So many people online seem to already complain about Silent Hill f out of a few details coming out of trailers. I honestly think the game looks sick and I can’t wait to play it, expecially considering the writer’s good reputation.
I remember the SH2 remake lived in a similar hell-hole before gathering critical acclaim. I have not seen this kind of anxious negativity about new games in a series ever. What do you think?
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I don’t know but its fucking annoying. Yes, the Team Silent games were the best, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have more great SH games. I’d like to think Konami learned their lesson with Downpour. Homecoming was alright except for it contradicting previously established lore. I’m going to play f with an open mind. Being an SH fan can be exhausting sometimes.
honestly, imma just say it: silent hill shattered memories had a very interesting take on the series, and I don’t see anything wrong with spin-offs or minor titles deviating from the original formula of gameplay. Are we just bathing a tad too much in nostalgia?
do they? i hadn’t noticed. i thought ppl were generally excited and positive.
probably has to do with “negative minority being the loudest” on the internet, but as you can see from this thread there’s a LOT whole of concern for a game nobody has tried out yet. I guess I understand where they’re coming from since Konami’s record with the series isn’t great, but I still genuinely fail to see why silent hill f isn’t perceived as a good game from the trailers we’ve seen thus far.
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The original Silent Hill games were created by an internal group within Konami called Team Silent. This team was formed by underperforming Konami staff to work on a Resident Evil competitor that Konami higher-ups wanted to underperform and give them a chance to fire said underperforming staff. Instead, they struck gold with SH1.
Team Silent suddenly had a level of fame to themselves, but they were still Konami’s red-headed stepchild. 2-4 were similarly successful, with 2 being the high point of the series.
After SH3, key staff started to depart from Konami. By the time the 5th game, Homecoming, came out, much of the original team had been replaced with those more aligned with Konami bigwigs that wanted to turn the series into a moneymaker instead of the quiet success it was built as.
An example of this is the Silent Hill HD Collection for PS3 and X360. The ‘remaster’ of SH2 and 3 was anything but. They had to make these remasters with incomplete codebases, no original staff to question, even some of the original voice acting was missing because Konami straight-up deleted the original source code.
There are those that say that SH never recovered from the gutting of Team Silent, and they tend to get louder with each entry into the series. Sometimes they have valid points, but not always.
To add to this, Team Silent members started leaving after SH3 came out primarily because when SH2 released, it wasn’t that well received compared to SH1 (this is mostly to do with the Japanese audience complaining online at the time that SH2 was not a sequel or continuation to SH1). As a result, Konami started forcing Team Silent to make changes to SH3 that Konami executives thought would make it sell and review better in Japan than SH2. In other words, Konami was taking away Team Silent’s autonomy within Konami to develop what they wanted.
Silent Hill 3 was the beginning of the downfall of the series because it was the first game in which the original developer’s vision for the game was edited by Konami executives. This would sadly become a recurring theme for every Silent Hill game released thereafter. Silent Hill 3 was never supposed to feature the cult from Silent Hill 1. Heather was not supposed to be Cheryl. The hospital was not supposed to be reused from SH2, and was only done so because the developers were running out of time.
What’s worse, except for Akira Yamaoka, the original series composer, Homecoming did not have any original Team Silent staff working on it because it was outsourced to an external, Western development studio. Not one member of Team Silent was credited in the game except for Akira Yamaoka, they weren’t even mentioned in the “Special Thanks” portion of Homecoming’s credits.
Shitty capitalism strikes again
For SH2, I think it was specifically because Bloober Team was working on it. They had a mixed or spotty track record before this release, so people were worried, they’d mess up the remake for a beloved game.
I think Konami also kinda “left” video game development for a time, focusing more on Pachinko machines, their health clubs, etc. So this, along with some of their previous choices, meant they didn’t really have the best reputation (and still haven’t), and people didn’t know if it was just going to be a lazy cash grab.
Silent Hill f I don’t really know what people are saying, and I haven’t looked, but I can only guess that anti-woke mob is going after the game, because you’re playing as a girl/woman, which is of course DEI, forced diversity, woke, whatever, I dunno.
For me, it looks like a good game. But doesn’t look like Silent Hill. Because of this it comes off as a game that was made and had the SH name slapped on it for street cred. That never works well in any case I’ve seen. Usually ends up the worst rated in a series.
Genuinely curious, why does it not look like SH? Is it because of the japanese setting? Because other than that it looks heavily focused on proper psychological chaos. I think we’ve got to give developers some form of freedom if we want to see this series advance!
Silent Hill is more than just psychological chaos, most any modern horror game does that much. The Japanese setting doesn’t really help, it would make it harder to adapt to the IP, but it could have been done in a way that it wouldn’t have been an issue.
I’ll have to rewatch the trailer to give you more specific points, but it seems combat might be more prevalent than it should, veering more to the Resident Evil brand. The shifted world didn’t make much of an appearance in the trailer, but from the glimpses it seemed tame and not really all that horror-esque. It doesn’t even appear to be in or connected to the town of Silent Hill.
Being a bigger fan of the first two games than any of the rest, i see them as the standard, the fog and mist, not being able to see everything clearly so that odd shapes and shadows mess with you is also something I am missing in the new game.
It may be a great game. I just don’t see it as a SH game.
IMO, hit stop in the combat. Also, the camera perspective puts too much emphasis on combat.
At its core, the peak way to play Silent Hill was to engage in combat as little as possible. This makes sense both in lore and for the player of the game:
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In the game lore, protagonists in Silent Hill are “Everymen.” Just an average person. Average people do not generally have combat experience or training, and thus an average person put into a Silent Hill scenario, will more likely want to run away than engage in combat with a weapon they are not familiar with. They may be so unaccustomed to combat with a weapon they may injure themselves or waste all the bullets or break the weapon due to lack of training in combat.
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For the player, combat felt bad, and generally posed more risk than reward (trade potentially losing a lot of health in a fight just to not have to walk around the enemy) as in Silent Hill, killing enemies doesn’t reward the player with anything other than having one less enemy to avoid. They don’t drop health or items.
Additionally, Silent Hill has generally focused on people with some sort of dark past, with the exception of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th game. The 3rd game’s original plot apparently did give the protagonist a dark past, but Konami felt it would have been too much and thus changed the plot significantly. Some elements of the original plot still remain, but are reworked into the new, different plot in the game currently.
SH2 remake, and in fact Homecoming and Downpour fall victim to this overemphasis on combat, and it is primarily the fault of the over the shoulder camera. The combat feels good and fun, and thus it makes the player want to do it more. This resulted in more sales because the mainstream audience seems to only like playing one kind of game. Unfortunately, it also resulted in the IP losing its identity.
The story looks fine, but calling it a Silent Hill game when it gives no indication of connecting to the town of Silent Hill is concerning. Every Silent Hill game previously connected to the actual town in some way. If f doesn’t do this, then nothing separates it from being a generic horror game with the Silent Hill name slapped on top.
I’ll try to reply to points highlighted by the both of you, to try and play devil’s advocate for a bit:
- I really don’t think the combat looks like anything we’ve seen from Resident Evil. Honestly, I don’t even know if there’s gonna be a gun in the game, judging from the trailers.
- The main character clearly looks like an inept at handling weapons too, like the old games. We don’t really know how much damage we take or how easy the combat is, but it’s obvious they couldn’t come out in 2025 with a combat system as stiff, clunky and annoying as the one featured in the first trilogy. Many games in the last decade have shown that you can have a combat system that feels fluid but also have it so that you may want to not fight, for one reason or another (If I recall correctly, weapons do break in the game after a certain amount of use - that’s surely a deterrent from using them).
- There’s a difficulty setting at the start of the game, so I’m sure you can just crank it up to hard if you want to have a though survival horror experience.
- We have no way of knowing how they’ll connect the whole situation to the town of Silent Hill, that’s true. I’m honestly not disturbed by this as I never felt the physicalness of buildings and road to be the important factor. For all we know, Silent Hill is a catalyst that connects people living through particular distressing emotions to a horrorific underworld - who says it cannot happen in another part of the globe?
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Additionally, Silent Hill has generally focused on people with some sort of dark past, with the exception of the 1st, 3rd, and 4th game.
I… I don’t think this counts as a very strong argument if you read the sentence a couple of times. The 3rd entry is, in its actual form, beloved by many fans of the original trilogy.
I don’t know peeps, I understand the sentiment of wanting a good game but we should genuinely just wait and try out the game if we’re interested. They can’t simply make the same game over and over, because that’d be even worse. It’s like with music artists, you know? Bob Dylan was shunned by many for “going electric”, yet those albums are now considered absolute classics. I’m not trying to say Konami has the same artistic foresight of Dylan, but we should at least try to cut them some slack and hold our opinions until after the game has come out and we’ve been able to try it out :)
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Haven’t seen any complaints about F, but the SH2 remake was made by a studio with a spotty record, they made some unnecessary changes, and it still has traversal stutter.
I admit I do not prefer the remake over the original, but that’s mostly because I would rather see new original things than to milk pre-existing material which didn’t age that badly. Also, as you mentionet, silent hill f isn’t being developed by bloober team! If anything, that’s something to look forward to if one didn’t like the remake.
Probably because Konami has been pooping the bed when it comes to the franchise ever since Silent Hill 2. The last hint of anything remotely good to come out from them was the Playable Teaser over 10 years ago and of course they fucked that up too.
I am salty as fuck about PT.
As a standalone entry it was absolutely fantastic, I loved every second of playing it. As a demo it got me so incredibly hyped about the full game.
And then Konami pulled some of the dumbest shit I have ever seen.
Woo, time to see how many gooners are actually on lemmy.
The modern “video game essay” format came out of people on the Something Awful forums who were REALLY into Silent Hill. It was Japanese style horror in a Western setting with a lot of fairly heavy themes and implications so it was the perfect confluence of weebing out and “it is dark so it is deep” level discourse. And what started as people writing thousands of word arguments for what the shovel being at an 80 degree angle in that shed meant became people making 60 minute youtubes on what it meant that Heather ALSO saw the titty nurses and how it represents her repressed lesbian urges. And 3 hour videos about Pyramid Head that would make even Freud roll his eyes.
And… basically all of the later Silent Hill games REALLY sucked. The Room has its defenders but pretty much everything after that is universally panned and with good reason. Up until last year-ish with the remake of 2.
Which was a different kind of shitstorm. Because now you had all these essayists who were The Keepers Of Silent Hill lore (one of the most famous ones wrote her master’s thesis on SH2 I want to say?) seeing the greatest of the games being remade. And by fucking Bloober team? Pretty much every essayist had keyed in that Bloober have some very questionable themes in some of their games. Uhm… trigger warnings but
spoiler
Bloober at least used to really like the trope of “The only way to stop this great evil infecting you is to kill yourself and it with you” and “They were a victim of abuse and should be pitied even as they perpetuated the cycle”. That are both, fairly unarguably, shitty mindsets but are also horror tropes going back literally centuries
So it was the mix of “This is MY game and MY story and how dare they change it” combined with “Also they picked the bogeymen that I hated on so hard last year that I could buy a car”.
And then… Bloober kind of made a masterpiece? Like, most of their changes are fairly loved/appreciated and everyone but the most hardcore of the SH2 Video Essayists loved it.
But now we have Silent Hill f that very much DOES feel like a cash in and a way to make a Fatal Frame but with a more marketable IP. But also… Fatal Frame fucked hard?
Either way? The most important thing ever is to never stop saying that Silent Hill (the town) is really smokey because it was built on top of a coal mine that caught fire and has been smouldering for decades. That is some real Silent Hill fan lore that not many people know but is really cool to share.
I know SA members were called “goons” but does the modern “gooner” really come from that?
Nah. Modern day gooners are all based on how Arsenal fans just can’t stop touching themselves. Like, if you ever go to a game there is an entire section dedicated towards group edging.
In all seriousness, I have no idea what the actual origins of “gooning==masturbation” is. But the word “goon” mostly just is a synonym for thug or henchman. So a lot of groups used it because they are the bogeymen and blah blah blah.
The thing about Arsenal is they always try and wank it in
If you aren’t a Manc, you’re a wank!
