godlike figure with four human faces flanking one red-skinned oni face in a mane of white hair. This is arguably the game's second most extreme deviation from the "silent hill style," but not much moreso than the Baphomet-like fantasy devil that served as final boss in the very first game. The real focus of this monster is the fact that it manifest's Hinako's childhood friend Shu as though he's trapped in its torso or wrapped up in its robe with it, Shu being that boy she felt she had such a deep connection with.

  Their special little bond goes back to when they were so small, they played "space wars" together, a secret imagination game Shu devised out of his favorite sci-fi comics. As they grew too old to run around and pretend they were fighting aliens, Hinako grappled with the question of what exactly she meant to her childhood friend, whether he still saw her as just a child he played games with or as someone entering adulthood alongside him. I do notice that the blue and red, angular paint on this boss's limbs is a similar color scheme to his old toy raygun, as well as a robot on the cover of his favorite comic book:

  A tsukumogami, as you might know, is also a yokai animated from beloved man-made objects, and you can piece together that some entities represented as tsukumogami and doll-like objects are basically at war with the entities represented by foxes, like Kotoyuki, who does after all provide Hinako with weapons and training to massacre the mannequin-like monsters of the dream realm.

  During one of the game's endings, you'll even face the same boss with the doll in its center, while you're jerked between this battle and the battle against....


KYUBI

  For some endings of the game, both dream-Hinako and Kotoyuki agree that they don't want to be married, which anger's Kotoyuki's fox-god father, who demands the continuation of their bloodline, and attacks in the form of a giant, withered looking many-tailed fox. I do like the sort of "bad taxidermy" effect of the design, even if this is another monster that looks more "Elden Ring." Neither he nor the doll-being are on anyone's side but their own, each representing decisions made for Hinako by others without her consent.


SHIROMUKU

  Finally, we have what may be the most meaningful monster in the game. We first encounter this entity when it stalks Hinako through encroaching fog in a number of chase sequences, unseen except for the same monstrous arm Hinako will receive in the dream palace. When finally revealed in two possible boss battles, it takes the form of a towering bride with a huge, circular white headdress and the same "sliced off" face as some of the Kashimashi. It represents everything Hinako is most terrified of, the imposing authority of tradition and ancestry that threatens to rob her of freedom for the rest of her life, and it's also the final form Fox Hinako will take if she submits to the will of the fox gods.

  In the game's default ending, and my favorite ending to be honest, Hinako completely snaps on her wedding day, slaughters her would-be husband and both of her parents. The entire journey of her fox-self basically builds up to this, her deepest wishes for a life of her own manifesting as an alternate persona that fully takes control and mercilessly punishes those responsible for her social captivity, traumatic abuse and emotional suffocation.

  ...Which, like the events of the entire game in most of our possible endings, was also triggered by "medicine" given to Hinako by none other than her childhood friend Shu. These were not legitimate, peer-reviewed pharmaceutical products, but his very own concoction as the son of pharmacologists, formulated from toxic herbs to help with "mental clarity."

  Shu's journals tell us that these pills induced dreams in which he, too, envisioned an alternate version of himself through which he, too, supposedly worked out some personal problems and reached some important conclusions. Having always been in love with Hinako after all, he wanted nothing more than for her to defy her family on the arranged marriage, but was too gutless to ever confront her about it himself, so his wonderful little conclusion was to drug the girl he loves and hope it might basically poison some sense into her. This is why I do not feel badly for Shu, and I reject any ending of the game that presents him sympathetically or sees Hinako reconcile with him in any way.

   ...And that's Silent Hill F. We could go on analyzing more of the story, obviously, but my monster-by-monster method probably covers all the juiciest and most important beats. It's definitely the strangest entry in the series, with its more fairy-tale elements, yokai, gods, and battles in which you are essentially a furry slasher villain, but it works, at least as a concept.

   Like I said, I always expected Silent Hill to explore radically different "mind scapes" after what the second game teased us with, so of course a troubled young girl in rural Japan has a different Silent Hill than a middle aged American dad or a middle aged American widower or a middle aged American trucker or a middle aged American war veteran or a middle aged Ameri...look, the series got kind of repetitive for a while. Kind of like nobody who got ahold of it could think of a direction to take it that wasn't basically a stereotype of the first two games. Why didn't anyone change it up more? I mean, even more than this. A troubled Japanese schoolgirl may be starkly different from a middle aged grizzled American alcoholic but it's still a pretty common player character archetype regardless.

  You're basically telling me that all this time, Silent Hill could have explored any human experience you can name, anywhere it wanted? Imagine the timeline in which Silent Hill F wasn't the decade-something-later franchise reboot, but came out at least twenty years ago, setting a precedent for a more varied series from there. What kind of Silent Hill would we see for, I don't know, a wealthy celebrity? A powerful politician? An overworked computer programmer? A scientist? An artist? A small child? And in just about any country? Living under any culture? For me personally, "F" doesn't feel so much like they've finally continued the series with a fresh perspective, but a glimpse into the imagination I was rooting for before even the third game.

  As a game, it's also just sort of...acceptable. It's apparently doing quite well, so congrats, but most of its gameplay felt downright grueling. Wandering around to unlock door after door was definitely not something I missed about the series, and the only challenge to the puzzles comes from either the tedium of fighting your way between scattered clues, or the solution is obscured through poor design choices, with nonsensical clues that can unintentionally misrepresent what you're meant to be doing at all, rather than creatively nudge you in the right direction. It's a game that feels, frustratingly, worth the wait in some aspects and anticlimactic in its other qualities, a step in the right direction creatively but still chained to some of the genre's most outdated gameplay conventions.

  So what would be my final, overall personal thoughts on the bestiary, which is what you're really here for? I'm actually still not sure, because that's just as mixed of a bag. There are some solid new hits like the pile of doll parts, the pile of mammaries, the pile of flowering tumors, solid pile representation in this title, no pile-related complaints, but then there are the somewhat interchangeable humanoid designs, and little capturing that "muddied hallucination" quality I fell in love with about its earliest entries. I like the leap to magical yokai motifs, for all the reasons I've already stated, but they feel pushed almost too far in monsters like the straight-up kitsune or the hungry ghost, while not present enough in monsters you could so easily drop into any other entry, like pestilent mannequins. I guess I'd overall have to give it something like a 7 or 8 out of 10. Silent Hill is certainly back, and inarguably more back than it has been for more than half of its original run.

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