Silent Hill f places Hinako in 1960s Ebisugaoka amid a bleak family situation featuring an alcoholic, abusive father, a submissive mother and an absent sister shown in unseen-face flashbacks. The game favors sustained tension over pure jump scares, adding health, sanity and weapon durability meters that necessitate selective engagements. Environments transition from eerily empty streets to fog, red undergrowth and grotesque enemies including marionettes and fleshy ogres. A focus mode trades sanity for improved evasion and counterattacks. Combat feels deliberate and sluggish, encouraging avoidance and careful resource management rather than frequent direct confrontation.
Silent Hill f starts off with a grounded (but still heavy) setup, establishing a miserable family dynamic for protagonist Hinako. With an alcoholic, abusive father, a submissive mother and an absent sister, who's shown in flashbacks with that classic horror trope, face unseen. Something horrible is about to unfold inthe sleepy, remote village of Ebisugaoka, sometime in the early 1960s.
The latest entry in the Silent Hill series still has jumpscares, like you'd expect from the horror series, but both the setting and game systems are more focused on tension, putting both Hinako and the player under constant duress. A typical health meter is joined by a sanity gauge and even your weapons have limited durability, so you're forced to pick your fights.
Hinako is no soldier. She's no battle-hardened survivor. When I eventually find a steel pipe to fight back with, even fast attacks are a little sluggish, while heavy swings, which can often stun and knock down enemies, take a while to charge up and can be hard to aim if you haven't locked onto the enemy. If there's more than one attacker, it's a tense struggle and I'm often forced to burn through recovery items more so than when facing a sound and light-sensitive crawling beast, a fleshy-spherical ogre and other middleweight boss fights
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