As Someone Who’s Rarely Scared by Video Games, Silent Hill f Terrifies Me

I’m a great lover of the horror genre, specifically as it appears in the world of gaming. Resident Evil, Dead Space, and Silent Hill have consistently ranked among my favorite franchises ever, and even less mechanically complex titles like Outlast and Until Dawn have a special place in my heart. But I’m very rarely scared by these games. This context is just one of many reasons why I absolutely adore Silent Hill f.

It’s hard to say precisely why I’m not often scared by horror games. Theoretically, games should be more anxiety-inducing for me than horror movies and books due to their interactivity, but the opposite is true. My best guess is that this comes down to the stakes of video game stories, and the gamification of death. A horror game can only scare me for the first hour or so, when I’m still in the dark about how it works. Once I die and am sent back to a checkpoint, the haunted-house illusion dissipates; the tension is gone. I may get nervous about losing my progress or resources upon death, but this isn’t fundamentally different from the experience of playing most action games. I can’t fear death when I just come back to life, and I can’t relate to saving the world either. But there are a lot of other things I fear, and Silent Hill f seems to know what they are.

Silent Hill f's Brand of Horror Isn't Messing Around

Silent Hill f Is Truly Terrifying, Not Just Shocking

Jumpscares in horror games are fine, but they are primal. If I don’t realize that my girlfriend has gotten home, and I round a corner and see her unexpectedly, I experience the exact same reaction: it’s a matter of expectation, not fear. The only phobia a jumpscare can leverage is the primal aversion to the unknown, the quick-trigger reaction of a doctor tapping your knee with a hammer—clinical, clean, scientific.

Silent Hill f is far messier, taking concepts like tradition, community, friendship, and gender, and weaving them into terrors far greater than any monster. The fear of betrayal—of betraying or being betrayed—is particularly palpable to me, so these aspects of Hinako’s story feel like psychic warfare. Then there’s the fear of losing yourself, whether that means surrendering your autonomy, forgetting your past, or going insane. These ideas are at the heart of Silent Hill f‘s horror, and their effectiveness is a direct result of their painful relatability. Maybe I won’t be tormented by evil spirits, but I could lose my freedom or autonomy, and I could conceivably be betrayed by my community, in some way.

Lower Stakes Make Silent Hill f More Scary, Not Less

While other survival horror games have personal details and swings at characterization, these are mostly secondary to the central conflict, which tends to be existential and epic in nature. For instance, while Chris Redfield might be motivated by the potential of reuniting with Jill Valentine in RE5, his ultimate goal is to stop Wesker and “save the world.” In Silent Hill f, the main conflict is Hinako’s struggle to retain her freedom amidst cultishly manipulated, psychedelic-induced, supernatural nightmares. Her emotional journey, fraught and hellish as it is, is the focal point of the story.

In short, Silent Hill f is social horror; it’s moral and ethical horror, too. It channels the anxiety of losing oneself, and even though it’s necessarily informed by supernatural aspects, its focus on intimate, uncomfortable storytelling is why it keeps me up at night. Those elements will always be scarier than even the most grotesque or uncanny monster designs.