I've got myself into a slightly weird and surprising situation – I think I might be a big horror game fan, without ever intending that to happen. The fact is, that without ever describing myself as a huge fan of the genre, I've played a whole heap of the biggest releases in it over the last few years, from the Dead Space remake to various Resident Evil games and now Silent Hill f.
This is the latest game in a franchise that was dormant for a decent while, but now seems to be bouncing back – not least because of a successful remake of Silent Hill 2 last year. This spin-off takes the series into a very new place by spinning the clock back and landing in 1960s Japan, in a small town plagued by horrendous events.
You play Hinako, a teenage girl with a fairly obviously complicated family situation, and it doesn't take long for the town to become swathed in the series' iconic fog. On top of that, of course, are the bizarre and generally horrifying enemies, led at first by a wave of creepy mannequin-style blade-wielding female figures.
It's all really scary stuff, and even just a few hours in I can tell that there are some twisted psychological layers to what I'm seeing. Another trademark of the series is a flawed protagonist whose interactions with enemies betray more than you first realise, and I've every confidence that Konami has done some devious work on that front.
Still, now that I've started to settle into my new flat and have my gaming setup nearly where I want it, I'm encountering a new dilemma summed up nicely by Silent Hill f – do I play games on my PS5 Pro or my PC? They're both hooked to the same monitor, which has 4K resolution and HDMI 2.1 to ensure that games look and feel amazing either way.
With an Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070 Ti in my gaming rig, it's hard to turn it down, and I expect it to become my default option for non-multiplayer games, so it's what I've gone for in Silent Hill f's case, with great results so far. I'm playing on the maximum settings, at 4K (a luxury given how sharp 1440p can look), and it's reliably running at north of 60fps, even when volumetric fog is at its thickest and things are action-packed.
The game's super sharp, too, and I'm having a great time navigating through the creepy mazes of alleys and houses it's offered up so far. Those exploratory moments also give way to plenty of combat, which is surprisingly fun – something that isn't always a given in survival horror games. How much resource management I have to do will probably become clearer as I progress through it, though.
One small thing that initially irked me is that after I selected the "Hard" mode at the outset, I later thought that had locked me out of ever downgrading to the easier "Story" setting. No option was evident in the menus, but thankfully when I got stuck on a troublesome boss with low resources, the game offered me the option while reloading after a few deaths. It's great to be able to change, although this slightly weird lack of transparency about how you do so is still a tad odd.
Still, that's a minor note for a game that seems really promising from what I've played, and which is already attracting rave reviews from people who've had time to actually finish it. It's further cementing that my PS5 Pro has a fight on its hands to remain as my main gaming machine, although the arrival of Battlefield 6 in a couple of weeks promises to be a huge shift on that front.
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