The very first image unveiled from Silent Hill f showed a schoolgirl wearing a blue sailor uniform and traditional sandals, surrounded by pale pink cherry blossoms.
It was unmistakably Japanese, and it sent a clear message to fans of the survival horror franchise: Prepare for a significant departure from the typical Silent Hill game.
The original Silent Hill, released in 1999, was a typical American horror story that unfolded in a fictitious seaside town in Maine shrouded in a thick blanket of ominous fog. Team Silent, a Tokyo studio within Konami, spent two weeks in Chicago and also drew inspiration from Stephen King and David Lynch, whose depictions of nightmarish Americana helped inform the game’s eerie, dreamlike atmosphere.
Silent Hill f, which will be released on Sept. 25 for the Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and PC, is instead an unabashed work of J-horror, the subgenre popularized by turn-of-the-century films like “Ju-On: The Grudge” and “Ringu.”
Konami declined to comment about the new setting and its influences, pointing to previous statements by the game’s creators. During a preview of Silent Hill f, the series producer Motoi Okamoto said that while the series had always “fused the essence of western horror and Japanese horror,” its upcoming game was an attempt to lean fully into Japanese motifs.
Trailers for the game show environments steeped in Japanese culture and heritage, including torii, the traditional gates at the entrance to shrines, and spider lilies, which are associated with the fall equinox; indoor settings are divided by latticed screens and decorated with traditional hanging scrolls. A Shinto deity worshiped by village residents is prominently featured, and in addition to the franchise’s traditional steel pipes and crowbars, players can also wield more Japanese-specific items such as a polearm, known as a naginata.
Silent Hill f’s writer, a Japanese manga author who goes by the pseudonym Ryukishi07, has said he initially assumed the game would be set in the United States like the franchise’s other mainline entries. “I had some ideas of the stereotypical American thing with cops and doughnuts and girls running away into hospitals and all that,” he said.
Essential to the franchise’s lasting appeal has been its somewhat off-kilter point-of-view, in which mundane fixtures of Smalltown, U.S.A., were regarded at a curious remove. The tone and style of the early games — slow and deliberate, relying on mood rather than jump scares — felt very Japanese and notably distinct from the survival-horror landscape at the time, especially games like Resident Evil, which were more action-oriented and propulsive.
“Resident Evil 2, in particular, put aside the horror a bit and went very ‘Hollywood,’” Keiichiro Toyama, the creator of Silent Hill, said in an interview in 1999. “It focused on the action, and felt more like an action movie than a horror game. We wanted to go back to the roots of what horror is supposed to be about. We wanted to make you scared on an instinctive level.”
Clayton Purdom, a founder of the tech and culture consultancy EX Research, said that early Silent Hill games “refracted J-horror in a really interesting way, situating that tradition in an American location that worked because of its off-ness.” He pointed to some of the strange cultural miscellanea that bled into the games. A school locale in the first Silent Hill was based on one in the film “Kindergarten Cop”; a central character in Silent Hill 2 was inspired by Christina Aguilera.
“It was an America remembered through cultural signifiers,” Purdom said. “The town layouts and the institutions seemed elemental in their design but dreamlike and prone to dissolution and industrial decay.”
The new game moves in a very different direction. Silent Hill f is set in Showa-era Japan, which Ryukishi07 has called “the era where fantasy mythology seems to reside.” The developers at NeoBards Entertainment meticulously recreated the 1960s setting, adding authentic period details in the style of architecture and production design that add a depth of realism to the paranormal atmosphere. The choices were made in part to set Silent Hill f apart from other games in the series. “We believed that this would allow us to depart from the pre-established canon and discover more of the lore,” Okamoto said in a recent presentation on the game.
Silent Hill f also makes at least one major departure in terms of gameplay.
The first few Silent Hill games had famously poor combat. Players were armed with baseball bats and small guns, but they were clumsy and slow, so difficult to use effectively that it was often easier to flee enemies than to fight them. (Indeed, this was part of the games’ charm.) Silent Hill f’s combat is more precise, built around carefully timed blocks and parries — more like the combat in games such as Dark Souls and Elden Ring, which are known for their difficulty.
“Challenging action games are gaining popularity among younger players nowadays,” Toyama, the creator of Silent Hill, said this summer. “So I believed that if we implemented such elements into the game, it would resonate well even with people who are new to the series.”
Those coming to the horror franchise for the first time may be surprised to learn how deeply it has been shaped by cinema.
Besides King and Lynch, the first three Silent Hill games were influenced by the 1990 cult horror film “Jacob’s Ladder,” which is subtle and atmospheric with elements of a psychological thriller. It follows a Vietnam War veteran named Jacob Singer, played by Tim Robbins, who begins to experience disturbing hallucinations of demons and ghosts. The director Adrian Lyne uses the grit and grime of urban subways, hospitals and apartment blocks to evoke a gradual descent into hell, an idea that the early Silent Hill games adopted as their foundation.
In Silent Hill f, by contrast, you play as Hinako Shimizu, a Japanese schoolgirl who lives in Ebisugaoka, a fictitious place modeled on the small northern town of Kanayama, Japan. The new setting puts the game more directly in the territory of J-horror films, though the developers have said they were not inspired by any specific titles.
“I think I’m not trying to take direct influence from Japanese horror so much as it is I’m just trying to take the game and trying to dice it up and chisel it in a way that appears as horror,” Ryukishi07 has explained.
Nevertheless, the period setting, realistic locale and haunting atmosphere evoke some classic Japanese horror films. Many modern J-horror movies, like “Pulse,” revolve around contemporary technology and the anxiety of modern living, but Silent Hill f seems more reminiscent of an older era of Japanese cinema.
Purdum pointed to “Kwaidan” and “Onibaba,” two 1960s horror films that “were more explicitly based in Japanese folklore” and bear some visual similarities to Silent Hill f, including the look and feel of their explicitly Japanese monsters and demons. The teenage protagonist’s distinctive school uniform is reminiscent of those worn in the 2000 classic “Battle Royale.”
Several recent American-made games have embraced a Japanese setting, including Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ghost of Tsushima and its upcoming sequel, Ghost of Yotei — a trend that suggests an appetite for that locale and aesthetic.
Purdom noted that Silent Hill f, in which a Japanese developer is abandoning an American setting, was sort of the inverse. “I think most people are stoked,” he said, “just to see Konami making new games in the series, which has laid dormant for a long time, and to be taking some creative risks with it.”
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