This article discusses plot details from throughout Silent Hill f.
The rural Japanese town of Ebisugaoka is cut off from its neighbours by a bridge. Nestled into the slope of a mountain, surrounded by forests and fields, its people are stuck between the past and the present. It’s the 1960s and there are electrical wires latticed above buildings and vending machines on corners, but the population is mistrustful of modern medicine. They gossip in hushed tones about local families and tend devotedly to shrines to a Shinto deity called Inari. Tradition is important to the people of Ebisugaoka, but tradition, in Silent Hill f, is not a positive thing. For the game’s protagonist, Hinako, it turns life into a nightmare.
The split between the real world and dreams isn’t very distinct in f, which isn’t uncommon for a Silent Hill game. As is series tradition, the fog that shrouds the town brings with it expressions of the fears and regrets of its protagonist. Monsters made of doll heads and disembodied breasts, tongue-wagging man-things and blind-eyed puppet women, attack Hinako as she moves through a landscape that shifts between the identifiably grounded and wholly fantastical.
In Silent Hill f, a hostile and confounding world is summoned up by Hinako’s anxieties about how to ‘properly’ come of age. She’s bound by the practical confines of a family and society that expect her to grow up into a rigidly defined type of woman. She’s to be married to the right man, helping save her abusive father and subservient mother from financial destitution in the process. As the game begins, Hinako is about to leave her childhood friends—and her still-developing sense of self—behind for a life designed by others.
She’s trapped by tradition, literalized in Silent Hill f by entrenched cultural standards and intertwined Shintoism—specifically, the figure of Inari. Inari is, importantly, a kami (spirit or deity) associated not just with the industrial past of Ebisugaoka’s mines, but also with fertility. They’re represented as either male or female and employ white fox messengers — kitsune, known for shapeshifting, as well as possessing and tricking humans, sometimes by leading them astray while traveling. Japanese folklore and literature is filled with stories of ‘fox-wives’ seducing men.
Inari’s shadow hangs heavily over Hinako’s journey into adulthood. She is meant to continue a family lineage through marriage to a fox-masked man who resides in an otherworldly Inari shrine. She bristles at the idea of her personhood being reduced to a vessel for reproduction, of being made servile to a man. This fear entangles her mind, along with the mysterious red capsules she takes as medicine, turning the abstract concepts she wrestles with into seemingly flesh and blood threats. In a scene of ritual self harm that channels the narcoticized religious terror of certain sequences in Red Candle Games’ Devotion+, Hinako robotically saws off her own right arm, has her back branded by a heated iron, and, finally, allows the flesh around her eyes to be cut off and replaced with a fox mask. In another sequence, she sacrifices her childhood friends through increasingly brutal puzzles, burning one alive, strangling one in a Hellraiser-like suspension of chains, and, most hauntingly, leaving one who’s terrified of the dark trapped in a pitch-black chamber. She does all of this as if guided by a force external to her. Her culture, which is both a part of her and something reinforced through her friends, family, and hometown, possesses her as powerfully as any evil spirit.
Silent Hill f isn’t so much scary as it is consistently uncomfortable. It has the texture of a nightmare, with images and people appearing and disappearing, reconfigured into new form by the roiling, sometimes contradictory thoughts that fill Hinako’s head. Early in the game, she describes Ebisugaoka’s descent into hyperreal strangeness as feeling like “one nightmare after another,” and that bears out with time.
Ebisugaoka is a maze of narrow streets, lined with tall stonework walls and wood houses, and forest paths that twist up and through the mountainside. In the dream-like ‘otherworld’ she enters when losing consciousness, Hinako finds herself following the mysterious, fox-masked man through a gauzy permanent midnight outside of and inside an improbably extensive shrine to Inari. The shrine’s hallways wind in on themselves, its doors often locked by bizarre puzzles and, when she awakens from this place, Ebisugaoka has become overgrown, thick with red spider lilies++, lumps of pink throbbing flesh, and horizon-blocking fog. Her family, neighbours, and friends conspire against her. Sinister motivations animate even what seem, initially, like the most innocuous conversations. Everything is rotten, poisoned. With the one bridge out of town wrenched apart, Evil Dead 2-style, there seems to be no escape from the claustrophobia of these real and magical worlds.
Silent Hill f is a coming-of-age story, though, and it’s concerned with whether Hinako grows from the person she is at the game’s beginning—or remains in stasis. Hinako’s name, we learn, is written with the kanji for “young bird” and avian imagery underscores her story. She finds the mangled corpse of a bird early in the game. She collects ema prayer plaques painted with a bird, and ‘wishes’ for upgrades to her health and combat ability at shrines. She also, at one point, encounters her elder sister Junko, who’s married as her family expected, in the eerie labyrinth of the Shinto shrine. Her sister’s face is covered, to Hinkao’s view, by the impassive stare of a crow tengu mask, as if she’s an actor in a play. Junko has assumed her expected role in the family.
Hinako’s own inability to be like Junko leads her to double herself, as her mind attempts to rationalize her twin desires to forge her own path in life and embrace some aspects of the culture that defines her mental landscape. One Hinako kills her friends and allows herself to be mutilated into the ideal bride for the fox-masked man, Kotoyuki Tsuneki, that her parents want her to marry. The other lashes out, trying to destroy what traps her, with the first ending of the game+++ providing a coda where this Hinako has murdered her own wedding party in a homicidal bid for freedom.
Her desperate attempt to find some path forward underscore the game’s name, whose “f” subtitle is presented in the font and italics of the notation for “forte” in written music. A forte sign instructs the musician to play with force or strength. Hinako, smashing the towering bridal version of herself+++, the offerings at the shrine, or the monsters that represent her fears, works with passion to destroy everything that would keep her in depressive resignation. But, every ‘good’ ending requires of Hinako that same kind of willpower. She could spend her life in the hazy dread of a nightmare or force herself awake to fight against everything, within and outside of her, that stops her from heading into the future on her own terms.
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+ Devotion makes a good pairing with Silent Hill f, for the way both games explore religious tradition as a totalizing psychological force.
++ These lilies are associated, in Japan, with death, and as flowers that guide the dead from the underworld toward rebirth. They’re also, through legend, associated with separation. As recounted in a blog entry here, this legend is responsible for accompanying folklore where “spider lilies bloom along the path where you see a beloved person for the last time.”
+++ The monstrous figure Hinako becomes and fights in the first ending of the game is called ‘Shiromuku,’ named for the white traditional Shinto bridal wedding dress.
++++ There are five different endings in Silent Hill f, with each—aside from a gag UFO-featuring ending—reached by replaying the game, finding new or altered details along the way, that present various possible outcomes for Hinako’s story. The most chilling sees Hinako married to the fox-masked Kotoyuki Tsuneki as her parents wanted, the scene fading out on a voiceover of her hyperventilating, stating she’s terrified to become like her mother, and then, traditionally painted face appearing from a pool of blood, shrieking “no!” before a foot stomps on her.
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Reid McCarter is a writer and a co-editor of Bullet Points Monthly. His work has appeared at The AV Club, GQ, Kill Screen, Playboy, The Washington Post, Paste, and VICE. He is also co-editor of SHOOTER and Okay, Hero, co-hosts the Bullet Points podcast, and posts on Bluesky.