BOO! Hello dear readers, and welcome to the spoooky edition of – wait, hang on, my editor's telling me this article is scheduled to be published in November? So I'm missing Halloween??
Dangit, sorry folks, but I tried – I always want to add some Halloween flavour to our lil' video games section, because spooky things can be fun. I'm endlessly fascinated by horror games, even if I'm usually too scared to actually play some of them.
Back in October 2023, I wrote about a small indie(-ish) Japanese horror game called Yomawari, and tried to understand the game design decisions that made a title with such cutesy adorable graphics so dang scary. (Check out "The fear factor: What makes for a good horror game?" at tinyurl.com/ydmrun5y.)
This time, I wanted to examine something with a bigger budget – the recently(-ish) released Silent Hill f. What does a major title from a major game studio do differently from (or similarly to?) an indie studio to make players scared, horrified, and terrified?
Well, let's head to the titular hills and find out!
Silent Hill goes J-Horror
Here's the setup: Silent Hill f is a 2025 survival horror game set in the quiet rural town of Ebisugaoka in the 1960s. You play as Shimizu Hinako, a young girl growing up in post-war Japan, learning to manage friendships, navigate adulthood, and – perhaps more importantly – survive the onslaught of supernatural monsters spawned from psychological torment that are suddenly swarming her fog-covered hometown.
Now, I want to be clear – this isn't exactly a review of the game. If you're asking me, I enjoyed the game (on "Story" combat difficulty and "Hard" puzzles), but I'm neither a long-time Silent Hill fan nor a survival horror purist, so take my opinions with a grain of purified ghost-banishing salt.
No, what I'm interested in is examining the specific gameplay design decisions that the developers NeoBards Entertainment made when making Silent Hill f.
When I was playing Yomawari, I identified three key decisions that made the horror in that game feel so good: first, the game was good at luring players in with a sense of attraction, anticipation, and surprise. Second, the game made the player feel very fragile, to heighten the sense of danger. Third, the game cleverly used uncertainty (incomplete or obfuscated information) to ratchet up the paranoia.
Silent Hill f does a fantastic job at luring me into its world, because this game is straight up a classic J-horror film that happens to be a video game, and I'm a sucker for those kinds of stories.
Here, the "big AAA game" budget really shows: the game is beautifully cinematic; the (voice & motion) actors portray believable humans suffering a terrible plight; the sound design perfectly captures the creaks and clatters that fuel paranoia and jump scares; and the town of Ebisugaoka is rendered with such high fidelity that I'm always tempted to explore its decrepit corners even as a part of my brain screams that I should be running the other way.
The presentation of Ebisugaoka gets a 10 out of 10 from me, perfect, no notes. But the problem is, Ebisugaoka only makes up half of the game – there's another half of Silent Hill f that takes place in the supernatural realm known as the Dark Shrine.
Shrine on you crazy diamond
The Dark Shrine levels of Silent Hill f are themed after Shinto temples and are, you guessed it, extremely dark.
In real life, darkness is one of our primal human fears, because if we can't see what's out there, we never know if there's something out to get us.
In horror games, darkness is a tool for obfuscating or hiding information, which can be used to invoke that same primal fear. However, if this tool isn't used correctly, then instead of invoking fear, the game might end up invoking the primal feeling of "argh dagnabbit I stubbed my toe! What did I walk into??"
I found the Dark Shrine levels, especially the early ones where you had to rely on a hand-held lantern, weirdly difficult to navigate. I'm still trying to decide if it's a user problem, or if the lack of visible landmarks plus minimal environmental lighting was a genuinely compromised level design decision.
I can confidently say this, though: both Silent Hill f('s Dark Shrine) and R.E.P.O. are horror games where I had to turn up the game's gamma/brightness from default to max, because the darkness was paradoxically preventing me from seeing what I'm supposed to be scared of.
I contrast the Dark Shrine levels with Yomawari, which used darkness juuust enough as a visual aesthetic to invoke a sense of dread and paranoia, but not so much that I'm unable to actually see the levels I'm navigating.
In fact, I contrast the Dark Shrine with Ebisugaoka in the same game. The levels set in the rural Japanese town uses Silent Hill's signature fog to perfectly hide information without compromising player agency/navigation.
One standout moment for me was when I had to get past some paddy fields in Ebisugaoka. The fog covered the land in its greyish-white shroud, but I could still see the outline of my destination in the distance, and the paths I could take forward.
But between here and there, in those fields... are those scarecrows, or something else – wait, did it move? What's that sound that's getting closer??
See, this is a masterful use of presentation in a big budget horror game. Let me see this beautifully-rendered world in front of me, but keep me guessing as to what, if anything, is out there waiting to kill me.
Taking inventory
The survival horror genre has had a long time to refine the tension-building gameplay mechanics in its toolbox, and the mechanic of limited resources (and its partner, limited inventory capacity) is used quite masterfully in Silent Hill f.
In this game, healing items are uncommon, and you can only carry so many of them. This makes each monster encounter a nerve-wracking experience, as each injury you take is a strike against your permanently dwindling supply of health. Or rather, this is the perfect illusion that Silent Hill manages to evoke.
In truth, the game designers (at least for me, on the easiest combat difficulty) managed to find the fine balance between the illusion of scarcity, and actually giving players enough tools to "win" the game. As I've written before, with horror games, you want players to fear failure, but ACTUALLY dying (especially repeatedly, or in no-win situations) will quickly break the illusion and turn fear into frustration.
(Also, can I say that the game designers pulled off a clever trick by letting me trade in these limited resources for Faith, aka "XP for upgrade points"? This meant that even when I've got all the items I need, I'm still tempted to explore dangerous parts of town for some sweet, sweet ramune to trade in for a stamina upgrade. That's a design decision that lures players to take risks that they really shouldn't have to, and I approve of it whole-heartedly.)
Breaking (weapon) trends
Speaking of limited resources, one specific mechanic I wanted to dig into is the implementation of breakable weapons. Silent Hill f has a surprising amount of combat, and Japanese schoolgirls are apparently very, very good at bludgeoning paranormal monsters to un-death as long as they have a steel pipe on hand.
As a general concept, the idea of weapons with limited uses/durability often produces mixed reactions from players: breakable weapons can, indeed, be annoying when they break the power fantasy or break the flow of combat, but when done right it can subtly guide players on how they should experience the game.
In Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, breakable weapons force players to adapt and experiment with what's available. In Silent Hill f, being able to carry only a few weapons – which break after some routine ghost-bonking – forces players to act carefully (i.e. become paranoid as they ration out their beatdowns), and turns every encounter into a dilemma: do I really want to get into a fight with this unholy abomination, or should I risk running away?
To see what happens to a survival horror game when it removes weapon durability, we only need to compare Silent Hill f with- uh, erm, Silent Hill f.
Wait, what?
Yeah, sorry, this one threw me for a loop too – while all the praise I had for Silent Hill f's breakable weapons apply to the Ebisugaoka levels, the Dark Shrine levels actually gave me weapons with infinite durability.
This one small-yet-important change meant that the game designers could turn the Dark Shrine levels into more combat-centric levels, thus making half of this survival horror game into more of an action horror game? I think??
In my analysis of Silent Hill f's gameplay design for horror games, this is the one decision that continues to baffle me. Sure, direct combat in the Dark Shrine levels are still tense due to limited healing items and respawning enemies, but there's a whole layer of tension and decision-making that's removed for a purpose I can't fathom.
Gameplay-wise, the Dark Shrine levels did feel like a very different horror game from the J-horror masterpiece that is the Ebisugaoka levels. Imagine a Mario game where in half the levels you get to jump around like a hyper-agile plumber, while in the other half you actually fix toilets – it's that jarring.
The 'f' is for fascinating
I originally intended to write this article to examine the differences in game design decisions between indie horror games versus big budget horror games from major studios, but weirdly enough, the dichotomy of the selected game made this more of an examination of Silent Hill f vs Silent Hill f.
As I said, I really did enjoy Silent Hill f, and I can recommend this game to anyone who wants some big budget spookiness in their lives – but personally, I think I'll return to my more familiar territory of small, weird, indie Japanese games.
I hear that the creators of Yomawari are creating a farming game called Honogurashi no Niwa, and it looks absolutely delightful. It shares the same art design as Yomawari, and appears to be built on the same engine too.
I can't wait to live a peaceful life in a definitely not-haunted rural Japanese village, growing not-cursed crops, raising not-undead chickens, and... and... surely this isn't a trap to lure me into a sense of pastoral calm before the game reveals itself to be a secret horror game, right? Right??
Uh, maybe please check back with me next Halloween to see if I haven't died of fright yet.
