How New Game Plus in ‘Silent Hill f’ Adds So Much to the Entire Experience
As a franchise, Silent Hill has been starved of fresh ideas for the better part of two decades. Sure, the most surface-level elements might have changed between entries. Shattered Memories, for instance, made the radical decision to substitute the town’s perpetual fog bank for a snowy blizzard, while Downpour took an even bolder leap and introduced watery precipitation into the mix. Yet outside of those shifting weather patterns, it’s been a pretty stagnant affair ever since the PS2 era.
Almost every installment in the series of late seems to have dealt with some variation on the same basic theme. There’s always a condemned sinner embarking on a literal guilt trip through their own psyche — subjected along the way to symbolic punishments and living manifestations of their innermost demons — while the narrative beats and core gameplay mechanics have similarly been rehashed to the point of losing their edge. Hell, even the metaphorical creatures that once represented the very specific anxieties of very specific characters have been repurposed as one-size-fits-all boogeymen (apparently, everyone in the state of Maine has a hang-up that can in some way be embodied by bubblehead nurses).
By distancing itself from this stale formula, Silent Hill f has been a much-needed breath of fresh air. It’s still authentic to its roots — upholding series traditions like that obligatory low-lying cloud, a light world/ dark world dichotomy, separate difficulty settings for puzzles and combat, monsters ripped straight from the protagonist’s Id, and a jokey UFO ending — but it crucially shakes things up in some bold, exciting ways.
Relocating the action from contemporary small-town America to rural Japan (circa the 1960s) is the most obvious deviation, and one that has a pronounced ripple effect on everything from the game’s riddles to its world-building, its enemy design and its visual aesthetic. But then there’s also the way that developer NeoBards Entertainment inches us closer to Soulsbourne territory: placing a distinct emphasis on melee combat; reflex-testing boss battles; and lite RPG systems.
In fact, there are so many innovations and strange new twists for the franchise in Silent Hill f that we didn’t manage to cover them all in our review. We only made a passing, veiled reference, for example, to the part where you are ritualistically mutilated and turned into some kind of fox deity with godlike powers (including a Kratos-esque rage mode). In any other game, that wouldn’t be something that you could casually skim over, yet there’s so much to dissect with this title that it didn’t even crack the top five talking points for us.
However, the most glaring omission from our review — that we skirted around for spoiler reasons — was surely Silent Hill f‘s unique approach to New Game Plus. Because NeoBards are doing some very interesting things with that concept.
Growing Up Sucks
It should go without saying, but any discussion of how Silent Hill f continues beyond its end credits is going to be inherently spoiler-filled. After all, we’re not just talking about the merits of replayability here, or the usual power trip that comes with retaining all your upgrades in a video game’s second go around, but rather how the story is fundamentally incomplete until you’ve gone through it at least a couple of times. Kind of similar to how it works in Nier: Automata.
With that said, short of transcribing the script in its entirety, it’d be hard for me to spoil NeoBard’s new release any more thoroughly than I am about to. So, consider yourself forewarned!
As a quick recap, Silent Hill f follows a young highschooler by the name of Hinako Shimizu, as she navigates the growing pains of an especially brutal adolescence. Since entering puberty, she’s had to contend with: increased scrutiny from conservative elders disapproving of her “unladylike” conduct; controlling behaviour from a patriarchal father prone to violent outbursts; cruel treatment at the hands of female peers who envy her effortless good looks; and unwanted attention from the hormonal boys and adult men in her life.
These teenage woes would be bad enough for most young women. Yet the awkward years are proving to be uniquely challenging for Hinako, on account of a few extra supernatural stresses that are weighing her mind down even further.
You see, one fateful morning, our protagonist wakes up to discover that her hometown of Ebisugaoka has been enveloped in a paranormal mist and that its populace has vanished off the face of the earth. With the exception of her friendship group — and dysfunctional family unit — every single resident of the municipality has been unaccountably raptured and swapped out for petrifying creatures that appear to represent Hinako’s subconscious anxieties.
Examples include feminine homunculi that have been stitched together from the most perfect body parts (in a pretty blatant metaphor for impossible beauty standards), a potbellied gremlin that has sweaty palms, a drooling tongue and a notable fixation on young girls (like the horny old men of Ebisugaoka), as well as a hideous, swollen beast that appears to be in excruciating agony as it continually pumps out legions of spawn (gee, I wonder what that could represent for a woman who is coming of age).
Anyway, Hinako is understandably determined to flee this nightmare-infested ghost town and so hatches an escape plan. Of course, that turns out to be easier said than done, given that she keeps involuntarily slipping into a parallel dark world that has dangers of its own. These intermittent, out-of-body pitstops see her utterly isolated and cut off from her support network, as she gradually progresses through an ethereal shrine towards an uncertain future, beckoned ever onwards by a mysterious stranger wearing a fox mask.
Now, depending on how closely you are paying attention to Hinako’s journal and the various collectible documents strewn around the game, the exact point at which you realise what’s going on here could vary. But to make a very long story short, the gist is that Hinako is being forced into an arranged marriage in order to help clear her parents’ crippling debt. And she’s hardly ecstatic about it. Indeed, to her, the prospect of forthcoming wedlock is akin to a death sentence looming over her head.
The portions of the game that take place in this otherworldly plane are therefore allegorical for Hinako’s current predicament. The various rituals that the “Fox Man” (a stand-in for her betrothed) puts you through entail things like stripping away one’s identity until there is nothing left, abandoning childhood friends to the abyss, and surrendering free will in service of somebody else’s happiness. It doesn’t take an expert in Jungian theory to get to the bottom of what this could all mean for an engaged teenager with a particularly bad case of cold feet.
Is That It?
To put it mildly, then, an awful lot is going on with poor Hinako. Between her abusive domestic situation, her friends all turning their backs on her when she needed them most, the repressive gender norms of the time, and her being sold off as some kind of child bride, it’s enough to warrant a mental health day. Yet she is surprisingly well adjusted, all things considered.
Or so we’re led to believe. You see, the ending of your first playthrough of Silent Hill f casts the story in a whole new light. Mere minutes before the credits roll, we learn that Hinako has not been coping with these mounting pressures at all and that she, in fact, suffered a mental collapse not too long ago.
While her family and friends were hoping that marriage would be the answer to all her issues, platonic guy pal (and aspiring physician) Shu prescribed a very different panacea. It turns out his solution was to simply ply her with red capsule pills — the game’s standard health item — in the hope that it would somehow calm her nerves.
However, this remedy had quite the opposite of its intended effect, with Hinako quickly developing an addiction to these little helpers, overdosing on them and suffering a nervous breakdown at her own wedding ceremony, whereupon she proceeded to massacre all the guests. The implication being that we’ve been playing through said psychotic episode this entire time. Once this devastating information has been revealed, we then watch as Hinako drowns in a literal tsunami of pills, before the screen abruptly cuts to black, “Sopranos” style.
It’s a dissatisfying ending that leaves a lot up in the air, and you’d be forgiven for feeling shortchanged if those are the despairing circumstances you leave our protagonist in. Yet the game has been so methodical in its plotting up until that jarring curveball, that you know there has to be more to it and so jump back in for round two.
Should you commit to seeing through that follow-up attempt, then your persistence will be richly rewarded.
Making Sense Out of Madness
It’s only when you make your return trip to Ebisugaoka that the narrative pieces of Silent Hill f start to click into place.
If you’ve experienced it for yourself, you’ll know that the summary above is heavily streamlined and joins up dots that aren’t connected for you outright by writer Ryukishi07. Indeed, it’s only when you revisit key scenes on a subsequent playthrough that you can wrap your head around what the fuck is going on with that dark shrine subplot, or why there are two separate versions of Hinako knocking about.
With the benefit of hindsight, though, you can start to figure it all out. Case in point, it becomes apparent that the game’s stalker enemy — a doppelganger of our heroine that’s transformed into a giant fox garbed in a wedding gown — is a projection of Hinako’s belief that she will ultimately have to “kill” her child self in order to become a proper trad-wife. That’s why it only ever appears when she’s retreating into juvenile comforts, like hanging out with friends outside their regular haunts, and why it doggedly hunts all of the Ebisugaoka school kids that keep her anchored to the past.
The knowledge that Hinako has been promised to someone against her will, and that she sees this marriage as a kind of impending spiritual death, will also inform how you interpret other parts of the tale. It explains why all your interactions with Shu have such a heart-wrenching sense of finality to them, for instance, and why there are anxiety-inducing clocks ticking away in every room that you enter (serving as a depressing countdown to the simpler, good all days coming to an end).
But it’s not just a case of you appreciating the context behind these clues more on a repeat playthrough. On the contrary, NeoBards actually do give you additional information during New Game Plus that you sort of need to get the full picture. Extended cutscenes contain crucial dialogue that wasn’t there before, there are way more documents to help fill in the gaps of character motivations, and having earlier access to key items enables you to travel to areas that were previously blocked off. Not to mention, a treasure-hunting side quest is introduced, in which you must follow the trail of a missing folklorist, which puts you on the right track for a more triumphant resolution.
By drip-feeding extra content in this way, the developers put you in the shoes of a character who’s gradually starting to confront their repressed traumas and coming to terms with the reality of their situation. Hell, I don’t think anyone openly addresses the wedding dilemma at all in your inaugural run, but it certainly gets a lot of attention in playthrough #2.
It’s a gutsy decision from a creative standpoint, because you can imagine a lot of gamers never getting to that stage and just checking out after getting their trophy for “completing” the experience. Probably with a rather sour taste in their mouth.
You gotta respect how they stuck to their guns here and weren’t afraid to potentially leave some audience members behind. It makes it all the more gratifying for those who do stick around to earn the catharsis.
Just Say “No”
Besides clearing up the mystery and giving you some bonus routes to explore, Silent Hill f’s New Game Plus does something else that’s really, really unique.
In any other title, the appeal of this mode would be that you get to indulge in a therapeutic power trip, exploiting all of the late-game upgrades and resources you’ve acquired to lay waste to early-game foes. Take Resident Evil 4, for instance, in which you can cockily return to the village after completing the campaign and proceed to trivialise the whole affair with the help of an infinite rocket launcher. It turns that once-terrifying siege level into an absolute cake walk!
And that’s a pretty standard model for horror NG+ modes, as also seen in releases like Dead Space and its recent homage: Cronos: The New Dawn. The idea is that you’ve already done the scary part and so, as a reward for your bravery, now get to turn the tables on all those gnarly beasties that once had you quaking in your boots.
Silent Hill f does things a little differently, though. Sure, you get to hold onto your Omamori charms and any upgrades you’ve made to Hinako’s health, stamina and sanity meters are preserved. Yet, despite those advantages, the act of survival gets counterintuitively tougher on your second attempt, not easier.
What’s so interesting about this is that it’s for a narrative-driven reason, as opposed to a gameplay one. You see, after being treated to the downer ending that you’re locked into on your first run, you’ll want to avoid those aforementioned capsule pills like the plague. Because you now know that they are the root cause of all of Hinako’s suffering.
Heading over to the “Endings” screen on the main menu will confirm this, as you learn that not taking a single tablet is indeed the best option for netting a more desirable outcome to her story. After all, going completely cold turkey is a necessary requirement to unlock an even vaguely optimistic ending.
So, now you’ve got to fundamentally change your playstyle, resisting the urge to pop a pill whenever you take damage. Which is a hard part of the brain for a horror gamer to rewire, as we’re conditioned to prioritise our avatar’s vitals above all else. I mean, imagine not scoffing down a baguette whenever you’re hit by a zombie in Dead Rising, or choosing to swear off green herbs in perpetuity as you battle through the streets of Raccoon City. It’d take the utmost discipline and restraint!
Yet that’s effectively what Silent Hill f demands if you want Hinako to kick her nasty addiction. The little red capsules that were once such a welcome sight end up taking on an ominous quality as a result, and you realise that they are pushed on you at every conceivable turn. Almost as if the town of Ebisugaoka is trying to get you to relapse.
What originally seemed like an overgenerous distribution of health items on the developer’s part (I had more than I ever needed on my first go around) is now revealed to be a deliberate taunt. As soon as you’re actively trying to avoid them, you can’t help but notice that the pills are distributed in every other crevice you search, foregrounded in every room you enter, and left seductively in plain view just when the temptation to cave is at its strongest.
It’s an ingenious twist, turning something that is supposed to be a source of comfort into a sinister presence. Never before has a horror title made me want to steer clear of medical treatment in this way (other than in Resident Evil 5, when the A.I. controlled hypochondriac Sheva would make a beeline towards me every time I so much as grazed my fucking knee, intending to waste a precious first-aid spray on the minor boo-boo).
The other cool thing is that, with you no longer able to rely on the capsules, you suddenly have to engage with all of Silent Hill f’s other consumables. If you’re anything like me, you probably just outright dismissed these before and exchanged them for faith points to upgrade Hinako. After all, you would have been fully onboard with the pharmaceuticals back then and pills could be found in plentiful abundance, so there was no reason to hoard expendable crap when it could instead be sold for XP.
Unlike capsules, the traditional Japanese remedies that you’ll come to depend on in future runs — including Arare, Kudzu Tea, Inari Sushi and, uh, chocolate — all apply subtly different status effects. They might heal you over time, become more effective with stacked usage, or fully replenish given meters. You must therefore consider which one is right for the situation at hand, and carefully keep track of your reserves, adding a further layer of strategy to the combat that goes beyond just “mash triangle to pop more pills.”
All in all, Silent Hill f’s take on New Game Plus is more than just an excuse to breeze through the campaign again with overpowered abilities and superior resources. Rather, it’s an essential component of the experience that deepens everything from the characterisation to the themes, the narrative, the gameplay mechanics and the horror. So, if you’ve only finished the adventure once, make sure to dive back in. The best stuff is yet to come.
Silent Hill f is out now on for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and PC via Steam.
The post How New Game Plus in ‘Silent Hill f’ Adds So Much to the Entire Experience appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.
