Sholva Silent Hill f Review

Not just a fantastic Silent Hill game, but one of the best, as well. Silent Hill f is, without a doubt, an incredible Silent Hill experience, worth of being placed side by side, amongst the best ones in the series. What could seem impossible many years ago, is now a reality: the Konami we have today is a far cry from the era where they decided to outsource most of their new SH projects, after Team Silent stopped being a thing. Yet, in 2025 and, obviously, 2024, we have new Silent Hill games coming from third party studios that clearly know what Silent Hill is all about, because Silent Hill 2 Remake is one of the best games from 2024, and now we have Silent Hill f, which is nothing short of an audiovisual masterpiece, with incredible storytelling. But, this is a PC Review too, so let’s talk PC Performance now: on my Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 5060 Ti 16 GB I can safely say this game runs relatively better than SH 2R, mostly because SH f does not use Hardware Lumen, only Software, which was the one main settings in SH2 Remake that ate most of the performance. The game can be played at 1440p locked 60 FPS, Quality DLSS 4 forced via the Nvidia App, with mostly Max Settings, perhaps dropping Shadows a notch or so, to be 100% sure the 60 FPS lock is always kept. 4K DLDSR with Performance DLSS 4 is also quite viable on my rig, in this game, and still looks great. That’s not all, the game does not come with Frame Generation but, if you want smoother FPS output, Smooth Motion can help with that without any extra major artifacts than the ones the game already has which, yes it does, since it’s a Software Lumen enabled UE 5 title, and most do have some fizzling artifacting when moving the camera, around character edges: this is not DLSS, not Smooth Motion, it’s an UE 5 thing, in most games with Lumen. This game also presents some Shader Compilation Stutters plus smaller, less frequent, Traversal Stutters, with the former being a bit more intrusive at the early moments of the game, it gets way better after a couple hours, when the shader cache is warmer. This could be solved in a patch that, by the way, is still yet to come, if it even does. Aside from that, the game has more “consistent” performance than SH 2 Remake overall, that much is obvious. The Art Style has all the Silent Hill vibes on point, at every location we visit in this title, it’s mesmerizing, tense and unsettling, but still gorgeous nonetheless, always, the visual design is incredible. Audio Design is top quality as well: the well-known Yamaoka tunes are easily recognizable in the “Fog” areas of the game, and the “other side” or Dark Shrine soundtrack is also equally stunning and fitting. Sound is as much a part of why this game is so great as its visuals or its script, so please enjoy the sound design in this game, it’s really fantastic. Gameplay seems to be a point of great discussion for this game but, in my honest opinion, I enjoy the gameplay here in SH f more than I was expecting to: it feels that each strike has weight, we’re not hitting “air” like in other games, and there are a few extra tools to deal with enemies. Being a melee only game, I can see why some people feel it’s “not right” but this game takes places in 60s era Japan: if that does not “makes sense” to you, I don’t know what to tell you. Which leads me to the big point of this game, the Story: I was not familiar at all with Ryukishi07’s work so this comes from a zero bias point of view of his style: this man is a genius, plain and simple, if Silent Hill f is any indication of his signature style? Heck, yes. Now, explaining why I consider the story and, especially, they way is presented, to be nothing short of amazing…would require deep spoilers of, at least, the base main playthrough, without counting anything the various NG+ runs may add. So, I won’t get into that. That said, the way we explore Hinako's Psyche in this game is one of the big reasons why I consider it such a good game, and why it is very much what Silent Hill is all about, as a franchise. Silent Hill f is very much a Silent Hill game, it has all the elements that remind me of the original Team Silent titles, and then it also has its own personality and flavor. If you want to know what the f stands for, that’s for you (mostly) to decide, when you play and find out but, the great thing about a good story, quoting another great character from one of my favorite franchises, Alan Wake: ”There’s little fun to be had in explanations; they’re antithetical to the poetry of fear. In a Horror Story, the victim keeps asking “why”? But there can be no explanation, and there shouldn’t be one. The Unanswered Mystery is what remains with us the longest, and it’s what we’ll Remember in the end” Which is also a Stephen King quote, as per that game states, of course. And it’s this unanswered mystery, among many other things, what makes Silent Hill f such a good Silent Hill game. An easy 5 stars, if they patch the remaining polish/rough issues on this PC port, it's a gem of a game, and it deserves some small fixes, that's it.