Screenshot: Alone In The Dark: Illumination (Zero Punctuation) – Escapist, dated July 8, 2015.

We ain’t starting with a tagline this time.

Admittedly, I have more experience with the Resident Evil series (kinda) than the Silent Hill series, especially since my first exposure to Silent Hill is in its latest installment: Silent Hill f. I talked about it right before closing out for the Holiday 2025 season, and I thought I would’ve started Silent Hill 2 by now since it’s on one of my devices on the PS2 emulator. To summarize, the series flew under my radar while I was focused on some other series, both at the time and now. Such as:

Still not done with the first one, by the way. This Army life be sucking away my time away 〒▽〒

In that post about the games I played in 2025, I noted that SH2 was seen as the best in the series with a gradual decline in quality and plot after 2007 and before the series got something close to a brand new life in 2014 by way of the Playable Teaser. The short version of that was that of a nameless protagonist (something that rhymes with Rorman Needus) is trapped in a perpetual loop of a concrete house that redecorates and rearranges itself every time you pass through a door. Clues through the radio and the environment suggest that the protagonist himself is responsible for a horrific familicide and the teaser was a navigation of his own guilty conscience, which I believe was part of the premise of Silent Hill 2. I’d mark this a spoiler, but the game is so old it can fight for your freedoms like I am and the twist isn’t fresh anymore. “They were dead all along.” Being led around the nose by the ghost of your dead wife or commander or child’s interpretation of the Fuhrer is a… dusty tradition rather than a time-honored one because how many ghosts am I gonna see before I have to phone Danny Phantom for a ghostly ass-whoopin’?

The “D” symbol on the chest may be playing into the Superman impression, but it’s a good addition all the same.

Further along in P.T., you see why Sudeer Namron committed the crime. The clues from the winding hallway and the ghost that stalks and molests you if you get caught, a ghost in its second trimester at that, suggest that Rudeus Nimrod found out she was cheating on him with the manager of the local Kroger, became pregnant with the manager’s child and rather than take his winnings from the court in a divorce proceeding and chuck eggs at the apartment they move into when this s[rebar dragging]t blows up in their faces, he grabbed an axe, sharpened it to perfection and, well, he should’ve done this in a secluded area so the neighbors wouldn’t call the cops. Unless he turned himself in.

I was never blessed or fortunate enough to play it. Like many of you in similar situations, I only ever saw it by way of gameplay videos which I hope to Lord Buddha have been archived if Konami didn’t start the genocide, and they would i bastardi! The teaser had a bunch of info to parse from just its short existence on the PlayStation 4 before Konami pissed off Guillermo del Toro so much, F[acht!]k Konami became the rallying cry for the internet and, for a time, Jim Stephanie Sterling, son!

But I have to go Columbo on this and pick it apart some. ‘Scuse me:

There we go.

So I know that it ends with Norman Reedus’s clean and beautiful visage after dancing with zombies on The Walking Dead for 10,000 years, and he was probably a central character if not the irate alcoholic self-widower who’d rather rot behind bars than accept that both he and his wife were flawed people pretending to be good. Without access to a time machine or the ability to hold Konami at sword point with the Kusanagi-no-tsurugi (if it exists), we’ll never know what the plot of the whole thing was, and it may have simply been one of several ways for Hideo Kojima to play with the audience before putting the game out, but that game doesn’t exist anymore unless you have 5,000 lying around to buy a PS4 that allegedly has the game still on it.

The thing I have to ask about is whether it was going back to what worked as seen in Silent Hill 2, but leaning a bit more into the creepypasta side of things. Think about it. Man loses job and starts drinking, wife gets part-time job and double-crosses the meaning of holy matrimony by dressing more sexily for the manager because the husband can’t get the bread no more, husband finds out and… is that “No One Lives Forever” playing in the background?

“I’m so happy/Dancing while the Grim Reaper/CUTS CUTS CUTS but he can’t get me!”

And it becomes a ghost story forever more told by the so-called friends who eat, sleep, and breathe horror tropes like it’s a fire sale. For my speed, the kind of horror I like leans less into the dollar-store jump scare and more into the feeling of unease that can be found in Outlast, or Resident Evil VII and VIII, and the Silent Hill series to include:

The Adventures of Shimizu Hinako: Girl Survivalist Extraordinaire.

Silent Hill f isn’t just a Silent Hill game that’s creepy and disturbing; it uses as much Japanese horror tropes to tickle the Japanophile that is me since I first picked up Run, Young Lord, Run all those years ago. Yeah, I’m gonna keep mentioning that series as well as Max Payne. Might as well get a score card out for every mention of either. Also God of War. And maybe Sekiro if I can finally get through the game after six or seven years.

And I now find myself tits deep at the opening of a franchise I have trouble exploring further. It was Like a Dragon before this, and I still haven’t gotten that far in that series! やれやれだぜ。

I know this came from r/YakuzaGames, but I’ve had it for months; I just cropped it.

By all accounts, Silent Hill f is a return to form of sorts, only instead of man represses his crime into a false memory, it’s layers upon layers upon layers (sounds like a lasagna) cultural nuance manifesting to make the guilt and horror stick in what might as well be a fictionalization of rural Shizuoka Prefecture c. 1965, which funny enough translates to “Silent Hill” based on the kanji: 静岡. Learned something new a few weeks ago.

It does well enough to detach itself from the westernization that had been going on between 2001 and ’25. Not that it made for awful, unplayable messes, but if you wanted the spirit of what the games were before catering to a North American audience and therefore absorbing more and more of the western horror tropes absent of what made the eastern ones so unique, then Google-dono’s nifty new clanker AI tool suggest that some of the best games are 1, 2, 3 and their associated remakes as they exist or are about to exist in the coming future and that from a horror standpoint, Silent Hill: Homecoming offers none of that and is something of a Resident Evil 5 and 6, less horror more action and assault and battery on a boulder.

Source: u/Gamer_with_a_Stutter, r/ResidentEvil

Resident Evil as well seems to be going in the right direction even if it needed to extract from the Deep South and grandaddy Vlad Dracul’s infamous tales of impalement to get there. And Silent Hill has gone back to what it’s most famous for: horror by unnerving the cat s[にゃん]t out of you. And does that plus. The Wikipedia tells me Silent Hill f has about five endings. Maybe that’s what the “f” is for. I doubt I’ll play it enough times to see them all, but let’s say once I finish it among other things, I revisit this specimen and discuss the ending I got based on the settings and actions I took in the game. Not a hardline promise per se, as I have topics lined up all the way through the third week of August.

It shouldn’t take me that long to get through the game, but once I finish, I’ll squeeze in my thoughts once the dust has settled and Shizuoka gets back to reminding me Mt. Fuji exists from a distance.

Actually, I’d rather see Fukuoka. Not enough people talk about it.

These two tried to conquer it.