Silent Hill f is a 2025 psychological survival horror game developed by NeoBards Entertainment and published by Konami, written by Ryukishi07 of Higurashi: When They Cry. It moves the series out of the American town and into a 1960s Japanese mountain village swallowed by fog and blood-red flowers. What makes it frightening is the slow way beauty curdles into rot, and how small you feel against it.
Story and setting
You play Hinako Shimizu, a high school girl in Ebisugaoka, a fictional rural town in 1960s Japan. Its look borrows from real places in Gifu Prefecture. Narrow alleys, wooden shopfronts, rice terraces, shrine steps.
Home is tense, and Hinako storms out early in the story. Then the fog rolls in.
Ebisugaoka empties out almost at once. Red spider lilies, the flowers Japanese tradition links to death, creep over walls and bodies. Things that used to be people start moving in the mist.
Hinako’s childhood friends are caught up in it too. Shu, Sakuko and Rinko each carry their own history with her, and the game uses them well. Small, petty schoolyard tensions turn into something much heavier.
Running in parallel is a second world. Hinako keeps waking in a candlelit shrine realm, guided by a calm man in a fox mask. He is polite. He is patient. You will not trust him.
That is all you need going in. The less you know, the better the first night with it goes.
How it scares you
The town itself
Ebisugaoka is the scariest thing in the game. It’s tight and claustrophobic, built from alleys you can’t see down until you’re in them. The fog eats sightlines at about arm’s length.
The red rot is where the visual horror lives. Flowers bloom out of walls and out of flesh. It’s gorgeous, and that’s the trick. Konami’s own tagline for the game was about finding beauty in terror, and the art direction commits to it completely.
Enemies
The creature design comes from the artist kera, and it’s some of the most unsettling work the series has had in years. Many enemies are humanoid but wrong. Limbs bend the wrong way. Faces are missing or melted into fabric. Some walk, some lurch, a few crawl.
They don’t explain themselves. You’ll read meaning into them later, but in the moment they’re just things that want Hinako dead.
Combat, stamina and Focus
This is where Silent Hill f splits fans. It’s the most combat-focused game the series has ever made.
Hinako fights with melee weapons: pipes, bats, blades, a naginata later on. Every weapon breaks with use, and repair kits are limited. Swings drain stamina, so button mashing gets you killed fast.
There’s also a Focus system. Hold it to read an enemy’s tell and land a counter. Focus burns through a sanity meter, and keeping it full means hunting down items and shrine offerings.
At shrines you trade those offerings for Faith, then spend Faith on omamori charms and stat upgrades. It’s a light RPG layer, and it pays to engage with it.
If you came for a game where you mostly hide, be warned. Here you mostly fight. Running is still often the smart call, but you can’t sneak through the whole thing.
Pacing, sound and camera
The camera sits over Hinako’s shoulder, close, like the 2024 Silent Hill 2 remake. You see a lot of her and not much around her. That’s deliberate.
Akira Yamaoka returns on music alongside Kensuke Inage. Expect metal scraping, wooden percussion, folk tones and long stretches of nothing, then a sound you can’t place behind you. Play with headphones.
Pacing swings between tense exploration of the town, puzzle rooms, and the eerie shrine world, where combat gets more formal and ritualised. Puzzles have their own difficulty setting, separate from combat, which is a lovely nod to the old riddle levels.
Jump scares are rare. The game prefers dread that builds over minutes rather than seconds.
Lore and ending
Spoiler warning
This section spoils the structure of Silent Hill f’s endings and the central meaning of its story.
Silent Hill f has five endings, and your first playthrough always ends the same way. Everything else unlocks through New Game+.
That first ending is bleak and deliberately incomplete. It answers what happened, but not why. Lots of players finish it confused, and that’s the point.
New Game+ is the real game
On later runs, the game adds new cutscenes, notes and dialogue. Choices and items that weren’t available before start to matter. The story changes shape with each loop.
This is very Ryukishi07. Higurashi worked the same way, replaying the same summer with new information until the full picture forms. If you stop after one run, you’ve seen maybe half of Silent Hill f.
What it’s about
Strip the monsters away and this is a story about a young woman being pushed into a role she never chose. In 1960s rural Japan, that role is wife: obedient, quiet, absorbed into another family.
The fox-masked man and the shrine world are tied to the marriage at the heart of the story. Fox imagery here isn’t random. In Japanese folklore, a sun shower is called a “fox’s wedding,” and fox spirits are tricksters who wear pleasant faces.
The body horror reads cleanly through that lens. Flowers growing through flesh. Bodies turned into decoration. Hinako being slowly reshaped into something pretty and hollow.
Her friendships matter too. Old jealousies and betrayals among Shu, Sakuko and Rinko get folded into her nightmare. Like James in Silent Hill 2, Hinako is fighting a world built from her own guilt and fear.
The endings, broadly
The endings range from heartbreaking to defiant, depending on what Hinako accepts and what she refuses. The fullest one requires multiple playthroughs and a careful eye for the new material.
And yes, there’s a UFO joke ending. Aliens have been a Silent Hill tradition since the 1999 original, and NeoBards kept it.
Where it fits in the series
Silent Hill f is a standalone story. It never visits the town of Silent Hill and doesn’t follow any earlier characters. You don’t need to have played anything before it.
It shares the series’ DNA instead. The fog. A personal otherworld. Monsters that work as symbols. You won’t find Pyramid Head here, but you’ll find the same idea behind him: a creature built from one person’s guilt.
Release order
| Title | Year | Developer | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Silent Hill | 1999 | Team Silent | PS1 original |
| Silent Hill 2 | 2001 | Team Silent | The series’ most loved entry |
| Silent Hill 3 | 2003 | Team Silent | Direct sequel to the first game |
| Silent Hill 4: The Room | 2004 | Team Silent | Last Team Silent game |
| Silent Hill: Origins | 2007 | Climax Studios | Prequel |
| Silent Hill: Homecoming | 2008 | Double Helix | First Western-led mainline game |
| Silent Hill: Shattered Memories | 2009 | Climax Studios | Reimagining of the first game |
| Silent Hill: Downpour | 2012 | Vatra Games | Last entry before the long gap |
| P.T. | 2014 | Kojima Productions | Playable teaser for the cancelled Silent Hills |
| Silent Hill: The Short Message | 2024 | Konami / HexaDrive | Free PS5 release |
| Silent Hill 2 (remake) | 2024 | Bloober Team | Remake of the 2001 game |
| Silent Hill f | 2025 | NeoBards Entertainment | New story, 1960s Japan |
Silent Hill f is part of Konami’s revival push, alongside the Silent Hill 2 remake and Silent Hill: Townfall. Producer Motoi Okamoto and the Konami team behind the revival have kept each project as its own story.
Which to play first
If Silent Hill f is your first Silent Hill, that’s completely fine. Start here.
If you’re choosing between f and the Silent Hill 2 remake, think about your taste. The remake is the better pick for a classic slow psychological thriller with lighter combat. Silent Hill f suits you if you like Japanese folk horror and don’t mind a fight.
Where to play
Silent Hill f launched on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. On PC it’s sold on Steam and the Epic Games Store.
As of October 2026, it’s priced at $69.99 on Steam. The Steam store lists it as single-player only, with no co-op or multiplayer. It carries a 17+ age requirement, which tracks with how gory it gets.
At launch it was a straight purchase, not a subscription title on Game Pass or PS Plus. Subscription catalogues rotate, so as of October 2026, check your service’s library before buying if you rely on one.
For Steam Deck, check the compatibility badge on the Steam store page as of October 2026. This is a heavy, modern Unreal Engine game, so expect to lower settings on handheld hardware. Fog-heavy games can also look muddy on a small screen.
On PC, it’s one of the more demanding entries on our list of the best PC horror games, so check the system requirements first.
Voice acting is Japanese only, with subtitles. That suits the setting perfectly, though you’ll need to read during tense moments.
If you liked this
Silent Hill 2 (2024 remake): same close over-the-shoulder camera, same Yamaoka soundscape, and the series’ best story about guilt.
Fatal Frame: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse (2023 remaster): Japanese island folk horror with ritual, shrines and haunted girls, built on photography instead of melee.
Signalis (2022): a dreamlike, looping psychological horror about memory and identity that rewards reading every note.
FAQ
Is Silent Hill f connected to the other Silent Hill games?
Not directly. It’s set in the fictional Japanese town of Ebisugaoka, not Silent Hill, and has no returning characters. It shares themes and style, not story.
How long is Silent Hill f?
A first playthrough of the main story takes most players around 12 to 15 hours. Seeing all five endings takes several more runs through New Game+, which are faster.
How many endings does Silent Hill f have?
Five, including a joke UFO ending. Your first run always gets the same ending. The others only unlock on New Game+.
Is Silent Hill f too gory for squeamish players?
It’s one of the gorier horror games of recent years, mostly body horror with flowers erupting from flesh. If gore is a dealbreaker, the Silent Hill 2 remake is the gentler choice.
Is Silent Hill f hard?
Combat is tougher than older Silent Hill games, with stamina, weapon breakage and counters. You can lower combat and puzzle difficulty separately, so it stays approachable if you want the story more than the fights.