After more than a decade, we’re finally getting a new Silent Hill game that could determine the future of the franchise. The success of Bloober Team’s remake of Silent Hill 2 has definitely helped the series, and now Silent Hill f looks like the most promising addition to the mainline games since the tragic cancelation of Silent Hills. In typical horror game fashion, the newest trailer doesn’t give you a lot of information about what you’ll be facing in Ebisugaoka, the fictional Japanese village in which the game will be taking place. However, you can actually find more hints about Silent Hill f outside of the trailers, and that starts to form an interesting idea about what you might see in the game.
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Although Silent Hill f will be set in Japan instead of a Western-style town that you generally see in the series, the trailers and description of the game make it look like the style of gameplay and story will be returning to the roots of the series, which is a much-needed move for the sake of Silent Hill’s future. It also means that you might see more cultural references used to build the game’s atmosphere and story.
If you take a look at the page for Silent Hill f on platforms like Steam, you’ll find that there’s a game description and a list of content warnings. The warnings include “depictions of gender discrimination, child abuse, bullying, drug-induced hallucinations, torture, and graphic violence.” With this in mind, one warning sticks out among the rest in the trailer from the transmission: drug-induced hallucinations.
Now, you have to wonder how much of what we’ve seen in this new Silent Hill f trailer is real and how much of it could be the result of hallucinations. It also makes it to where players aren’t able to trust Hinako as a narrator, which makes her the perfect narrator for a horror game. Silent Hill, in particular, makes great use of unreliable narrators, and it keeps you guessing about the nature of the horrors you come across. After all, the heart of Silent Hill is the manifestation of trauma, not the town in which these events take place.
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Another layer that adds to the high possibility of Hinako as an unreliable narrator isn’t just the hallucination warning, but the words and imagery you witness in the trailer. A voice says that Hinako took everything from her, and you also see multiple moments in both trailers centered on Hinako’s face. Particularly, you see her face peeling off or about to be cut by a knife. This could mean that the three-face theory from Japan might play a large role in the game’s story.
The three-face theory is one that suggests everyone has three different faces. The first is the polished public face that you show the world. The second is then your more relaxed face that you show friends and family. The final is your true face that shows your real identity. With this concept and the trailers’ content in mind, identity seems like an important theme in Silent Hill f. This is just a theory for now,
The release date for might not be far away, but after waiting for a new Silent Hill game that revives the series, it’s tough to not get excited and impatient for Silent Hill f. This is the game that Silent Hill needs right now to determine its future beyond remakes, and it already looks full of promise.
