After over a decade of uncertainty, Konami’s Silent Hill series is back on track. Silent Hill f is resonating with critics and fans alike that have hailed the psychological horror game as a return to greatness. But while praise for its haunting visuals and enigmatic story are universal, its approach to action has proven polarizing. Some of the game’s more critical reviews (and even Polygon’s own glowing one) cite its combat as its weak point, sparking some early debates about whether or not the melee-driven battles are meaningfully messy.
While there’s a defense case to be made, no doubt, that has been a sticking point for good reason. It’s less that hitting an enemy with a pipe doesn’t feel good; it’s that it undercuts the game’s most powerful moment.
[Ed. note: Spoilers for Silent Hill f follow.]
In Silent Hill f, you play as a young schoolgirl named Hinako rather than a full-grown adult. As a result, she plays very differently than, say, Silent Hill 2’s James Sunderland. Hinako mainly fights with lead pipes and other makeshift melee weapons she finds lying around Ebisugaoka, the Japanese village where the story takes place. Swinging a weapon takes a lot of effort. Her strikes are heavy, with Hinako putting her entire body into each attack. She stumbles off balance with each swing, leaving her vulnerable if she misses her mark. Sometimes the best strategy is to land one careful shot and temporarily stun a monster long enough to run away, especially because all weapons break after a few uses. That dynamic is one of Silent Hill f’s best qualities. It’s clumsy and difficult, as it should be considering the hero.
What’s disappointing is that developer NeoBards doesn’t commit to that friction. The slow melee combat is dressed up in modern video game systems built to make it more familiar. Hinako can evade enemies with a jerky dash, and doing so at the right moment slows down time just as it would for Bayonetta. She can spend sanity to unleash a strong focus attack. There are counterattacks. On top of all that, you can equip different Omamori that give Hinako other power-ups, like health leeching from defeated enemies and automatic counters.
All of this might be fine, if uninspired, in a vacuum. But the overworked combat actually works against the story in significant ways. Midway through Silent Hill f, Hinako undergoes a major transformation. In a grisly sequence, she is subjected to three rituals that disfigure her body. The most shocking moment comes when she saws her own arm off, and it is replaced with a hulking fox arm. It’s a significant moment in the story, with a repressed Hinako unleashing her inner monster and embracing her rage.
In select sections in the back half of the game, Hinako fights exclusively in fox form. Her attacks are faster and more vicious, ripping enemies to shreds and permanently killing them by draining their soul. In theory, it should function as an effective moment of contrast. The powerless Hinako we have been with up to that point is revealed to be a force of nature once she allows herself to break out of her ladylike shell.
But that impact is undercut because Hinako is always superpowered, even at her weakest. Her perfect dodge, for instance, is an act of pure magic that ensures players will always be able to get out of a tough situation. Switching the combat setting to Hard helps retain the difficulty, but even at its most dangerous, Silent Hill f is too eager to stick to the language of modern video game action. What should be stressful and horrifying becomes your average day out at the parry factory.
While it’s not a dealbreaker by any means, the incongruous approach to combat reveals the narrative limits of mass-appeal game systems. Counters and dodges certainly make Silent Hill f more palatable for an audience raised on mainstream action games, but what do they actually tell us about Hinako? In her diary pages, Hinako lays bare her emotional struggles. She writes about feeling like a stranger in her own body and being forced to present a different version of herself to the world. There is a vulnerability to her that is only half-explored in the way she actually handles on a controller. Games too often take the power of body language for granted in the pursuit of pleasure. Let me flail and struggle alongside my character. I can handle it.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
